Why Is Pet Supplies Customer Acquisition Cost Rising Even as Repeat Purchases Increase?

In AdScale’s database, pet supplies CAC climbed 32% year over year. Revenue per customer in the same window fell 10%, even though repeat purchase rates rose 14 points.

Pet Supplies CAC Is Rising Faster Than LTV Can Offset It

Yes, customer acquisition cost is genuinely rising in pet supplies ecommerce. And no, rising LTV is not offsetting it the way most growth teams assume. Across the pet supply shops in AdScale’s database with a connected ad account, CAC rose from about $8.70 to $11.48. That’s the change between Q1 last year and Q1 this year, a 32% increase. Over the same stretch, the amount of revenue a new customer generated in their first 90 days actually dropped by roughly 10%, from $170.73 to $153.48. Meanwhile, the share of customers placing a second order within 90 days climbed from about 81% to 95%.

Put plainly: pet brands are paying more to acquire a customer who orders more often but is worth less in the short term. That’s a different, more complicated story than “CAC is up but LTV is up more,” and it’s the one the numbers actually support.

Key Takeaways

• Pet supplies CAC rose 32% year over year in AdScale’s database, from about $8.70 to about $11.48 per new customer.
• 90-day revenue per new customer fell about 10% over the same period, from $170.73 to $153.48.
• The share of customers who placed a second order within 90 days rose from roughly 81% to 95%, a 14-point jump.
• The 90-day LTV to CAC ratio compressed from roughly 19.6x to 13.4x. It is still healthy, but the direction matters.
• Average order value actually rose across the same two quarters, from $65.95 to $74.11, so the drop in revenue per customer is not a story of smaller carts. If anything, rising AOV should have pushed cohort revenue up, not down.

Is Rising CAC Actually a Problem for Pet Supplies Brands?

When CAC climbs, the instinct in most growth teams is to reach for a reassuring explanation before an uncomfortable one. “We’re just buying higher-intent customers.” “LTV is rising to match.” “The auction is more competitive, but so is the payoff.” Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is a story a team tells itself because checking the actual cohort data is more work than repeating the narrative.

Pet supplies looked, on the surface, like a good candidate for the reassuring version. It is a category with real repeat-purchase logic built in: food runs out, litter runs out, treats run out. A brand should be able to point to rising order frequency as proof that a pricier customer today is a more valuable customer over time.

The trouble is that when you actually compare the cohorts quarter over quarter using AdScale’s database, the frequency did rise, sharply. The revenue did not follow it up. That gap between “buying more often” and “worth more” is the part worth sitting with. It is exactly the kind of pattern that a CAC-only or LTV-only dashboard will not surface. It is the same kind of blended-average blind spot that turned up in AdScale’s fashion return rate research. There, a single average masked a structural pattern underneath it.

What Do AdScale’s Pet Supplies CAC and LTV Benchmarks Show?

Here is what that comparison shows, drawn from active pet supplies shops (Animals & Pet Supplies, Pet Supplies, Pet Training Aids, and related sub-categories) with a connected Google or Meta ad account in AdScale’s database.

Customer Acquisition Cost Rose Every Quarter of the Comparison

Spend divided by new customers acquired moved from $8.70 in Q1 2025 to $11.48 in Q1 2026, a 32% increase. That climb was not a straight line. CAC actually dipped in Q4 2025, the busiest acquisition quarter of the year by new-customer volume. That dip lines up with what most ecommerce operators already know about holiday-season efficiency.

Ninety-Day Revenue Per New Customer Fell, Not Rose

The Q1 2025 cohort generated $170.73 in revenue per customer in its first 90 days. The Q1 2026 cohort generated $153.48 in the same window, a 10% decline. That’s the same direction CAC moved, but the wrong direction for the “rising CAC is fine because LTV is rising too” story to hold.

Repeat Purchase Behavior Genuinely Improved

The share of new customers placing a second order within 90 days rose sharply. It went from about 81% in the 2025 cohort to about 95% in the 2026 cohort, a 14-point increase. This is a real behavioral shift, and on its own it looks like exactly the kind of signal a subscription-adjacent category should be happy to see.

Average Order Value Moved the Wrong Direction to Explain the Gap

Quarterly AOV for the pet vertical actually rose across the same two quarters, from $65.95 in Q1 2025 to $74.11 in Q1 2026. That’s about a 12% increase. That happened even as 90-day revenue per customer fell. Rising AOV should, if anything, push cohort revenue up, not down. That makes the decline harder to explain away as smaller carts. It points instead toward a shift in order composition inside that 90-day window. That’s a similar composition question to the one that surfaced in AdScale’s look at desktop versus mobile AOV in German apparel shops.

The LTV to CAC Ratio Compressed

Dividing 90-day revenue per customer by CAC gives roughly 19.6x for the 2025 cohort and roughly 13.4x for the 2026 cohort. Both numbers are, by most operator benchmarks, still comfortable. The direction of travel is the part that deserves attention before it becomes uncomfortable.

What Is the Frequency-Value Gap in Pet Supplies eCommerce?

Call this pattern the frequency-value gap: purchase frequency rising while per-customer revenue in the same window falls. It is easy to miss because most reporting tracks these two metrics on separate dashboards, one for retention or repeat-rate, one for revenue or LTV. Looked at separately, both trends can appear to be good news. Repeat rate up: customers love the product. Revenue per customer eventually stabilizing: normal cohort maturation. It is only when the two are placed side by side, on the same cohort, over the same window, that the story changes.

A rising repeat rate is not the same claim as a rising LTV, even though the two get used interchangeably in a lot of growth reporting. A customer who orders four small top-up purchases in 90 days can show up as a loyal repeat buyer while contributing less total revenue than a customer who placed two larger orders. Frequency is visible in almost every analytics tool by default. Value per customer requires someone to actually do the division. That asymmetry in what is easy to see versus what is easy to miss is most of why this pattern goes unnoticed until CAC forces the question.

How Can Pet Brands Track CAC and LTV Together?

The fix is not complicated, but it does require changing what gets reported. Instead of a CAC trend line and a separate repeat-rate trend line, pet brands need a single view that puts acquisition cost and per-customer revenue on the same chart, for the same cohort, over the same fixed window. That is the only way a frequency-value gap becomes visible before it becomes a margin problem.

In this analysis, building that view meant deliberately rejecting the tempting shortcut of comparing a fully mature 12-month cohort against a five-month-old one. Matching both cohorts to the same 90-day window is what surfaced the gap, the same matched-window discipline behind AdScale’s ROAS benchmark research. A brand doing this internally does not need AdScale’s specific numbers to apply the same discipline: pick a fixed window that both the newest and oldest cohort you want to compare have actually lived through, and hold every comparison to that same window.

What Should Pet Supplies Merchants Do About Rising CAC?

1. Build a cohort table with CAC and per-customer revenue side by side. Pull new customers by acquisition month, spend for that month, and revenue generated by that cohort in a fixed window like 30, 60, or 90 days. Seeing both numbers on one row is what makes a gap like this visible.
2. Pick one comparison window and stick to it. Do not compare a 12-month LTV for an old cohort against a 90-day figure for a new one. If the newest cohort you care about is three months old, every cohort in the comparison gets measured at three months.
3. Break repeat orders down by size, not just count. A repeat-rate number alone cannot tell you whether the second and third orders are meaningfully sized or small top-ups. Pull average order value specifically for second and third orders within the window, separate from first orders.
4. Recalculate your CAC ceiling from the ratio, not the dollar figure. A rising CAC in isolation says nothing. A shrinking LTV to CAC ratio, even from a comfortable starting point, is the number that should trigger a conversation about targeting or offer changes.
5. Segment new customers by acquisition channel and audience type before drawing conclusions. A blended CAC and blended per-customer revenue figure can hide two very different populations, for example a smaller number of high-value customers and a larger number of low-value ones arriving through broader targeting.
6. Re-run the comparison every quarter, on a rolling basis. A single snapshot cannot tell you whether a gap like this is a one-quarter blip or a sustained trend. The value of this kind of analysis compounds the more consistently it gets repeated.
7. Treat a rising repeat rate as a question, not an answer. When repeat purchases climb, ask what is actually being repeated, at what size, before treating it as proof that acquisition spend is paying off. AdScale’s research on retaining new customers after their first purchase is a useful starting point for that deeper look.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequency and Value Are Not the Same Claim

A rising repeat rate feels like good news, and in a category built on consumables, it is tempting to stop reading the moment that number goes up. The two pet supplies cohorts compared here are a reminder that frequency and value are not the same claim, and that a dashboard built to celebrate one can quietly miss the other slipping. The brands that will handle rising acquisition costs well in this category are not the ones with the lowest CAC. They are the ones who noticed the gap between how often a customer buys and what that customer is actually worth, before the auction forced the question.

Keep Learning

• Why Are Fashion Ecommerce Return Rates So High for Multi-Item Orders? How a similar cohort-level look at AdScale’s database uncovered a structural returns pattern in apparel.
• German Apparel Desktop vs Mobile AOV: The 24% Gap Another case where a blended average hid where the real value was sitting.
• Clothing Industry Ad Benchmarks: What 100M+ eCommerce Orders Reveal About Google vs. Meta A platform-level look at how CAC and AOV interact across Google and Meta for a single vertical.
• Good ROAS for eCommerce: Benchmarks From AdScale’s Database The methodology playbook this analysis borrowed from: matched windows, directional framing, no overclaiming.
• Post-BFCM New Customer Retention: Turn First-Time Buyers Into Loyal Customers A deeper look at what happens to new customers after the first purchase, the same question this piece asks of pet supplies.