Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, sees the same order pattern break down again and again: a customer buys a bag of dog food, a small toy and a bag of treats in a single checkout. On paper it looks like one shipment. In the warehouse, it behaves like three different problems stacked into one box.
This is where a lot of pet e-commerce operations quietly lose money and customers. Not because they chose the wrong courier or the wrong platform, but because they designed their shipping process around the average order instead of the heaviest, most awkward item that order can contain.
The mistake that looks harmless
Most online stores treat shipping as a single variable: weight, distance, done. Hugo Galvao states that the model works fine for categories where products are roughly similar in size and fragility, like books or clothing. However, it falls apart the moment a single cart mixes a five-kilogram bag of kibble with a ceramic bowl and a small chew toy.
Each of those items has different handling needs. Pack them with a generic process built for uniform parcels, and something usually gives: the box is oversized for the light items, undersized for the bag, or padded in a way that protects the bowl but leaves the food bag to absorb every bump in transit.
Why pet baskets break generic shipping models
Pet products combine several handling challenges that rarely show up together in other categories. Bags of food and litter are heavy and bulky, which pushes up shipping costs and demands careful handling to avoid tears. Ceramic and glass items break easily and need real protective packing, not an afterthought of bubble wrap. Consumables like food and treats carry expiry dates, so stock has to rotate properly instead of sitting in a warehouse until the oldest batch ships last.
None of these challenges is unusual on its own. What is unusual is how often they appear in the same basket, since pet owners tend to restock food and buy a smaller extra item in the same visit. A shipping process built for single-category orders was never designed for that combination.
Why Brazilian geography makes the mistake more expensive?
Brazil’s continental scale turns a packing problem into a delivery problem. Long distances between distribution centers and final destinations already stretch delivery times outside major capitals, and Brazilian shoppers have consistently shown they will choose a cheaper, slower shipping option over a faster, pricier one at checkout. That preference only works if the seller has already gotten the packing right. A heavy, poorly protected box moving slowly across the country has far more opportunities to arrive damaged than the same box on a two-day express route.
As Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho reinforces, sellers who ignore this interaction end up paying twice: once in refunds and replacements, and again in the customer who does not reorder after a bad first experience.
Designing around the heaviest item, not the average one
The fix is less about switching couriers and more about changing the packing decision at the point of order. Instead of asking what a typical basket looks like, operations need to ask what the heaviest and most fragile item in this specific basket requires, then build the box around that item first and fit everything else around it.
In practice, that means separating fragile items into their own protective layer regardless of order size, batching food and treats by expiry date at the picking stage rather than at random, and pricing shipping in a way that reflects the real cost of the bulkiest item instead of an average that quietly favors light orders and penalizes heavy ones.
Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho has built this principle into how Enjoy Pets approaches fulfillment, treating each basket as a packing puzzle rather than a single line item. Get the heaviest item right, and the rest of the order tends to take care of itself. Pet e-commerce will keep growing faster than the infrastructure built to support it. The businesses that scale without a growing pile of damaged-box complaints will be the ones that stopped shipping pet baskets like ordinary parcels a long time ago.
