Planning Your Range
Pet Food
Dry Pet Food (Kibble)
Profit margins on pet kibble can be very slim. Well-known brands such as Black Hawk, Hills, and Advance are so heavily discounted by large online retailers that you’ll find it virtually impossible to sell these at or near recommended retail price.
As a dropship customer buying individual bags of pet food, you don’t have access to the same pricing as physical retailers that order by the pallet. Your best way to combat this is to focus exclusively on niche specialty brands. Brands such as LifeWise, Stay Loyal and Hypro may have lower consumer demand, but they offer far greater profit margins.
Treats & Chews
The most profitable way to sell pet treats is to purchase bulk packs and split them up into smaller retail-size packets. If you’re a dropship customer, you can achieve this by having bulk packs sent directly to yourself, however you won’t be able to take advantage of our order fulfillment process.
Agline does offer a wide range of pet treats, at profit margins ranging from 30-80%. Just like with pet kibble, avoid well-known supermarket brands such as Greenies and Love Ems and instead focus on specialty brands such as Vitalitae and Huds & Toke.
Pet Accessories
Accessories are where your online pet store will make the bulk of its profit. Toys, walking accessories and bedding are the most popular categories for dropshp customers.
Pet Bedding
Our primary pet bedding brand is Snooza. With an unrelenting focus on quality and a commitment to environmental sustainability and local manufacturing, Snooza products sit at the highest price point in the market. You can expect to make 50-90% profit on Snooza products.
We also stock Scruffs pet bedding at the mid-market price point. Scruffs beds feature classic designs and offer a modest 40-60% profit margin.
Agline does not stock any “cheap” pet beds. Stores such as Kmart, Aldi, and Big W have the scale to offer cheap pet beds at a price point that Agline and the small independent pet stores we supply cannot match, so there is little to be gained by stocking these products.
Pet Toys
KONG is our flagship pet toy brand, however you must have authorisation from KONG before you can order their products from us. You can make 50-90% profit margins off their products, and they offer excellent opportunity to upsell. Treat dispensers, for example, have a range of KONG-branded stuffing options available.
Cat toys are generally slow moving products, so it’s probably not worth your time to list our entire range on your website. We recommend creating a small range from our bestsellers, which mostly fall in the Petstages or KONG Refillables ranges.
Dog Clothing
Our dog clothing range presents significant opportunity during the winter months. These products offer strong profit margins of 40-100%, but they do come with certain challenges.
Even when you provide the most comprehensive dog measurement instructions, roughly 1 in 10 dog coats will be returned because it doesn’t correctly fit the customer’s pet.
It’s important to prominently display the sizing information for each coat you stock, and to formulate your returns policy and pricing strategy to account for higher returns volume in this category.
Pet Health & Nutrition
Supplements
As with the pet food, avoid corporate brands. Nectar of the Dogs, Simply Seaweed, and Vet’s Best are all smaller brands with good markup for small independent online pet stores.
Worming & Flea Control
Dropship customers will not be price competitive on these products.