The visionary behind Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, grapples with a recurring dilemma as his pet e-commerce venture expands beyond its initial few hundred monthly orders: should he continue to manage packing and shipping in-house, or delegate that responsibility to a marketplace’s fulfillment program, such as Mercado Envios Full or Fulfillment by Amazon? Both options are viable. They simply prioritize different aspects, and the optimal choice varies based on the specific requirements of each product.
What self-fulfillment gets right
Handling packing and shipping internally keeps a business in full control of exactly how a product gets handled before it reaches the customer. For pet items specifically, that control matters more than it does for most categories, since a heavy bag of food, a fragile ceramic bowl or a box of glass-bottled supplements all need different handling that a business intimately familiar with its own catalog can tailor precisely.
Self-fulfillment also keeps the full margin on every order, without the storage, pick, pack and referral fees that a marketplace fulfillment program charges on top of its usual commission. Hugo Galvao argues that for a smaller operation still building volume, that margin can matter more than the convenience being traded away.
What letting the marketplace handle it gets right
Programs like Mercado Envios Full and Fulfillment by Amazon exist because they solve a problem self-fulfillment struggles with at scale: consistency. Listings using these programs typically qualify for a visible badge that signals fast, reliable delivery, which measurably increases buyer trust and improves how prominently a listing shows up in search results within the marketplace. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho explains that standardized packing and carrier management under these programs also tends to reduce late or damaged deliveries compared to a seller managing everything manually.
That reliability comes at a real cost. Sellers using Amazon’s fulfillment program typically pay between thirty and thirty-five percent of revenue in combined fees, landing on net margins in the fifteen to twenty percent range once everything is accounted for. For a bulky, heavy category like pet products, where storage and handling fees are often calculated by weight and volume, that cost structure can bite harder than it would for a lightweight, compact item in a different category.
Why the trade-off is sharper for pet products specifically
This is where the comparison stops being generic. A pet business weighing this decision is not just trading margin for convenience the way a jewelry or apparel seller might. It is trading margin for a genuine reduction in damage risk on items that are unusually prone to it, heavy bags that tear, fragile bowls that crack, bottled liquids that leak, all of which a marketplace’s standardized fulfillment process is specifically built to handle more consistently than an improvised in-house process managed under growing order volume.
At the same time, the higher storage and fulfillment costs that come with heavy, bulky SKUs mean the math on using a marketplace program does not work the same way for every product in a pet catalog. A slow-moving, oversized item can rack up storage fees faster than it sells, while a compact, fast-turning product like a small supplement or a popular toy can benefit from the badge and conversion lift without the storage cost eating into its margin as heavily.
Making the decision product by product
The most effective approach rarely means choosing one model for an entire catalog. It means routing fast-moving, damage-prone and compact items through a marketplace fulfillment program where the badge and consistency pay for themselves, while keeping slower-moving, oversized or highly specialized products in-house, where full control and full margin matter more than the trust signal a badge provides.
Hugo Galvao has approached this decision at Enjoy Pets exactly that way, treating fulfillment as a per-product choice rather than an all-or-nothing policy. More on how that balance plays out is available at www.enjoypets.com.br.
