Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho has watched a belief that shaped e-commerce logistics for years quietly stop being true: that promising the fastest possible delivery is the surest way to win a customer’s order. Recent research on delivery preferences suggests the opposite is now closer to reality, and the shift has real implications for how a pet business should be setting expectations at checkout.
The reversal behind the numbers
Delivery speed ranked as the single most important factor in a consumer’s shopping experience in 2022. By 2024, it had dropped to fifth place, overtaken by factors like cost and, above all, reliability. The vast majority of consumers now say they prioritize a dependable delivery date over a fast one, and a similar share say they are perfectly willing to wait two or three extra days for an order as long as they know, with confidence, when it will actually arrive.
This is not a minor preference shift buried in a niche survey. Hugo Galvao mentions that it reflects a broader shopping experience and that a promised date a store cannot reliably keep does more damage to trust than simply being upfront about a realistic, slightly longer timeline from the start.
The part that surprises most retailers
The counterintuitive detail goes further than most sellers expect. Accuracy does not just mean avoiding a late delivery. For a majority of shoppers, an early delivery counts as a broken promise too, since it disrupts a plan built around the date the store originally gave. What customers actually want is not the fastest possible outcome, but the outcome that matches exactly what they were told to expect, in either direction.
That reframes the entire logistics conversation. Hugo Galvao states that a store racing to ship faster than promised, assuming customers will be pleasantly surprised, is often solving a problem that was never really there.
Why this raises the bar specifically for pet products
This shift does not apply evenly across every category. Shoppers buying everyday consumables, the exact category most pet purchases fall into, tend to have noticeably less patience for long waits than shoppers buying items like clothing, where a slightly later delivery matters less. That combination sets a demanding standard for pet e-commerce specifically: customers are willing to accept a realistic delivery window rather than demanding the fastest option, but that window has to be both honest and reasonably tight, since a bag of food running low does not offer the same flexibility a seasonal jacket does.
For a pet business, this means the old habit of quoting an optimistic delivery estimate to look competitive against faster-shipping rivals is now working against the very thing customers actually value most.
What this means in practice
Acting on this shift does not require investing in faster couriers or absorbing the cost of expedited shipping across every order. It requires investing in the accuracy of the delivery estimate itself, built from real data on how long a route actually takes rather than an optimistic best case, and communicating proactively the moment something changes rather than letting a customer discover a delay on their own.
A store that quotes a realistic five-day window and hits it consistently will, according to Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, earn more trust than one that promises two days and delivers on that promise only half the time. For a category where customers are already trading speed for predictability, getting that promise right may matter more to long-term loyalty than any investment in shaving a day off the delivery clock.
