Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho observes that two listings for the same brand of dog food can sit side by side in search results with nearly identical prices and very different sales. The gap usually comes down to details that have nothing to do with the product itself, and he sees the same handful of listing mistakes repeat across pet sellers, regardless of how good the product behind them actually is.
None of these mistakes are a calamity on their own. Each one just gives a buyer one more reason to keep scrolling instead of clicking, and on a page full of near-identical options, that is usually all it takes to lose the sale to someone else.
Photos that never show the real product
A manufacturer’s stock photo looks clean, but it tells a buyer nothing about the actual size of the bag arriving at their door, what the packaging looks like once opened, or how a harness actually sits on a dog rather than on a mannequin. Buyers comparing several near-identical listings tend to trust the one that shows the product itself, in a real setting, over the one that only shows the box art against a plain background.
According to Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, a listing built entirely on manufacturer images also loses an easy way to stand out, since every competitor selling the same brand has access to the exact same photos. Real images of the product in hand, alongside a short video showing it opened or in use, are the one part of a listing a competitor selling the identical item cannot simply copy from a catalogue.
Titles missing the detail buyers actually search for
A title that reads only the brand and product line leaves out the exact numbers a pet owner is searching for: bag weight, breed size, or quantity per pack. Hugo Galvao mentions that a buyer searching for a ten-kilogram bag for a medium-sized dog skips past a listing that just says the brand name, even if that exact bag is the one being sold.
Search inside a marketplace works closer to a filter than a conversation, so a title missing the specific number a buyer typed rarely surfaces for that search at all, regardless of how well the listing performs once a buyer actually lands on it.
Questions left unanswered for days
The public question-and-answer section under a listing is often the last thing a buyer checks before deciding, and an unanswered question sitting there for several days reads as a seller who is not paying attention. A slow reply does not just lose that one buyer; it sits visible to every future visitor who scrolls down to check.
A pattern of unanswered or slow-answered questions on a pet listing raises a specific doubt: whether anyone would respond quickly if something went wrong with an actual order, which matters more for consumable pet products than for almost anything else sold on the same platform.
A description written as an afterthought
Specialists treat the description field as one of the few parts of a listing sellers fully control and consistently underuse, filling it with a copy-pasted paragraph from the manufacturer rather than the specific details a pet owner is actually deciding between, such as ingredient differences between similar formulas or exact feeding guidelines by weight.
A description that answers the two or three questions a buyer would otherwise leave for the Q&A section closes the sale before that buyer ever has to wait for a reply. Hugo Galvao sums up the pattern across all four mistakes the same way: none of them require a bigger budget to fix, only more attention to the details a buyer actually weighs before clicking buy.