Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, has watched plenty of pet businesses chase the same short-term fix whenever sales slow down: run a discount. It almost always works in the moment. Revenue ticks up, the dashboard looks healthier, and the temptation to repeat the trick the next time growth flattens becomes hard to resist. The counterintuitive part is what happens after that.
The moment a discount looks like a win
A price cut is one of the fastest levers any store has. Cut the price, and orders usually follow within days, sometimes hours. For a pet brand watching a slow week, that immediate response feels like proof the tactic works, and it becomes tempting to reach for the same lever again the next time numbers dip. What that immediate spike hides is who is actually buying during the sale.
What the data on discount buyers actually shows
A large majority of shoppers who use a discount code admit they would have bought the product at full price anyway. In other words, most of the revenue a sale appears to generate was never incremental in the first place. The store simply gave away margin on purchases that were going to happen regardless.
The customers who are brought to the store for the first time by a discount, notes Hugo Galvao, are often the least valuable kind. They tend to arrive with lower order values and an expectation that the next purchase should also come with a deal, which is a difficult habit to reverse once it forms.
Why the pattern gets worse the longer it runs
The damage from discounting rarely shows up right away, which is part of why it is so easy to keep using. The typical pattern unfolds over months rather than weeks: a sale lifts revenue, the following period without a promotion dips below what would have been normal, another sale gets scheduled to compensate, and customers gradually learn to wait for it. A year into this cycle, a brand can find itself running near-constant promotions just to hold revenue at a level it used to reach without any discount at all.
For a pet business, where food and supplies already come with a natural, predictable reorder cycle, this pattern is particularly costly. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho states that a customer who would have reordered on schedule regardless now waits for a promotion before restocking, turning a reliable revenue stream into an unpredictable one.
What tends to hold up instead
None of this means discounts should disappear entirely. It means they work best as a precise, occasional tool rather than a default response to a slow month. Brands that build loyalty through early access to new products, recognition for long-time customers, or perks tied to how often someone buys tend to see stronger repeat behavior than brands relying on blanket price cuts, without giving away margin on purchases that would have happened anyway.
The distinction that matters is whether a promotion is targeted at genuinely undecided customers or applied broadly to everyone, including the ones who were already going to buy. The first approach protects margin while still using price as a tool. The second slowly trains an entire customer base to distrust the full price altogether.
As Hugo Galvao reaffirms for a category built on repeat purchases, the businesses that grow the most sustainably tend to be the ones that treat discounting as a scalpel rather than a habit, saving it for the moments where it genuinely changes a customer’s decision rather than reaching for it every time growth needs a quick push.
