Eye On the Web: Dog Owners Beware!

CreativePro Staff

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Remember the early days of electronic commerce? When you would see TV commercials that showed a group of people sitting around debating the safety of transmitting your credit card number over the Internet? You might not remember, as those days seemed to pass in the time it takes to click a hyperlink and Americans everywhere are now smattering their credit information around the Web with abandon. But with the rise of e-commerce came the rise of a phenomena few may have expected: instead of one Web site devoted to any given commerce area, we now have four or five. I like to call this the me-too-ism of the Web.
Let’s take pet sites for instance. Not the mycatbessie.com sites of the early Web, but the current bumper crop of pet commerce sites. You know, the ones that are advertised on television by sock puppets. I recently took a little cyber-stroll to check out the most popular (read: most heavily advertised) of these sites. Now you might think that each of them would, wisely, be quite different from the next, so that prospective customers would have something to distinguish them by. You’d be wrong.
I pointed my browser first to pets.com, the site where that ubiquitous sock puppet lives. This site has the most clever tag line of the lot, "because pets can’t drive," and unlike the other sites I later browsed, has a category specifically for ferret-owners. The differences pretty much end there. All of the sites have a list of feature stories; pets.com’s selection includes such gems as "Help for Overweight Cats," and "Does Your Dog Growl to Protect His Food?" This site also has a Pet of the Day, a Pet’s Law section, and a section where customers can ask a vet about their thornier pet issues. Of course, there is ample evidence of the site’s reason for existence, to sell pet supplies.
The next site I visited, petopia.com, is associated with the PETCO chain of warehouse-style pet supply stores. Like the other sites, this one has categories for dogs, birds, cats, fish, reptiles, and small pets (I’m thinking things like mice count as small pets). Besides a whole bunch of Sanrio-style illustrations, this site hosts a pet jokes discussion area, an article on cats and kids living together, an interview with an animal trainer, and, by far the most useful-seeming feature on any of these sites, a pet services finder with listing for things like groomers and vets. Of course, since PETCO itself does things like pet grooming and inoculation, it’s unclear what kinds of services one might find on its site.
Another site affiliated with actual real-world retail stores is petsmart.com. Again, this site is set up pretty much like all the others, with areas for shopping, asking questions of various pet experts, and a slew of such titillating story topics as "Are Pets Lucky?" and "How to Understand Your Dog and Help Him Understand You." Again, with the exception of the basic graphic elements, this site looks pretty much the same as all the other pet sites I looked at.
Then there is petstore.com, a San Francisco Bay Area-based startup that is the only one of the four I looked at not traded publicly. This site is a bit of a bare-bones operation, as reflected by the tag line "Shop for Your Pet." Feature stories on this site include an account of Frasier’s dog’s book tour, tips for flying with your pets, and pet zodiacs. As the clear underdog (heh) in the fight for the pet-owner market, it is unclear why the folks at petstore.com thought emulating the big sites would be a good idea. With fewer resources than the big dogs, what makes this site think they can be the one to survive?
And that’s just the thing. Realistically, only one of these sites can survive. Of course I’m no expert in economics, so I’ll say maybe two can survive. Everything needs a competitor, after all. McDonald’s has Burger King, Coke has Pepsi, maybe Pets.com can have Petopia.com. Who knows? The point is, no one is well served when everything on the Web starts trying to be like everything else on the Web. This is a new medium, full of bright promise, rife with opportunity for experimentation. Anybody with an idea can get on the Web these days, but we all have to do our part to make sure those ideas are good ideas, and not the same idea someone else had last year. If we’re not careful, this new innovative, exciting medium we call the Web will end up just one more bastion of complete mediocrity. There are enough ideas to go around, we just have to think them up.
Andrea Dudrow is a writer living in sunny San Francisco. She has been covering the Web and Web design for the past four years and has contributed to Macworld, MacWEEK, eMediaweekly, Adobe.com, Adobe magazine, Publish, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She also writes about arts and culture, and spends a great deal of time fantasizing about the broadband future.