US competitors on the Internet

PET worldwide has just completed an analysis of data compiled by Internet Retailer magazine listing the top 500 US retail websites. It focused on those stores listed as pet retailers, but also identified a number of other retailers (conventional and web only) selling pet products. These include Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, whose wide range of products includes pet supplies. And in addition to these major successful web merchants, there are thousands of other small merchants around the world whose websites offer pet products with varying degrees of success.
While the magazine’s list consists only of US-based retailers, many of them are selling and shipping internationally, so it is important for you to know more about them and to learn from them by examining their websites to see what they are doing. Amazon, of course, is aggressively expanding internationally and has developed distribution centres in a number of foreign countries to support its international sales efforts.
If your website today is not designed to encourage people to buy from your store, you need to change it so you can display an array of products and offer web-buying as another option to your customers. If you check out the web addresses of the firms in the attached spreadsheet, you can see how these successful retailers make their websites informative and easy to shop on. Visiting these sites should give you lots of ideas as to how you can improve your own website.

Department of Commerce data and the Internet Retailer magazine’s own research indicate that while total US retail sales grew by 35.73 per cent in the decade from 2003 to 2013, e-commerce sales grew by an astounding 287.31 per cent to a total of $225.5 bn. The growth in other countries is probably very similar.
Everyone has heard the story of Amazon’s amazing growth as a web merchant, but there are other, smaller retailers, some barely known, who are capturing dollars that could be spent in conventional retail stores. The big Internet winners are those retailers who have built and are maintaining websites with fast checkout, quick site search, customer reviews and/or product information.

No better example of how changes can positively affect sales can be found than the experience of…