A well-designed pet loyalty program formalizes a habit that already exists rather than manufacturing one from nothing. Many pet owners have already picked a brand and a store. The program's job is to reward repeat purchasing, not just first-time trial.
That distinction changes what a program should reward and how it should be structured.
The stakes are large and getting larger. U.S. pet industry expenditures reached $158 billion in 2025, according to the American Pet Products Association, which projects $165 billion in 2026. Pet loyalty programs are one retention lever a brand can control directly, whether they run on points, subscriptions, tiers, or referrals. Rivo is one Shopify-focused retention platform built for that model, with Loyalty supporting points and VIP tiers and a separate Cashback program that can award qualifying customers store credit. The mechanics behind any program still matter more than the vendor running it. This article walks through how those mechanics work, what established pet brands and retailers do today, and where multi-pet households change the design math.
Key Takeaways
- Multi-pet households represent a substantial part of the pet market. APPA data reported in 2025 indicated that 65% of pet-owning households had two or more pets.
- Autoship is an important retention mechanic in pet retail. Chewy reported that Autoship customer sales represented 83.3% of FY2025 net sales, although that measure includes both Autoship purchases and purchases outside Autoship made by customers classified as Autoship customers.
- Points, autoship, and paid membership are not interchangeable structures. Each rewards a different buying behavior and requires different program rules.
- Multi-pet households can benefit from pet-specific accommodations instead of simply larger points multipliers. Petco's current Petco Perks Premier program separately prices plans by pet category and provides a multi-pet discount when another pet is enrolled.
- Referral programs extend loyalty past the purchase by giving existing customers an incentive to introduce new customers.
- Reward economics should reflect how frequently pet products are consumed and reordered rather than relying on an arbitrary industry-wide percentage.
- Autoship and loyalty can work together when a brand's subscription platform is properly connected to its loyalty system and recurring orders are included in the applicable earning rules.
- Rivo Loyalty supports points and VIP tiers. Rivo also offers separate Cashback, Referrals, Memberships, and Accounts products.
- Rivo's analytics include Rivo-attributed revenue, customer lifetime value, repeat order rate, ROI, and loyalty performance metrics.
- Rivo provides migration guidance for Smile.io, Yotpo, Stamped, Loyalty Lion, Growave, Rise, and Inveterate.
How Do Pet Loyalty Programs Work?
Pet loyalty programs reward pet parents with points, tiered perks, subscription savings, referral incentives, or other benefits for purchases and engagement, then let them redeem qualifying value for discounts, products, store credit, or other rewards depending on the program.
Pet retail already shows meaningful brand and store attachment. A 2024 U.S. pet-owner survey reported by PetfoodIndustry found that 83% of respondents had a preferred pet food brand. Separately, a 2025 survey of 204 UK pet parents and pet-shop consumers found that 80% of respondents who used independent pet shops visited their local store at least twice a month, with locality, product choice, and tailored recommendations among the factors driving those visits. A loyalty program can formalize and reward an existing buying pattern rather than trying to create loyalty from nothing.
Should Pet Brands Use Autoship or Points-Based Loyalty?
The main structures reward different behaviors, and brands can combine more than one where their technology and economics support it.
Points-Based Programs
Points programs reward customers for spending and, in some cases, other actions. Raw Paws Pet Food's current rewards program gives customers 10 points for every $1 spent, provides additional earning opportunities, and lets customers redeem accumulated points for store credit. The program also includes a refer-a-friend mechanic.
This structure can work well for catalog-wide purchases with variable timing because customers continue accumulating value across eligible purchases rather than committing to a fixed reorder schedule.
Subscription and Autoship Loyalty
Autoship rewards or incentivizes a recurring purchasing commitment rather than a single transaction. Chewy defines Autoship as its subscription program for automatic ordering, payment, and delivery and describes it as an important driver of recurring net sales and customer retention.
For FY2025, Chewy reported Autoship customer sales of $10.5 billion, representing 83.3% of net sales. Importantly, Chewy defines Autoship customer sales to include both purchases through Autoship and purchases outside Autoship made by customers classified as Autoship customers. The number therefore should not be read as saying that 83.3% of all Chewy sales were individual subscription orders.
For Shopify merchants, autoship and loyalty are usually separate systems that need to be connected. Rivo lists subscription integrations including Awtomic, Skio, Recharge, Stay, Ordergroove, Smartrr, and Loop Subscriptions. Supported integrations can allow subscribers to earn or spend loyalty value on subscription purchases according to the merchant's configuration.
Paid Membership Tiers
Paid membership charges an upfront or recurring fee for an ongoing set of benefits. Petco currently operates a free Petco Perks Core program alongside paid Petco Perks Premier plans. Dog and cat Premier plans are listed at $24.99 per month with a 12-month commitment, while plans for birds, fish, reptiles, and small animals are listed at $9.99 per month. Benefits vary by pet type and can include monthly reward credit and category-specific discounts.
Chewy operates Autoship alongside Chewy+, a separate paid membership. Chewy+ currently costs $79 per year after a 30-day free trial and includes free shipping, 5% rewards on eligible purchases, and exclusive offers.
These examples show that subscriptions, free loyalty programs, and paid memberships can coexist, but they solve different customer needs and should not be treated as interchangeable program types.
Which Earning Actions Build Repeat-Purchase Habits?
Beyond the purchase itself, brands can reward actions that keep customers engaged between orders. Common earning actions in loyalty programs include:
- Purchases: the baseline earning action for many points programs.
- Social engagement: some loyalty programs reward eligible social follows or sharing.
- Milestones: pet retailers can use pet-specific milestones. PetSmart, for example, currently offers eligible Treats Rewards members Birthday or Gotcha Day benefits tied to pet information in their account.
- Reviews and referrals: programs can reward product reviews or successful referrals where the platform supports those earning actions.
- Receipt-based earning: programs can allow customers to photograph or upload receipts when purchases occur outside a brand's direct ecommerce checkout.
Rivo Loyalty supports purchase and engagement-based earning actions including account creation, social activity, product reviews, and custom actions. Rivo's current help documentation also includes receipt-scanning functionality. Pet-specific profiles or pet-birthday records should be treated separately, since those are not established as standard Rivo Loyalty features in the current documentation.
What Rewards Work Best for Pet Owners?
Reward design should map to what customers already value about the brand and the economics of the products being purchased. Pet-food research has repeatedly identified quality, health and nutrition, ingredients, value, price, and brand among important factors in purchase decisions.
Reward types pet brands can consider include:
- Store credit or cashback, which creates value for a future purchase.
- Free product, which can introduce customers to another eligible SKU.
- Exclusive access, such as early access to launches or promotions.
- Points redeemed for discounts, a common loyalty mechanic.
- Pet-specific benefits, such as birthday or Gotcha Day rewards when the retailer maintains pet information.
Rivo supports fixed-amount, percentage, free-shipping, and free-product rewards in its Loyalty product. Rivo Cashback is a separate program that can award qualifying customers store credit for a future purchase.
How Do VIP Tiers and Paid Memberships Work for Pet Brands?
Tiered programs reward cumulative spend, order count, points, or another qualification measure with escalating benefits. Paid memberships instead provide a defined set of benefits in exchange for a recurring or one-time membership payment.
Petco's current Petco Perks model illustrates the distinction. Petco Perks Core is free, while Petco Perks Premier is a paid program with pet-type-specific benefits. Petco currently lists dog or cat Premier plans at $24.99 per month and bird, fish, reptile, or small-animal plans at $9.99 per month. Petco also states that enrolling another pet can save $2 per plan each month when monthly billing is used.
Chewy provides another example of parallel structures. Autoship handles automatic recurring ordering, while Chewy+ is a separate $79-per-year paid membership offering benefits such as free shipping and 5% rewards on eligible purchases.
The important distinction for program design is that VIP status, recurring-product subscriptions, and paid memberships are separate mechanics even when a retailer offers more than one.
Designing Loyalty Programs for Multi-Pet Households
Programs serving pet owners should account for the fact that many customers are buying for more than one animal.
APPA data reported in 2025 indicated that 65% of pet-owning households had two or more pets. Different animals may create different purchase frequencies, product categories, and service requirements.
Petco's current Premier pricing illustrates one way of handling that complexity. It offers different plans for dogs and cats versus birds, fish, reptiles, and small animals and provides a multi-pet discount when an additional pet is enrolled.
Retailers can also maintain pet-level information for benefits such as birthdays or Gotcha Days. PetSmart's Treats Rewards program allows customers to add multiple pets to an account and provides eligible celebration benefits for pet milestones.
For a Shopify brand, however, a decision to create dedicated per-pet profiles is an account-design requirement, not a standard loyalty-platform assumption. Brands should confirm that their customer-account or data architecture supports the required pet-level fields before designing rewards around them.
Referral Programs
Referral programs turn existing customers into an acquisition channel by rewarding successful introductions to new customers.
Raw Paws Pet Food provides a current pet-category example. Its official rewards program says the advocate earns points valued at $30 after a qualifying referral, while the referred friend receives a $30 coupon for a first order.
Doglyness similarly combines loyalty and referrals. Its Doglycoins program currently awards coins for purchases and eligible engagement actions such as social follows and birthdays, while its referral offer gives €10 to the referring customer and €10 to the friend.
Rivo Referrals supports double-sided referral campaigns, unique referral links, referral pages, analytics, and built-in fraud controls. Current Rivo documentation describes checks including IP-address monitoring, existing-customer detection, self-referral prevention, email checks, and configurable eligibility requirements.
How Do Leading Pet Brands Structure Loyalty Programs?
The following are neutral examples of current loyalty mechanics rather than a ranking.
- PetSmart Treats Rewards: A free points-based program with Member, Bestie, and VIPP status levels. Members earn base points on eligible purchases, can redeem points for savings, receive eligible Birthday or Gotcha Day benefits, and can earn benefits on Autoship purchases.
- Petco Perks Core and Premier: A free rewards layer paired with paid Premier plans. Premier pricing and benefits vary by pet category, and Petco offers multi-pet savings for additional enrollments.
- Chewy Autoship and Chewy+: Autoship provides automatic recurring ordering, while Chewy+ is a separate paid membership offering free shipping, 5% rewards on eligible purchases, and other offers.
- Blue Buffalo Good Rewards: A General Mills rewards program powered by Fetch. Customers can earn on eligible Blue Buffalo purchases by scanning receipts in the Fetch app and redeem points for available rewards.
- Doglyness: A Doglycoins program rewarding purchases and selected engagement actions, alongside a separate give/get referral offer.
- Raw Paws Pet Food: A points-per-dollar program with additional earning opportunities, store-credit redemptions, and a refer-a-friend structure.
Pet brands without an in-house loyalty platform can also use third-party software to manage points, tiers, referrals, memberships, and other retention mechanics instead of building the entire system themselves.
How Do You Integrate a Pet Loyalty Program With Shopify?
For pet brands selling on Shopify, implementation depends on the loyalty platform, subscription provider, messaging stack, and Shopify plan. Five practical considerations apply:
- Sync Shopify customer and order data so eligible loyalty activity is recorded automatically rather than reconciled manually.
- Connect supported subscription tooling if recurring orders should earn or redeem loyalty value. With Rivo, the exact behavior depends on the subscription integration and configured earning and redemption rules.
- Connect email and SMS platforms where supported so loyalty events and customer data can be used in lifecycle messaging.
- Configure referral fraud protection before scaling a referral campaign.
- Track participation, redemption, repeat purchase behavior, and attributed revenue rather than using enrollment alone as the measure of success.
Rivo also offers Shopify checkout extensions that can bring supported loyalty, referrals, store credit, cashback, memberships, and account actions into Shopify checkout and customer accounts. These checkout extensions are available to Shopify Plus merchants using Checkout Extensibility, and specific extensions can require the corresponding Rivo feature.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a Pet Loyalty Program
Most loyalty-program problems can be reduced by testing the economics and technical setup before launch:
- Setting reward value without modeling margin. Reward cost should be evaluated against gross margin, expected redemption, order frequency, and the behavior the merchant wants to encourage rather than an arbitrary universal percentage.
- Ignoring subscription customers. If recurring purchases are an important part of the business, confirm that the subscription platform and loyalty system can exchange the data needed to award or redeem benefits.
- Treating every household as identical. Multi-pet customers may have different product mixes, replenishment cycles, and service needs.
- Skipping referral controls. Referral incentives should have appropriate fraud and eligibility protections.
- Launching without a measurement plan. Enrollment does not show whether customers are earning, redeeming, referring, or purchasing again.
How Rivo Supports Loyalty Programs for Pet Brands
For Shopify and Shopify Plus pet brands building or rebuilding a retention program, Rivo Loyalty supports points, configurable earning and redemption rules, and VIP tiers. Rivo also offers separate Cashback, Referrals, Memberships, and Accounts products that can be combined according to the merchant's plan and requirements.
Rivo works with subscription platforms including Skio, Recharge, Loop Subscriptions, Ordergroove, Smartrr, Stay, and Awtomic. These integrations are particularly relevant to pet brands with recurring consumable orders because supported configurations can allow customers to earn or spend loyalty value on subscription purchases. For example, Rivo's Skio integration can award points on both initial subscription orders and recurring renewals when the merchant's earning rules are configured to include them.
Rivo's Analytics Home dashboard tracks Rivo-attributed revenue, customer lifetime value, repeat order rate, ROI, and additional loyalty, referral, and account metrics. It also compares loyalty redeemers with non-members on measures including average order value, repeat purchase rate, and purchase frequency. Rivo explains its ROI metric as attributed program revenue divided by Rivo subscription cost. Its documentation uses 12.5x as an example, meaning $12.50 in attributed revenue for every $1 of Rivo subscription cost, not as a promised return for every merchant.
One published Rivo customer case study provides an example of program performance rather than a benchmark. Kitsch has generated more than $5.8 million in loyalty-attributed revenue according to Rivo, and customers in its highest VIP tier showed an 8.7x higher repeat purchase rate in the case study.
Brands moving from an existing loyalty provider can also use Rivo's migration resources. Rivo's current migration documentation includes Rise, Smile.io, Yotpo, Stamped, Loyalty Lion, Growave, and an Inveterate-to-Rivo Memberships migration checklist.
Request a demo to see how Rivo Loyalty, Cashback, Referrals, Memberships, subscription integrations, and customer accounts could fit a pet brand's retention stack.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between autoship and loyalty programs?
Autoship is a subscription or recurring-order mechanic that automates repeat purchases, while a loyalty program rewards eligible customer activity with points, rewards, status, or other benefits. They can work together when the subscription and loyalty systems are integrated, but autoship itself is not the same product as a loyalty program.
How can pet brands increase repeat purchases?
Pet brands can combine mechanics that fit their actual purchase cycle, such as loyalty rewards on repeat orders, referrals, relevant customer milestones, and subscriptions for products customers need on a recurring schedule. The right combination depends on product replenishment frequency, margins, customer behavior, and the capabilities of the brand's ecommerce stack.
How do you build a loyalty program for a pet store?
Start by deciding which customer behaviors should earn value, what customers can redeem, and what the resulting rewards will cost at realistic redemption levels. Then connect the program to the store's ecommerce, subscription, messaging, and retail systems where needed, add appropriate fraud controls, and define measurement around redemption, repeat purchase behavior, referrals, and attributed revenue.
What are the best loyalty features for pet brands?
Useful features depend on how customers actually buy from the brand. Points or store credit can support repeat consumable purchases, supported subscription integrations can connect loyalty with recurring orders, VIP tiers can recognize high-value customers, paid memberships can bundle defined ongoing benefits, and referral tools can reward customer advocacy. Rivo supports these areas through separate Loyalty, Cashback, Referrals, and Memberships products and supported integrations rather than through a single pet-specific loyalty program.
Do multi-pet households need different loyalty accommodations?
They can. Multi-pet households may purchase across more categories and on different replenishment schedules than single-pet households. Programs can account for that through pet-level account information, milestone benefits, category-specific offers, or separate pet enrollments where the retailer's technology supports them. Brands should confirm that their platform actually supports pet-level data before designing a program that depends on it.
