Platforms Featured Southeast Asia

Filipinos’ love for pets account to 53% of SEA’s online searches for pets

by Teddy Cambosa

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November 17, 2021

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Manila, Philippines – With pets being a new way for people to cope up during long lockdowns, the love for furry friends by Filipinos accounts for 53% of the total online searches related to pets in the Southeast Asian region, accounting to 7m Google searches and the highest in the region, new data from e-commerce aggregator iPrice shows.

In 2021, Google searches for pets will total roughly 12.9 million, up 88 percent from the same period in 2019.

Filipinos’ searches for pets from January to September 2021 have increased by 118% compared to the same time period in 2019. This makes it the highest increase in the region, along with Malaysians.

On other markets, Vietnam has the lowest increase (34%) despite their abundant Google searches for pets, rising only by over a third of 2019 numbers this year. Meanwhile, Singapore’s interest for pets was highest in 2020, and slightly decreased by 7% in 2021.

Data regarding demand for pet supplies showed that the Google impressions on their category for pet supplies have increased by 158% across all their six platforms in Southeast Asia. The period of January to October 2021 was compared with the same period of the previous year.

Impressions based from iPrice Philippines’ pet supplies database have more than doubled, from over 400k the previous year to over a million this year. The rise in pet adoptions and purchases is evidently good for pet stores.

Meanwhile, iPrice’s platform in Thailand leads with the highest increase of impressions on pet supplies, around 4.5x more than the previous year; followed by their Malaysia platform, increasing by nearly 3.5x more. Meanwhile, iPrice’s Vietnam platform comes in third, with a 220% increase in impressions on pet supplies. It more than tripled from last year’s numbers.

And in regards to whether cats or dogs are the most-beloved pets, data showed that Southeast Asians’ interest in dogs is over 5x more than their interest in cats. The same comparison is consistently seen in the Philippines; Filipinos searches for dogs, whether for sale or adoption, are 460% more than their searches for cats.