Pets Ecommerce Traffic: Chewy Down 5.8%, PetSmart Up 9.3%

In the quarter ending in July, Rover was also up 5% year-over-year on demand for pet care services

Chewy remains the big dog among online pet retailers, but competitors are nipping at its heels. Our latest update on pet retail and services follows the structure of the retail quarter ending in July for comparisons and also includes a peek at how Amazon pet product sales are putting pressure on specialty retailers.

Earnings announcements are coming up for Chewy (NASDAQ: CHWY) on Aug. 29 and Petco on Aug. 24. PetSmart is owned by a private equity firm and privately released results to lenders in June. Rover (NASDAQ: ROVR) beat expectations when it reported earnings on August 1, which is consistent with the strong demand signals we’ve been seeing for their services.

Key takeaways

• Chewy draws more than double the traffic of PetSmart but saw its number of website visits drop 5.8%, year-over-year, in the quarter, while PetSmart gained 9.3%. Bark Box was down 18.5% year-over-year. All of these estimates are based on traffic from within the US.
• Rover continues to show strong digital performance with its business selling dog walking and pet sitting services, with traffic up 5% year-over-year in the quarter. Its competitor Wag Walking wasn’t as fortunate, with traffic down 9.8%.
• July was a relatively strong month for Chewy, with traffic up 3.5% month-over-month – but PetSmart gained 14.9% that same month and Rover gained 10.1%.
• Amazon’s pet sales business continues to grow, with year-over-year increases of 24% in units sold and 28.5% in revenue based on June estimates from Similarweb Shopper Intelligence.

How the market shifted in Q2

Here is who was up and who was down in pet retail and services.

As the largest online seller of pet supplies, Chewy may be finding its share of the market hard to defend against competition from Amazon, PetSmart, and others. However, PetSmart seems to be doing something right to be growing faster than another competitor in the market, Petco.com, another rival that is about the same size as PetSmart in traffic volume but hasn’t been seeing the same consistent gains.

Here is what the change in traffic has been looking like so far this year, with PetSmart.com traffic up and Chewy.com traffic down almost every month.

Here’s how they stack up in absolute numbers.

Competing with Amazon

The companies dedicated to pet retail compete not only with each other but also with mass-market online retailers and Amazon in particular.

Here’s what the growth of the pet supplies category on amazon.com looks like over the past few years. In June, revenue from those sales reached $1.5 billion, up from $1.2 billion in June 2022, according to Similarweb estimates. Over the same period, units sold jumped from 51.9 million to 64.5 million. That’s a 24% increase in units sold and a 28.5% increase in revenue.

While we’re comparing traffic stats for the pet retail specialists with more specific ecommerce estimates for Amazon, the growth in Amazon’s pets department is dramatic enough to suggest it might be taking business away from Chewy and retailers. That may explain something about why it’s a good time to be in a service-oriented business like Rover that has little or no overlap with Amazon.

Public companies mentioned in this report include Chewy (NYSE: CHWY), Petco (NASDAQ: WOOF), PetSmart (NASDAQ: PETM), Rover (NASDAQ: ROVR), Wag (NASDAQ: PET), and Bark Box (NASDAQ: BARK), as well as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Methodology

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Image: Image by Mabuya from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".