Skip to main content

Amazon’s Quidsi launches online pet store, Wag.com

wag.com-quidsi-amazon
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Amazon.com subsidiary Quidsi announced today the launch of Wag.com, an e-commerce site just for pets. Quidsi is also the company behind Diapers.com, Soap.com and BeautyBar.com.

This new site will launch with an inventory of about 10,000 products (the same as a standard brick and mortar pet store), and the company reportedly plans to eventually offer about 25,000 products. Any purchase over $49 will receive free shipping, with 1- to 2-day delivery guaranteed.

If all of this feels eerily familiar, that’s because it is. A little more than a decade ago, Pets.com — which offered a nearly-identical service to Wag.com — is still considered a poster child of the dot-com bubble. The company became famous for its sock puppet mascot, which was used in television commercials. But despite the catchy advertising, the company blew through its coffers of cash in only two years time, at least partially because it shipped giant bags of dog food and cat litter for free — an expensive offering no matter how you cut it.

Some say that the launch of Wag.com is only the latest sign that we’re experiencing another bubble in the technology market. Not surprisingly, however, Quidsi disagrees.

“We’ve been doing this for a while,” Quidsi Marketing Director Earl Gordon tells CNet. “We can efficiently deliver a a 40-pound bag of dog food.”

The company, which Amazon purchased for $550 million last year, is known for its fine-tuned logistics, and its use of advanced warehouse technology, like the Kiva robots, to keep its operational costs to a minimum.

Aside from its notorious cost-cutting measures, Quidsi co-founder Marc Lore tells The New York Times that, while shipping large, bulky items at zero cost to the customer “has always been expensive and it still is,” it also helps create customers that will keep spending money with the company. “[Free shipping] pays out much more in the long run than the transient connection you may acquire when you make a ton of money by delivering one product to one customer once,” he said.

Watch a video about Quidsi’s Diapers.com factory to see how their high-tech factory works:

Topics
Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
The 5 best websites like Craigslist in 2024

For years, Craigslist has been the go-to website for scoring a free sofa or finding an apartment. But there are plenty of other alternatives to Craigslist that do an equally fine job, oftentimes with a more attractive interface and fewer spam postings. The 5 best Craigslist alternatives are:

Facebook Marketplace
OfferUp
Locanto
Mercari
Recycler

Read more
How to stop spam emails in Outlook, Gmail, and more
A person sitting on the grass and taking notes at a laptop.

Spam and other unwanted emails are a nuisance, and it can seem like keeping them away from your inbox is a losing battle. But while you won't be able to prevent every piece of spam from landing in your inbox, it is possible to significantly reduce the number of messages that show up.

In this guide, we'll show you how to use filters, blocking, and spam reporting features to help stop spam from invading your inbox. We'll also go over a few more tips on how to reduce unwanted messages overall.
How to stop spam in Gmail
If you use Gmail, the most popular email client, you will eventually start getting spam. Here are our two favorite ways to deal with it.
Block spam in Gmail

Read more
How to add a signature in Gmail on desktop and mobile
how to file for stimulus

Email signatures are a great way to automatically include your contact information to your email correspondence. If you'd like to add a signature to your emails in Gmail, it's easy enough to add one. You'll just need to go through your Gmail settings to do it.

In this guide, we'll show you how to add a signature in Gmail whether you're using the desktop website version of Gmail or its mobile app.
How to add a signature on your desktop
Step 1: Launch your favorite browser and log into your Gmail account as you normally would.

Read more