Chewy, Inc. (NYSE:CHWY) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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But candidly when viewed from the lens of LTV to CAC, LTV has also continued to go up. So our ratios have actually very nicely maintained and an ROI standpoint we’re spending, where we believe we should be spending from a marginal point of view. The reason CAC continues to go up right now and will remain high up until the macro recovery in my opinion is, A, there is a shallower pool of customers declaring intent. So clearly, the competition for the same customer is higher and that drives up the bid rate. And then, B, recall that social used to be a pretty active channel a few years ago and the loss of targeting has actually led to a loss of yield that drives up CAC in the social channels. So it’s a combination of those two, but LTV is going up appropriately.

Seth Basham: That’s helpful. And just as a follow-up, is LTV going up appropriately for the most recent cohort customers too? And if not, is that LTV direct CAC ratio is weakening for the most recent cohorts? Are you going to adjust where you’re spending – find new customers?

Sumit Singh: We always do, actually. So the cumulative contribution profit is what we go after. And we’re always trying to sort of find that tangential point where the steps over to the fact where – to the point where the campaign actually become negative returning. so far the team has been very diligent and we’ve actually experimented with trying to spend money to pick up discretionary customers and it’s just not a high ROI effort right now. So we’re not really going after that, because we would rather maintain the quality that drives the repeat purchase, otherwise you never really get out of this spiral of churn and spending money to keep that customer per se. And so we are – our engines, our performance marketing teams appropriately adjust to find the best customer, the best return across the best channel. And that is done on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, not on a quarterly basis. We’re fairly responsive.

Seth Basham: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Basham. Our next question is from Lee Horowitz with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed.

Lee Horowitz: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Two if I could, when you think about the consistently challenged pet household growth environment, do you think that you need pet household growth to turn more meaningfully positive in order to return Chewy back to more meaningfully positive user growth in the medium-term? And then maybe digging in again through these recently acquired cohorts in the platform and some of the caution you are seeing amongst these users, can you talk a bit more specifically on what you maybe you’re seeing from these cohorts in terms of repeat purchase rate, Autoship penetration and basket size, relative to the core, anything that these users are flagging to you as way this degree modest caution that leads you to believe, maybe this is just structurally higher churn than your existing base? Thanks so much.

Sumit Singh: Sure. Sure. On the first question of do we need them to turn more meaningfully positive? Well, there is certainly a factor. Household penetration is a factor and that – it is an important input into the model. But it’s not the – it’s not what we are solely dependent on. In fact, for – our teams are progressing multiple features across chewy.com, which we expect and this is all kind of in the back half, which will continue – some of this will continue into next year per se. Our team is progressing multiple features across chewy.com, which we expect – where we will expect to credibly reduce friction and lower conversion barriers in areas of – for example account creation and improve both sign-up rate as well as customer retention, right.

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