Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, notes that a spreadsheet works well for a pet store with one marketplace, a few dozen SKUs, and a founder who still knows the stock levels by memory. Nothing about that setup announces the moment it stops working, since the same file keeps opening every morning long after it has quietly become the slowest part of the operation.
He has watched several pet sellers reach that point without noticing it right away, usually because the warning signs show up as small annoyances long before they show up as lost sales.
A price change takes longer to update than to decide
Updating a price used to mean editing one cell and moving on. Once the same product sits on two or three marketplaces, each with its own listing and its own promotional rules, that one decision now means logging into separate seller panels and updating each one by hand, in whatever order the person doing it remembers first.
The delay itself is small, often just a few minutes per channel, but it multiplies across every price change and every product, and it opens a window where the same item is priced differently depending on where a customer happens to be looking, which competitors and price-comparison shoppers notice quickly even when the seller does not, and often before the last panel has even been updated.
Nobody can say how much stock is actually left without checking three tabs
A single spreadsheet column for stock works until the same product is being sold from three places at once, each pulling from the same physical inventory without an automatic way to update the others when a sale happens. Hugo Galvao mentions that usually in these situations, what used to be one number becomes three numbers that are each right for a moment and wrong soon after.
The result shows up as selling a product that is technically out of stock, because two of the three tabs still showed units available when the order came in. It is a small operational gap, but it produces exactly the kind of canceled order that damages a seller’s standing on a marketplace during a week that otherwise looked like a good one.
The same mistake keeps happening, just with a different product each time
A wrong price, a stockout or a missed listing update tends to get treated as a one-off error the first few times it happens, fixed manually and then forgotten. Once it starts happening every few weeks, with a different SKU each time, the pattern stops being about carelessness and starts being about a system that cannot keep up with how many moving pieces the catalog now has.
At Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho treats that repetition as the actual signal to change tools, not the size of the catalog or the revenue number on its own. A business can carry hundreds of SKUs on a well-built system without strain, or struggle with fifty on a spreadsheet that was never meant to track three marketplaces at once.
What replacing the spreadsheet actually solves
The upgrade is rarely about speed for its own sake. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho states that actually, it is about removing the small daily decisions, and the small daily errors that come with them, from a person’s memory and putting them somewhere that updates itself the moment something changes on any channel.
That is what actually frees up time to work on the parts of the business that a spreadsheet was never going to help with in the first place, like which products deserve more attention this quarter or which marketplace is actually worth the investment to expand into next.
