The market seemed ripe: Three competing brands--Petopia, Pets.com, and Petsmart--were moving into the market sector, and Allpets.com had already established an online following for its specialized content. What it lacked was any IT infrastructure and technical expertise to execute its ideas.

To get up to speed quickly, Allpets.com sought outside help. It outsourced its E-commerce operations to OneSoft Corp. to better market hundreds of products via an online catalog. OneSoft also supports chat boards, order processing, and customer service, so the Los Angeles company can do what it does best--provide content for its online community. With more than 5,000 content pages, Allpets.com has organized visitors and members into an electronic marketplace with pet-related product catalogs, bulletin boards, and chats.

According to chief marketing officer Patti Bodner, Allpets.com wants its in-house staff of four customer-service representatives and three content managers to focus on community building and content delivery. "We really didn't consider doing the IT infrastructure ourselves," Bodner says. "We knew we needed a much larger team than we had. Also, we were looking for speed, and we wanted a vendor who could do the implementation within 60 days." Because of the new competition, "getting up in a short period of time was very important to us," Bodner says.

The new storefront is built on OneSoft's Extensible Markup Language E-commerce software and Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 and was rolled out in August--54 days after the project was launched. Since then, sales have increased by 300%, and the company expects to quadruple its visitor rate by the end of second quarter, president Niloofar Howe says.

A browser interface from OneSoft lets Allpets. com's staff add and edit Web-site content. "Our site is very content-heavy," Bodner says. "We have to keep it very fresh. With this solution, you don't have to be a technician to do that." The interface also supports full product-management capabilities to drive, track, and fulfill sales. The company adds some 300 products to its online catalog every week, and content managers post photos, prices, and product descriptions, as well as multiple weekly specials.

Even though it turned to an outside vendor for a front-end solution, Allpets.com hasn't needed an automated back-end fulfillment system. "We are still able to manage the inventory and sales process," Bodner says. "All the orders that come through are hosted by OneSoft, but we physically handle the delivery ourselves." That could change, however. "We aren't a huge organization, and it's something we'll scale to," she says. All other technical administration, including hardware maintenance and applications management, is handled remotely at OneSoft's location. OneSoft's licenses range from $750,000 to $1 million.

Return to main story, "Rapid-Fire IT Infrastructures."

Illustration by Bob Daly
Photo by Howe and Bodner