Pricing, assortment and strategy in the Czech online pet segment

Summary

On comparable products, the price gap between the cheapest and the most expensive player on the market exceeds 30%. The lowest prices belong to the Zooplus group (bitiba and zoohit), which most likely passes on the advantages of its European scale. The highest index is posted by profizoo and Bezedná miska, which offset their prices with the breadth of their assortment and a premium approach respectively.

The Zooplus group is not cheaper on average, but specifically in the premium categories above CZK 500, where margins are traditionally highest. Bitiba and zoohit share the same catalogue and differ only in price, which confirms a deliberate split into a discount and a premium layer.

The players approach seasonal price adjustments in entirely different ways. PetCenter ran pronounced one-off waves of discounts before Black Friday and around the turn of the year, while Super Zoo tended to raise prices over the same period. Spokojený pes timed its main wave of discounts to the first two weeks of December.

Average price dispersion on the market grew, but the divergence was driven by a narrow group of products with large price gaps. Median dispersion remained stable, and for most of the assortment price relations did not change significantly.

Price parity between most of the e-shops is very low, typically in the low single-digit percentages. The exception is the bitiba and zoohit pair, with a markedly higher match that reflects shared pricing processes within the Zooplus group.

PetCenter and Super Zoo work with psychological price endings most systematically: almost 8 out of 10 products are priced at “x9”. Profizoo is a striking exception, making minimal use of charm pricing.

PetCenter and zoohit expanded their assortment, and Super Zoo was the only one to narrow its catalogue slightly. Zoohit added new products fastest, and the simultaneous additions and removals point to active portfolio rotation.

The players show markedly different inventory management results over the season. Super Zoo and Spokojený pes had a higher share of unavailable products, but always resolved the situation quickly. Profizoo and PetCenter kept most of their assortment in stock, but took longer to restock when an item did run out.

Pricing strategies, assortment decisions and availability change constantly on this market. E-shops that track these movements systematically and in real time gain a basis for faster and more accurate decisions. DeepScout produced this report from data collected and matched automatically using AI, with no manual review required.

Introduction

The Czech pet segment: market context

The Czech pet supplies market generates over CZK 26 billion a year in food, litter and animal accessories, with roughly a further CZK 7 billion going to veterinary care. That makes the overall market one of the largest in Central Europe. The online channel takes an estimated 20 to 30% of that volume, considerably more than the national e-commerce average of around 16 to 20% (Němec, 2025).

The Czech Republic ranks among the European leaders in pet ownership. At least one dog is owned by 42% of households and a cat by 23% of households (FEDIAF, 2025). A strong pet culture shows up in buying behaviour as well. Owners are increasingly willing to invest in higher-quality products, and the premium segment is growing even where overall spending has stagnated. The humanisation of pets, meaning they are seen as full members of the family, reinforces this tendency further (Němec, 2025).

The offline market is dominated by supermarkets and a network of specialist stores. Supermarkets hold almost 40% of pet food revenue, with economy categories and private labels as their domain. Specialist stores, by contrast, serve the premium customer segment (Stuchlík, 2024).

The online market, meanwhile, is growing considerably faster than offline. The pet segment on Rohlik.cz grew 27 to 28% year on year, and generalist platforms such as Alza.cz are approaching billion-crown revenues in the pet segment (Němec, 2025). Specialist online retailers therefore compete for customers for whom price is not the only criterion, who are looking for breadth of assortment, expertise and the convenience of having heavy goods delivered. This dynamic deepens the competition between specialist e-shops, for which the ability to stand out, offer the right added services, set prices correctly and manage assortment becomes a key factor in both keeping and winning customers.

The e-shops analysed

This analysis follows seven online pet retailers operating on the Czech market. The selection covers the full spectrum of business models and price segments: from the largest omnichannel chain through premium pure play specialists to a discount player backed by European private equity. It includes both Czech family businesses with a decade of history and companies consolidated under foreign capital. Together these retailers represent a key part of online pet supply sales in Czechia, and their differing strategies illustrate how many ways there are to succeed on the same market.

Super Zoo

Super Zoo is run by the Czech family group Plaček, which since 1986 has grown into by far the largest specialist pet supplies retailer in the region. It operates more than 200 bricks-and-mortar stores in Czechia, and the e-shop is part of an integrated omnichannel model with click & collect and same-day delivery. The assortment runs to over 10,000 products, more than half of them the group's own private labels such as Elbeville, Ontario, Rasco Premium, Prospera Plus, Repti Planet and Nature Land. This is the most developed private label portfolio on the Czech pet market. The customer base is mass-market and spread across price levels. Among its innovations, the self-service 24/7 stores (the first in Europe) and the Nasypte si concept for loose, unpackaged kibble stand out. In recent years the group has grown 15% a year even while Czech retail as a whole stagnated.

PetCenter

PetCenter is the second largest specialist pet supplies chain in Czechia, run by a Czech company in the portfolio of Tomáš Chrenek's family. The network numbers roughly 70 stores located mainly in shopping centres across Czechia and Slovakia, with the e-shop serving as a complementary sales channel. PetCenter's strength is vertical integration: many stores house veterinary clinics and dog hotels, offering customers complete care in one place. This is a kind of differentiation that pure play online players cannot easily replicate. Its private labels include the Pet Chef dog food range and the Huhubamboo accessory brand focused on innovative design. Huhubamboo products have seen sales grow over the past year, showing that PetCenter treats private label as brand innovation rather than merely a cheap alternative. In early 2025 a new legal entity, PetCenter s.r.o., was established, pointing to an ongoing restructuring of the group.

Spokojený pes

Spokojený pes is the largest purely Czech online pet supplies retailer. The company grew in 2005 out of a hobby of its founder Soňa Fialková, who after twenty years at the helm handed over to a new CEO, Matúš Karaffa, co-founder of the children's e-shop Feedo.cz. Under the new leadership the company aims to pass the one billion crown mark within five years, through expanding its store network, strengthening its position in Slovakia and moving into neighbouring countries. Its differentiation rests on a premium assortment, its own Rychlý Pes delivery service with guaranteed same-day delivery in Prague and Brno, and the Spokobox subscription box of treats, toys and surprises.

profizoo

profizoo is a Czech family business from Kutná Hora that builds its differentiation on breadth of assortment: the catalogue runs to as many as 45,000 items and covers not only dogs and cats but also reptiles, birds, rodents, fish and farm animals. That range makes profizoo an encyclopaedic shop for owners who cannot find the product they want at the competition. Alongside the e-shop it operates seven physical stores. Its own product lines include the ProfiDog and ProfiCat food brands and Profizoo, covering over 3,000 accessory items from beds through dispensers to treats. It consistently achieves top results in customer ratings and has won the ShopRoku award in the pet supplies category six times.

zoohit

Zoohit is the Czech localisation of the zooplus SE group, one of the largest online pet supplies retailers in Europe, which in 2021 passed into the portfolio of private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and EQT. The assortment exceeds 11,000 products in the mid and premium price categories for dogs and cats. Exclusively for zoohit.cz customers there is the zooplus group's extensive family of private labels, including Wolf of Wilderness, Purizon, Concept for Life, zooplus Bio and Tigerino among others. The key customer benefit is the Autobalík subscription service with regular food deliveries and a 5% discount. Over 2025 and 2026 the owners are weighing a sale or IPO of the group, which may affect medium-term strategic investment.

bitiba

Bitiba is the discount brand of the same zooplus SE group and shares logistics, stock and ownership structure with Zoohit. The difference is in positioning: Bitiba targets price-sensitive customers with an emphasis on the lowest prices, while Zoohit aims at the premium segment. Bitiba also shares Zoohit's entire portfolio of zooplus group private labels, offering them at lower prices in line with its discount positioning. This model of two separate brands on shared infrastructure lets the group serve both segments without cannibalising itself. Bitiba regularly ranks among the most visited Czech pet websites. Its loyalty programme works on a stamp basis, with a discount once an order passes a value threshold.

bezednamiska

Bezedná miska is a premium niche specialist focused primarily on dogs and cats, operating as a pure play online player since 2014. Its differentiation rests on turning down lower-quality products, in-house veterinary advice and strong content marketing in the form of a blog and the Bezedný podcast. Compared with players of similar size it stands out for above-average technology: its own mobile app, certification for veterinary medicinal products and a loyalty programme. It targets customers for whom the animal's health is the priority and price only a secondary criterion.

About this case study

This case study offers a systematic analysis of the pricing and assortment behaviour of the seven largest online pet retailers operating on the Czech market. The period analysed covers eight weeks from 24 November 2025 to 12 January 2026, taking in the Black Friday season, the Christmas shopping peak and January, when consumer demand traditionally falls.

The aim of the case study is not to provide an academic view of the market but practical findings that e-shops can use when setting prices and managing assortment. The data shows where the pricing anomalies on the market are, how the strategies of individual players differ and where the right pricing response can deliver a competitive advantage.

The case study is intended above all for commercial managers and pricing specialists who want to understand market dynamics better and find ways to support growth.

Methodology

DeepScout

DeepScout is an automated competitive monitoring tool that gives e-shops structured data on their competitors' prices, availability and assortment. The data is collected automatically through our own scraping infrastructure and matched using AI algorithms that identify identical products even when they carry different names or lack standard identifiers.

With DeepScout, e-shops can move from manually browsing competitor websites to data-driven decisions, and do so without any technical development of their own. The platform is designed to adapt to the needs of e-shops of every size, from small specialists to market leaders.

1. Pricing

1.1 Price index and price distribution across the market

The market analysed does not show a single price level. On comparable goods we see pronounced price differences, which moreover widened further around the turn of the year (see analysis 1.3). Over the period analysed, the spread between the cheapest and the most expensive player exceeded 31 index points.

With Super Zoo as the reference value at 100, the players fall into four distinct bands. Bitiba sits in a category of its own well below the market, which matches its role as the explicit discount brand of the zooplus group. Zoohit and Spokojený pes form a tight cluster roughly 8-10% below the reference player, each for a different reason: Zoohit as the premium arm of the zooplus group, Spokojený pes as a Czech premium specialist with competitive pricing. PetCenter stays just below the reference value, with Bezedná miska and profizoo slightly above it, in line with their value positioning.

Both players with the lowest index, bitiba and zoohit, are part of the Zooplus group, the largest online pet food retailer in Europe, which most likely allows them to pass the advantages of European scale into their prices.

Comparing how products are spread across price bands adds important context to the price index. It shows that zoohit and bitiba have a considerably higher share of their offering in the bands above CZK 500. The Zooplus group is therefore not cheaper on average, but specifically in the premium categories, where margins are traditionally highest. Bitiba and Zoohit show a similar price distribution because they share the same zooplus group catalogue. The only difference is price: Bitiba sells the same products more cheaply than Zoohit, which confirms the group's deliberate split into a discount and a premium layer with identical goods behind both.

Price comparison, however, is not the only factor customers decide on, and differences of a few percent can be more than offset by other factors. Physical presence is an advantage for Super Zoo with its 200 stores and for PetCenter, whose stores additionally integrate veterinary clinics and dog hotels. Bezedná miska likewise puts expertise and veterinary advice at the front of its brand. Repeat purchases are made easier by the subscription services of Zoohit and Spokojený pes, the latter adding same-day delivery through its own Rychlý Pes courier service. Breadth of assortment is the differentiator for profizoo, with 36,000 items and six ShopRoku awards.

1.2 Price movement over time

Over the eight weeks analysed, prices fell slightly, but the movements were not evenly spread. Individual players approach price adjustments in entirely different ways.

Players on the pet market do not handle price adjustments in the same way. While some actively cut prices ahead of the key trading moments, others raise them over the same period. This difference has a direct impact on how a customer perceives the value of a given e-shop at that point in the season.

Just before Black Friday, PetCenter ran a pronounced one-off wave of discounts, and once it ended reversed prices back by roughly the same amount. The same pattern repeated around the turn of the year with another wave of clearance prices. Overall, decreases outweighed increases at PetCenter, and the average size of a change was the highest of all the players analysed.

Looking at matched and unmatched products adds important context. PetCenter's discounts concentrated mainly on products that cannot be directly compared with competitors' offerings. Prices of matched products, those where comparison is possible, stayed stable across the whole period analysed. PetCenter's clearance campaigns therefore did not play out on the directly competitive battleground, which may be deliberate or simply a reflection of how its assortment is structured. Profizoo, and to a lesser extent zoohit, showed the opposite: more discounting on comparable products than on unique ones.

Spokojený pes chose different timing. Its main wave of discounts came in the first two weeks of December, that is just before Christmas rather than before Black Friday. Overall repricing activity was lower than at PetCenter and the ratio of increases to decreases considerably more balanced, suggesting a less pronounced seasonal strategy and a more gradual approach to pricing.

Super Zoo took the opposite approach to PetCenter. While PetCenter was discounting heavily over the Black Friday period, Super Zoo tended to raise prices at the same time. One possible explanation is that it began its seasonal activity back at the start of November, as many other retailers did. The strategy evidently worked: the e-shop itself announced that over the Christmas season it achieved year-on-year revenue growth of 31.5%.

Profizoo showed a similar tendency. Through November and December increases outweighed discounts and overall repricing activity was low. If profizoo, like Super Zoo, started its season earlier, then the quiet course of the period analysed makes sense. Its January behaviour points the same way, with profizoo raising prices across the board, consistent with a post-season reset back to the standard price level.

Knowing when competitors run their pricing campaigns has direct value for running your own business. If you know the competition concentrates on a different period than you do, you can better target marketing investment where competitive pressure is lowest. The same knowledge helps forecast revenue and manage stock more efficiently. For example: if a large part of the market discounts dramatically before the end of the year, it will be hard to sell seasonal stock at the last minute, because customers will be buying elsewhere at clearance prices. Anyone tracking this dynamic in advance can adjust both stock and prices in time.

1.3 Price divergence and parity

Price dispersion on the market widened over the period analysed. The differences are driven by selected products with large price gaps, though, while everyday pricing stayed stable.

Over the period analysed, average price dispersion between the players increased. A closer look shows, though, that the divergence was driven by a relatively narrow group of products with large price gaps across the e-shops. Median dispersion, which better reflects the typical product in a catalogue, stayed roughly stable. For most of the assortment, then, price relations did not change significantly. This suggests individual players managed prices on their standard assortment relatively consistently, while the widest gaps opened up on selected products where some players promoted aggressively or, conversely, held full price while others discounted.

At the end of the year this is not surprising. Marketing campaigns and discount promotions are usually agreed with suppliers many months in advance, leaving simply no room for a flexible response to the competition. At the same time, the pressure to move seasonal stock pulls each player in a different direction depending on what they stocked and in what quantity. The result is a situation where everyone plays their own game, because seasonal stock has to be sold so the company does not enter the new year with a full warehouse and too much capital tied up.

For most companies it is quite enough to manage their base selling prices against the competition. The best in pricing go further, though, and manage to factor in competitor prices during non-standard events such as clearances or seasonal campaigns. That level of detail usually requires a dedicated pricing department and advanced tools able to handle highly complex processes over the long term.

As McKinsey's analyses show, however, that investment repays companies many times over. Dynamic pricing delivers an average margin increase of 5 to 10%, which for many companies is the difference between surviving and succeeding (McKinsey & Company, n.d.).

Looking at price parity confirms this picture. Most pairs of the e-shops analysed have a very low share of products at an identical price, typically in the single to low double-digit percentages. The one striking exception is the bitiba and zoohit pair, where the degree of price agreement far exceeds every other pair. That agreement most likely reflects shared purchasing or pricing processes within the Zooplus group.

1.4 The psychology of pricing

PetCenter and Super Zoo set prices ending in “X9” in almost 8 out of 10 cases. Profizoo almost never does. How a player rounds its prices reflects its pricing philosophy.

Psychological pricing rests on a simple finding: customers read numbers from left to right, and the first digit has a disproportionate influence on how they perceive a price. A price of CZK 199 is therefore perceived as considerably lower than CZK 200, even though the difference is a single crown. This effect, known in the literature as left-digit bias, has a measurable impact on customer behaviour. A field experiment (Anderson & Simester, 2003) showed that introducing prices ending in 9 increased demand by 35%. Remarkably, a charm price can even beat a lower non-charm price: in that experiment a product at 79 dollars sold in greater numbers than the same product at 74 dollars. A well-set psychological price can therefore raise revenue and margin at the same time, because customers buy more readily at a price that feels advantageous to them, even when it is not the lowest in absolute terms. The same principle applies at higher prices: CZK 990, CZK 1,990 or CZK 4,900 are just as deliberate a psychological instrument as the classic CZK xx.99 (Anderson & Simester, 2003).

The e-shops analysed fall into three groups. PetCenter and Super Zoo work with psychological price setting most systematically: the vast majority of their assortment ends in the digit 9, including a strong showing for xx99. Bitiba, zoohit and Spokojený pes also use charm pricing to a marked degree, but less concentrated. Spokojený pes and Bezedná miska are additionally the only ones to make visible use of the xx90 ending, which suggests more deliberate work with higher price bands. profizoo is a striking exception: most of its prices fall into no psychological pattern at all, which probably reflects working from supplier price lists without active adjustment.

The relevant question for e-shops here is whether their price endings are the result of a deliberate decision or merely a by-product of how purchasing and price list management work. Systematic work with psychological bands can have a measurable impact on conversion without changing the price level itself.

2. Assortment

Every e-shop's assortment is a strategic decision that says more than a list of products: it reflects the price band the shop operates in, how quickly it responds to the market and whether it can offer the customer goods at the moment they want to buy.

2.1 Assortment movement

Super Zoo is the only one narrowing its offering. PetCenter is expanding strategically, zoohit is rotating fast. Catalogue movement reveals more than a product count.

Over the period analysed the e-shops moved in different directions. PetCenter and zoohit expanded their assortment, Spokojený pes stayed practically stable, and Super Zoo was the only one to narrow its catalogue slightly. For the largest e-shop in the segment that is not surprising: consolidating a large catalogue can be a deliberate answer to the need to improve margin or stock turnover rather than a signal of retreat. More interesting than the net change in size is the speed of rotation: zoohit added new products faster than the other players, while its net growth was modest by comparison with that pace. Hundreds of products were added and removed in parallel every week, which points to active portfolio management rather than mere expansion.

PetCenter, moreover, used Christmas not only for pricing but for assortment as well. While additions were minimal in the preceding weeks, the pace picked up sharply in mid-December. Decisions like that are typically planned well in advance and tied to the commercial calendar. For competitors this means that tracking catalogue movements yields a different kind of information than price comparison: it signals where a competitor sees an opportunity and when they were preparing for it.

2.2 Availability

Price is only half the story. The other half is whether the customer can actually get the product at the moment of purchase. The players show markedly different inventory management models.

Profizoo and PetCenter operate conservatively: they keep the vast majority of their assortment in stock and stockouts are rare. When one does happen, though, resolving it takes relatively long. This approach indicates a reliance on large orders and less flexible ordering. Over the season, however, it helped these players maintain higher average availability. Super Zoo sits at the opposite end: stockouts are frequent and affect a large part of the catalogue, but typically last only a single day. This is a high-turnover model where warehouses empty fast and are replenished just as fast. Spokojený pes shows the least favourable profile over this period: frequent stockouts affecting a large part of the assortment and a relatively long wait for replenishment. In a period as particular as the end of the year, though, that can mean shortcomings in inventory management just as easily as beating the sales plan. Only the release of the 2025 results will indicate which of these hypotheses was right.

For e-shops tracking their competition, availability is an active opportunity. When a competitor sells out of a product you both stock, a window opens to capture the customer looking for an alternative. The length of that window differs dramatically between players: at Super Zoo it is hours, at others days or weeks. Anyone with this data in real time can act on it, for instance by targeting advertising or temporarily adjusting a price at exactly the moment a competitor cannot supply.