commerce

Wag.com summons ghost of Pets.com

Is it a sign of a bad bubble that we're re-hashing ideas from the first dot-com boom? Or are some ideas right, just too early? The team at Quidsi, which runs Diapers.com and Soap.com and which was bought by Amazon for $540 million this year, believes the latter, and they're launching Wag.com today to prove it.

Wag.com is a bubble 2.0 stab at Pets.com. For those of you too young to remember, Pets.com was a high-flying Internet retailer in 1999 and 2000. It sold pet food and other pet supplies online. Even in the frothy 1999 tech bubble, though, it was a puzzler that a company could make money selling dog food cheaply online and then paying for shipping on top of it.

In fact, Pets.com lost money selling and shipping low-margin pet consumables. So much that the company burned through its funding and folded less than two years after it launched.

Lesson learned, right? Apparently not. Quidsi believes that if they "start with the customer, and work our way back," as Quidsi's Marketing Director Earl Gordon says, they can make an online dog food business work. Because, clearly, nobody else has thought of this before.

The real secret is simply better logistics. There are three Wag.com warehouses, each with the entire inventory selection in them, to reduce shipping distances. Quidsi also uses proven Kiva robots to move items throughout its warehouses and help shop floor workers pack and pick shipments. "We've been doing this for a while," Gordon says. "We can efficiently deliver a a 40-pound bag of dog food."

The other trick to Wag.com, in addition to its ability to leverage Amazon's own marketing muscle, is that, "It's not all about dog food and cat litter." Josh Himwich, who runs commerce solution for Quidsi, says that the company would barely squeak by if it focused on selling commodities, as the Diapers.com brand already appears to do with its eponymous products. "Diapers are loss leaders at every single [retail] store. Not quite for us, but approaching it. If all you do is sell dogfood, you won't stay in business." … Read more

U.K. wireless operators partner on mobile commerce

Three of the top wireless providers in the U.K. are joining forces to speed up the deployment of mobile payments that will allow shoppers to pay for things with their cell phones, according to Reuters.

Thursday the news service reported that Everything Everywhere, the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone and Telefonica's O2 have agreed to create a mobile commerce system that would bring together retailers, banks and advertisers.

For years, there's been talk that consumers would be able to use their phones to buy things using a technology called Near Field Communications, which allows very … Read more

How your social network can protect your credit card

The payment service WePay launched a new online ticket store this week that competes in some ways with EventBrite. It's a logical addition to the growing service. But that's not what's interesting about WePay.

I'm seeing payment services companies like this popping up a bit more than I would have expected, given the serious regulatory and security issues involved in handling money in bulk (see Dwolla and Venmo). Talking about that with WePay founder Rich Aberman led to a fascinating discussion about how the company hopes to keep its fraud rate low enough to stay in … Read more

Amazon vows to cut more affiliates over state taxes

Amazon.com is threatening to cut ties with affiliates in any states that decide to collect sales tax, CEO Jeff Bezos said yesterday.

"We will continue to drop states who pass those affiliate laws, from the affiliate program," Bezos said at the ShopSmart Shopping Summit in New York, according to Reuters.

The company recently cut ties with affiliates in Illinois and has also done so in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Amazon is threatening to do likewise in California.

As on online company, Amazon itself isn't required to collect taxes in states where the company is … Read more

How to avoid sharing personal info online

Honesty is the best policy--unless you're dealing with someone you can't trust.

The sad fact is, you can't trust anyone on the Web. Just ask the millions of people who signed up for Sony's PlayStation Network and who now must protect against possible hack attacks on their bank accounts and other private data lost due the recent data breach. CNET News reporter Erica Ogg explains the company's response to its customers in her Circuit Breaker blog.

Sony claims the credit card information was encrypted and did not include the cards' security codes; the company also … Read more

Groupon: No more ads on Trump's 'Apprentice' site

Daily deals site Groupon owes a chunk of its fast growth to new customers brought in by its unavoidable ads all over the Web and on Facebook--but it doesn't want them appearing on the Web site of "The Apprentice," the reality show hosted by real estate mogul Donald Trump, a political firebrand of late.

In a blog post Thursday, the freewheeling Groupon took a rare serious tone as it explained its decision to ask advertising partner NBC, which airs "The Apprentice," to ensure that its ads not be displayed on the show's site. "… Read more

Amazon misses earnings estimate

Amazon's earnings report for the first quarter of 2011 wasn't pretty, even considering that Wall Street was expecting tepid performance.

Analysts were expecting earnings of $0.61 per share--and Amazon posted $0.44. Net sales were up 38 percent year-over-year to $9.86 billion, but it's the earnings per share that really counts.

That's a sign that spending--for example, on projects like the Cloud Drive media storage service, its own Android app store, the cheaper ad-supported Kindle that was announced earlier this month, and the e-reader's new "library lending" feature--may have been higher … Read more

ChoozOn aggregates the deal aggregators

Consumers are getting overloaded with group, local, and coupon deal sites, not to mention loyalty programs and credit card rewards. The smart consumer has to pay attention to some or all of these deals in order to avoid spending more than necessary. But while it's true that only suckers pay full retail, there are degrees. To be sure you're getting the best possible low-sucker-quotient deals out there, you need to scan a ton of different sources. Or you can hope that a new service, ChoozOn, can do it for you.

Going into limited testing today, ChoozOn aggregates deal … Read more

eBay acquires geolocation service Where

eBay, which has been on quite the mobile start-up acquisition spree of late, made it public today that it has acquired Where, a company that makes location-based mobile applications and operates a network of local ads and deals.

More specifically, Boston-based Where has been purchased by eBay's PayPal division, which plans to make the start-up a part of its suite of services for local businesses while keeping the Where consumer app intact.

"Local commerce companies like Where are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping," noted a PayPal blog post by senior director of global communications … Read more

Obama moves forward with Internet ID plan

The Obama administration said today that it's moving ahead with a plan for broad adoption of Internet IDs despite concerns about identity centralization, and hopes to fund pilot projects next year.

At an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., administration officials downplayed privacy and civil liberties concerns about their proposal, which they said would be led by the private sector and not be required for Americans who use the Internet.

There's "no reliable way to verify identity online" at the moment, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, citing the rising … Read more