PetMed Express, Inc. (NASDAQ:PETS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

In terms of trade downs, we are not seeing trade down behavior in our business. As you know, we are very medication focused and very prescription focused in terms of the weighting in our business. And those customers, particularly diet and health-focused customers, generally will stick with the brands that they love, whether they’re a favorite Flea & Tick brand or if it’s a skin brand. Whatever it is, we don’t see consumers wanting to trade down, which is good news for us. And I would say that trend will likely continue. And we’re relatively recessionary resilient, and we haven’t seen a lot of train down behavior. So in terms of the macro, we’re going to stay very focused. Obviously, as we get into March, that’s when sales historically have increased for flea and tick, and we’ll be watching very carefully around seasonality around temperatures.

Did that answer your question, Erin?

Erin Wright: Yeah. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Matthew Hulett: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Corey Grady with Jefferies. Please proceed with your questions.

Corey Grady: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to follow up on that and just talk about other factors that impact customer growth. So we’ve seen vet industry visits down over the past year and this is kind of a seasonally weak quarter for flea and tick. So you added customers by activating lapsed customers. Maybe you can talk about what you’re seeing in the market in terms of like customer intent, and how you’re thinking about trends that might impact customer growth over the next year? Thanks.

Matthew Hulett: That’s a great question. In terms of the rig night (ph) of the existing lapsed customers, really, that’s a new conversation. That’s why we changed the definition. We have a huge opportunity in what we’ve got, and there’s a lot of interesting net new data around what those customers want from a brand like what PetMeds. And so it’s almost the way we think about it as having a completely new conversation. Some of those customers actually have a strong affinity, obviously, to the brand, but they haven’t really been introduced to us in a while. And so we’re treating them like they’re new customers because they are new customers. And those customers that are new seem to want a one-stop shop, one place to get more of their products versus just one item.

That could be in this speculation related to inflationary concerns. It could be pre-recessionary concerns. But going to one place to get all of your needs is a developing theme, and we’ve seen this in other e-commerce retailers. In terms of the net new components to the strategy for both the existing customers as well as new, it’s hard to predict the customer acquisition trends. It’s a dynamic marketplace, but we’ve certainly seen those trends flatten in terms of increase in overall customer acquisition. Our customer acquisition costs on an absolute basis have been relatively flat. But we see a lot of interesting demand, which is the thesis for PetCareRx to add more premium products like prescription food and premium food to the mix. And so longer term, we see an opportunity to potentially lead into customer acquisition costs and expand our customers more rapidly, but again, we are not in a position to comment on that yet.