From the perspective of Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, one of the most frequent mistakes in inventory management at pet stores that sell online is treating pet food, treats, and flea treatments as if they were collars or toys, products that can wait on the shelf indefinitely. Every pet food and veterinary medicine has an expiration date, the date until which the manufacturer guarantees its properties, and that date turns every unsold unit into a clock ticking against the store.
The problem rarely shows up as a lack of control. On the contrary, many stores organize their inventory carefully, only by the wrong criterion, the order in which goods arrive. The result is a tidy warehouse that, even so, lets batches expire at the back of the shelves or sends customers a package with only a few weeks of shelf life left. Anyone who sells pet food can use what follows to review their own warehouse today.
Order of arrival does not guarantee order of expiration
The most common organization method is FIFO, which stands for first in, first out. It works well for products without an expiration date, but it fails with food because batches do not necessarily arrive in chronological order of expiration. A supplier may deliver a freshly produced batch today and, the following week, another one manufactured months ago, with a shorter shelf life. Hugo Galvao identifies this gap as the source of a large share of losses: those who ship according to the date of arrival end up selling first what expires later.
The alternative is FEFO, which stands for first expired, first out. Under this criterion, the expiration date determines the order in which orders are picked, regardless of when the product arrived. The change seems small on paper, but it requires every unit to be recorded with its batch number and expiration date at the moment of receipt, a step many stores skip to save time when checking incoming invoices.
The loss from an expired batch goes beyond the product
When a batch expires in inventory, the most visible loss is the value of the merchandise, which must be discarded. There are, however, less obvious costs. Brazil’s Consumer Protection Code considers expired products unfit for consumption, and selling them exposes the store to penalties and claims for damages. The greater risk in e-commerce, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho warns, lies in trust, which is lost far more quickly than it is built.
A pet owner who receives expired food does not question only that order. They begin to distrust everything they buy from the store, and, on a marketplace, that distrust turns into a public review read by other buyers. Since the product involves the animal’s health, the reaction is harsher than it would be toward a defective toy. A single wrong shipment can cost a customer who would have bought the same bag of pet food every month for years.
A short shelf life also leads to complaints
Even within the expiration date, a product can reach the customer in poor condition. A 15-kilogram bag of pet food, depending on the dog’s size, can last more than a month, and if it arrives with only a few weeks of shelf life left, the owner runs the risk of not being able to use it up. Hugo Galvao remarks that situations like this generate exchanges and complaints even without any irregularity, because buyers expect to receive a product with enough time left to use it.
One practice that resolves much of this conflict is setting a minimum shelf life for shipping in each category, below which the product is not sent out for regular orders. Batches approaching this limit can be sold through specific offers, with the date clearly stated in the listing, to buyers who will use the product quickly. In this way, the store reduces waste without hiding anything from those who buy.
How to put expiration dates at the center of the operation
Organization starts at receipt, with the batch number and expiration date of each incoming shipment recorded in the inventory system. On the shelves, products with the nearest expiration dates sit in the picking position, while newer ones go behind them or in separate locations. Automatic alerts for batches approaching the minimum shelf life provide time to act, whether through a special offer or a transfer to the store’s fastest-selling channel.
Purchasing also needs to take expiration dates into account. Buying large volumes of pet food to take advantage of a supplier discount only pays off if the store’s sales pace can move the batch before it expires. In the opinion of Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, this care applies both to marketplaces and in the company’s own online stores, such as www.enjoypets.com.br, because a pet owner who receives a package with plenty of shelf life left rarely gives a thought to inventory but notices immediately when it has been poorly managed.
