PetsUnited LLC has gone from one web site 18 months ago to seven and is reaching into new markets, with plans to add up to five more URLs by year’s end, says CEO Alex Tabibi.
The company spent 2006 absorbing its acquisition of Country Supply, which became PetSupplies.com, and rolling out new URLs. This year’s marketing efforts include adding related markets and pushing toward “web 2.0,” the label attached to today’s more interactive Internet, a marketplace that includes social networking, such as blogs and online communities like MySpace.
PetsUnited wants to build its own community on the web. “We’re going to combine content, including video, and take the sites we built and create a community across them,” Tabibi says.
PetsUnited, No. 238 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, ended 2006 with several pet-oriented sites, including 1800PetSupplies.com and Dog, Cat, Horse, Ferret, Bird and Fish.com.
The company expects to launch Garden.com in the first quarter of 2007 and Farm.com by December, Tabibi says.
PetsUnited will implement an enhanced search function with the February rollout of technology from FAST. There will be up to 10,000 articles from pet, livestock and plant-related publications posted on the company site that the new application can search and display. The new search function will locate information in videos and blogs as well, Tabibi says.
“On Dog.com, for example, customers can buy products, read reviews and blogs, see videos and discuss them all in the forums,” says Tabibi, who is speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 4-7 in San Jose, in a June 5 session titled “Mining the Big Portals Sites for Rich Data Nuggets.” “They can rank and rate their favorite things and create favorite pages for themselves and their pets.”
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