Marketing Spend by Ecommerce Product Category

e.l.f. Beauty: 21.4% of net sales (FY2025)

e.l.f. Beauty spent 21.4% of net sales on sales and marketing in its most recent fiscal year, the highest ratio in this dataset. That figure has climbed sharply over the company's history, from under 3% of net sales in 2016, tracking the shift from a mass-retail-led distribution model toward a DTC and social-media-driven growth strategy that requires continuous paid acquisition rather than relying on shelf placement alone. High marketing intensity here isn't a sign of inefficiency, e.l.f. also posts one of the highest gross margins in our companion research on category margins, which is exactly what allows a beauty brand to sustain this level of acquisition spend and still post a healthy operating margin.

GoPro: 16.9% of revenue (FY2023)

GoPro spent 16.9% of revenue on sales and marketing in its most recently detailed fiscal disclosure, up from 13.5% just two years earlier. That upward trend matters more than the single-year number: consumer electronics is a category where a specific brand competes against both direct rivals and general commodity alternatives on nearly identical specs, which pushes acquisition costs up over time as differentiation gets harder to communicate through the product alone. This is a useful category to compare against apparel below: both sit in a similar marketing-intensity band, but for different reasons, apparel spends to build brand identity, consumer electronics spends to defend a shrinking differentiation gap.

Wayfair: 11.4% of net revenue (FY2025)

Wayfair spent 11.4% of net revenue on advertising in its most recent fiscal year, down from 12.4% the year before. That decline is worth noting on its own: it came alongside Wayfair reporting its strongest profitability in several years, suggesting the company found real efficiency gains in acquisition rather than simply cutting spend and losing share. Furniture and home goods carry a naturally high average order value, which gives a marketplace like Wayfair more room to spend on acquisition per order than a low-ticket category could sustain, while still keeping that spend to a moderate share of revenue.

Mattel: 9.8% of net sales (FY2025)

Mattel spent $522.0 million on advertising and promotion in its most recent fiscal year, 9.8% of net sales. Toy marketing carries a distinct seasonal shape most categories don't share as sharply: a large share of that spend concentrates into the fourth quarter ahead of the holiday season, when a toy line either becomes a must-have gift or largely misses its annual sales window entirely. That concentration makes toys a useful contrast with a category like pet products below, where demand is steady and predictable year-round rather than compressed into a single seasonal push.

Signet Jewelers: 8.1% of sales (FY2026)

Signet Jewelers spent $555.0 million on advertising in its most recent fiscal year, 8.1% of sales overall, but that figure hides a sharp geographic split: North America advertising ran 8.4% of North America sales, while international advertising ran only 4.6% of international sales. That gap likely reflects Signet's brand maturity and store density differing meaningfully between its home market and newer international operations, a mature, well-known retail brand in its core market can convert on brand recognition alone more often than a newer entrant can.

The North America/international split (8.4% vs 4.6%) is a larger internal variance than most single-category figures in this dataset show.

Nike: approximately 10.1% of revenue (FY2025, calculated)

Nike's demand creation expense (the company's own term for brand and sports marketing spend combined) ran $4,689 million against $46,300 million in total revenue for fiscal 2025, which works out to roughly 10.1% of revenue. This figure isn't stated as a percentage directly in Nike's own disclosures, we calculated it from the two dollar figures the company does report, so treat it as directionally accurate rather than a number Nike itself published as a ratio. That said, the trend behind it is real and independently documented: Nike's demand creation expense fell from 10.9% of sales in 2014 to 7.9% in 2023, a decade-long decline reflecting the company's shift toward direct digital channels that convert more efficiently than the wholesale and traditional-media-driven model it relied on previously.

This percentage is calculated from two separately disclosed dollar figures (demand creation expense and total revenue), not stated directly by Nike as a ratio.

Chewy: 6.5% of net sales (FY2025)

Chewy spent $825 million on advertising and marketing in its most recent fiscal year, 6.5% of net sales, the lowest ratio in this dataset and well inside the company's own stated long-term target range of 6% to 7%. Pet products benefit from a structural advantage most categories on this page don't share: high repeat-purchase frequency (pet food and supplies are consumable, not one-time purchases) means a large share of Chewy's revenue comes from existing customers who required no fresh acquisition spend that period, pulling the blended marketing ratio down even as the company continues acquiring new customers.