William Reardon’s Blog

From http://www.worldofends.com/:

Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We’re not going to do that again.

These guys are fucking idiots. Fine, we should have known it from their mindless new-economy braying in Cluetrain Manifesto. (Hey, it was cool — they got it. Remember “ “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors“) And sure, going after online pet stores is an easy mark. Remember the sock puppet?! Bwhahahahahaha!

Except that Pets.com was only one site. They didn’t fail because they sold pet toys. The failed because they followed the (in-hindsight) poor advice of “get big fast” at all costs. Never mind losses — profits will follow latter. And with that, they WAY overpaid Chiat Day for the infamous puppet, bought million dollar Superbowl ads, and sold products at a big loss.

Not that they were the only ones.

When I worked at Petsmart.com we pretty much did the same thing. Eventually we figured out that selling 40 pound bags of for half-off with free shipping across the country was a Bad Idea. Eventually Pets.com figured that out as well. It was always suspect that losing money per order wasn’t a good thing. In fact, the running joke was we should have changed our fulfillment backend to route those high-loss orders (e.g., the fore-mentioned bags of dog food) to simply place an order on Pets.com and drive them out of business that way.

One of the differences between Pets.com and Petsmart.com was that we passed on the stupid sock puppet. Hard to say if that was they key difference, but you can last a longer with an extra $25 million in your pocket. Again, hard to say, but that may be why one site resolves to the other, and not the other way round.

But back to selling pet toys. You’d be surprised. It’s actually a very good idea. Notice that after the days of 40 pound bags of dog food (with free shipping) — which you can’t even order online anymore — the focus was switched to things like toys. Heck, do a search and look how many sites out there want to sell you a doggie toy. Pet toys are ridiculously high margin. And they’re not heavy. Basically, they’re ideal for selling online.

(The only thing with thicker margins is pet medication (but then you run into some odd issues, if you’re, say, associated with Vetsmart).)

So maybe it’s weird that after moving and starting a new job, the thing that gets my panties all in bunch to blog about it was an off-hand comment about online pet stores. But how can you trust these idiots to have a clue, let alone a cluetrain, if they can’t even do a modicum of research on their opening statement. Sometimes people should just learn when to shut up.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2004 at 9:49 pm and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.