Chewy sells pet food and supplies online, competing against Amazon and Walmart in a category with real shipping costs and thin theoretical margins. That makes it a useful benchmark for e-commerce economics generally: if a subscription-heavy, high-repeat-purchase category like pet supplies still runs on these margins and these customer economics, it tells you a lot about what's realistic for a smaller store in a less favorable category.
The figures below come from Chewy's fiscal year 2025 fourth quarter and full-year results, filed with the SEC.
The headline numbers
| Metric | FY2025 | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Net sales | $12.60 billion | Up 6.2% YoY (8.3% on a normalized 52-week basis) |
| Gross margin | 29.8% | Up 60 basis points YoY |
| Active customers | 21.3 million | Up ~4% YoY, net additions of 810,000+ |
| Net sales per active customer (NSPAC) | $591 | Up from $567 in FY2024 (+4% YoY) |
| Autoship sales | $10.5 billion | 83.3% of total net sales |
Gross margin near 30% is the ceiling, not the floor, for physical products
A 29.8% gross margin is Chewy operating at massive scale, with negotiating leverage over suppliers that no small store will ever have. If a small e-commerce business you're evaluating shows gross margins meaningfully above 30%, understand exactly why: it's usually because the product is private-label, has real brand pricing power, or is dropshipped without carrying inventory risk (which trades margin for lower revenue quality). If it's below 20%, ask whether the business is subsidizing growth with unsustainable pricing or absorbing shipping costs it can't pass on. Either extreme changes what the business is actually worth relative to its stated revenue.
Autoship at 83% of sales is the single most important number in this filing
Chewy built its entire moat around subscription reordering (Autoship), and it now represents over 83% of total net sales. This is the e-commerce equivalent of MRR in a SaaS business: it converts a one-off transaction into a predictable, recurring revenue stream and dramatically lowers the marketing spend needed to generate the next sale from an existing customer.
When you're looking at a small e-commerce store, ask directly what percentage of revenue is repeat purchase from existing customers versus new customer acquisition. A store with no subscription or repeat-purchase mechanic is really a customer acquisition machine wearing a store's clothing — its value depends entirely on whether that acquisition engine (usually paid ads) keeps working at the same cost, which is exactly the thing that tends to break right after a change of ownership disrupts institutional knowledge of what's working.
Net sales per active customer of $591 is a wallet-share benchmark, not a target
NSPAC growing from $567 to $591 (+4%) shows Chewy extracting more spend from the same customer base year over year, largely through premiumization (higher-priced products, more categories per customer) rather than pure customer count growth. For a smaller store, the equivalent metric — average annual revenue per customer — tells you whether the business grows by selling more to existing customers or by constantly refilling the top of the funnel with new ones. The former is a much healthier growth pattern to buy into, because it doesn't require ad costs to keep working at today's efficiency indefinitely.
What this means for a business a thousandth Chewy's size
You will not find a $2 million e-commerce store with Chewy's negotiating leverage or margin structure, and it would be a mistake to benchmark against Chewy's 29.8% gross margin as if it were achievable at any scale. What does transfer directly, regardless of size, is the diagnostic: look at repeat-purchase percentage, revenue per customer over time, and gross margin trend, not just trailing-twelve-month revenue and profit. A store growing revenue 20% a year by acquiring new customers at increasing cost, with a flat or declining repeat-purchase rate, is a fundamentally weaker business than one growing 10% a year with rising repeat-purchase revenue, even if the first one's multiple looks more attractive on paper today.
Next: a completely different model — content and affiliate businesses monetize attention rather than transactions. NerdWallet's public filings show what that economics actually looks like once traffic, not inventory, is the constraint.