Pet and vitamin sites join dotcom failures

Vitamins, dog food and kitty litter have joined the list of commodities which pioneering dotcom entrepreneurs have failed to convince the public to buy online in profitable quantities.

Both Pets.com, 30 per cent owned by Amazon.com, and mothernature.com, a Massachusetts-based vitamin retailer, announced yesterday that they would wind down operations, later today in the former's case and over the coming weeks for the latter.

Pets.com, which is based in San Francisco and sells pet food and supplies, said it was laying off about 255 of its 320 employees and would be selling most of its assets, including the rights to its sock puppet mascot.

The mascot is a kind of canine Raggedy Ann equivalent of the virtual high-maintenance Miss Boo, the avatar host of famous fashion failure website, Boo.com, which died in May only to be resurrected in significantly altered form last month.

Pets.com's sock puppet has appeared on numerous US morning chat shows and enjoys strong brand recognition. Like Miss Boo, it may prove to be the only long-term survivor of the collapse.

The company had racked up losses of $147m by this September and said it wouldn't be able to raise the extra cash it needed to continue next year after being turned down by more than 50 potential sources of extra funding. This is despite having over 570,000 customers and advertising on TV during the Super Bowl, the highest-profile advertising in the US that money can buy.

Mothernature.com also admitted it was quitting before it ran out of cash completely, conceding that the business could not be financed as a going concern.

Jule Wainwright, the company's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement: "It is well known that this is a very, very difficult environment for business-to-consumer (B2C) internet companies. With no better offers and avenues effectively exhausted, we felt that the best option was an orderly wind-down with the objective to try to return something back to the shareholders."

Analysts agreed, saying that investors were currently shunning B2C websites.

In the past few weeks, five other major B2C sites have shut up servers. Furniture.com, TheMan.com, Beautyjungle.com, Eve.com and BigWords.com have either closed or laid off staff.