News Article

A review of portals and on-line shopping malls reveals the latest positioning of pet retail sites in the run up to Christmas.

In a follow-up to our survey of pet shop listings in the major search engines back in June, (see our archived article UK Pet Shops - Where Are They?), UKPets has been trawling the Web to see who's where when it comes to UK portals.

In September MSN announced a list of over 40 retailers who were to partner with its new shopping channel. The big names included high street stores such as Marks & Spencer, WH Smith, Comet and Mothercare, as well as the purely on-line retailers which included the pet shop Petspyjamas.

Partnerships such as this tend to mean that the retail partner provides the shopping mall or portal with the content and retail outlet for a specific channel or department behind a 'shopping' link.

The UK portal aimed at women on-line, handbag.com, is operating a similar partnership with Petspyjamas, whilst rivals Petspark, feature as link advertising.

Bigwideworld.com, the recently launched portal for 15-24yr olds has its pets channel sponsored by Petspyjamas and is currently looking to establish advertorial relationships with other major pet retailers.

Of the other major ISP and search engine portals..

BTInternet.com has no partners but carries adlinks to Petspark, Petsathome, Petspyjamas and PetsOnTheBrain.

Freeserve partners with Petspyjamas, and PetPlanet are advertising a range of goods here.

Fish4.co.uk has a form of partnership with PetPlanet, Petspyjamas and pet & animal publishing house - Ringpress Books

AOL (UK), NetscapeOnline (UK) and Compuserve (UK) are carrying no pet retail partners, as is BTClick in its major partnership with the search engine Excite (UK), although this last does currently carry Petspark advertising goods.

The search engines Altavista (UK) Askjeeves (UK), and Yahoo (UK) have little or nothing between them. (Yahoo has Petspyjamas advertising links to an old version of its site.

Nor is there currently anything 'pet-retail' at ntlworld Worldonline, but at LineOne PetPlanet have the audience to themselves.

When it comes to the on-line shopping malls the range of pet shops advertising opens out.

The big TV advertiser Shopsmart.com lists 15 reviewed shops. Anyone can suggest their site providing their site meets Shopsmart requirements for security, delivery, display and navigation.

Shopsmart's reviews include Index (Littlewoods catalogue); Bluepet; Animail (and its partner site PetsPyjamas); Emjay Cartoons (an animal caricature portraitist); Petz (now part of the Petplanet operation); Oka Direct (posh furniture for pets); along with the previously mentioned - Petspark and Pets At Home.

Shopsmart also lists 120 other pet related outlets (not reviewed).

ICshopping, a separation from the ic24 ISP portal offers a partnership scheme (but has no pet partners at the time of writing), and free listings. Free listings are subject to an assessment of the quality of the merchant before acceptance.

ICshopping currently lists four shops we have not yet come across - Cats and Canines; HeadStart Pets; The Pet Emporium and Puchi, alongside Animail & PetsPyjamas, Petbookshop (Ringpress), PetPlanet & Petz.

The newly launched BBC on-line mall Beeb is not the place to go for pet products unless you are feeding and housing wildbirds or looking for water gardening products, all of which are covered by gardening retailers.

Other UK shopping related sites include Shoppingunlimited, a shopping news site which as far as retailers go, just carries listings - these include Neds Net, Cats & Canines and Animail.

There is also the UK Online Shopping Directory where you can add your site to their rated listings for free. No one has taken up any advertising here but their listings include PetsDirect, DataPet (which gets rated top with 3 stars), Petplanet and Petspyjamas.

We have not mentioned the pet portals such as, for dogs - k9netuk and of course our own UKPets Commercial Directory.

There are many opportunities for new on-line pet retailers to improve their presence on the Net without it costing them the earth. Providing your site is securely and efficiently run there is no reason why you should not be listed in many of these high profile shopping areas.

For those not yet on the Net but still hoping to attract on-line pet owners, the UKPets Commercial Directory is probably one of the best places to be this Christmas.

Copyright 2000 Steve O'Malley (UKPets).
This article may be reproduced with permission of the author and correct attribution to the source.