Bargains4Pets.com

One of the very first websites Flippy and I ever started was Bargains4Pets.com.  I think it begain in 1998, which was an unbelievably miraculous time for Internet shoppers.  There were so many Internet startup companies, and they were all just giving things away.  Flippy and I earned about $600 in Petsmart gift certificates from one company, just for signing up new referrals.  We won a DVD player (the first one we owned), from playing an online slot machine game called “Jackpot”.  I think we won a coffee mugs and caps, too.  Stores like Buy.com offered coupons like “$50 off a $50 purchase” to new customers, which honestly meant $50 of free merchandise.  Websites were new to the e-commerce game and often guilty of pricing errors, meaning a $150 watch might be marked as $2 on the website, and you could seriously order it and have it delivered.  It was just insane.  Best of all were all the new pet store websites, though.  Places like Pets.com had new “$50 off $50” and “$20 off $20” every week—you could make a living just going from website to website, shopping with coupons, and paying nothing for merchandise.  The UPS man showed up at our apartment every day, often with all our deliveries on a dolly because he otherwise couldn’t carry them all.  It was fantasyland and it was incredible and it didn’t last very long.  So many Internet startups went under because their promotional efforts were ludicrous—I never understood what they gained by giving away free things, yet they continued to do it until they ran out of money.  We gave away lots of things to charity when all was said and done, yet I still have a stash of pet toys in the garage in a cabinet for emergency purposes.

Bargains4Pets was our effort to list pet store coupons and freebies in one place.  It started as an ugly single page, then it expanded to two pages.  Then I added a pet photo gallery, so people could submit pics of their pets.  It grew substantially and had a dedicated following of people until the good discount coupons become more and more rare.  I redesigned the site to feature automatically-updated banner ads featuring current sales, but the site was never really the same.

As my inbox still fills up with emails announcing sales and discounts and free shipping offers, I decided to turn Bargains4Pets into a blog.  I’ve tried to list all the major online pet retailers, and when they send me information about a new coupon special or an interesting product, I blog about it.  I’ve organized the blog by company, so if you have a particular website you like to shop at, you can browse that category only for current and past specials.  I’m also trying to toss in the occasional product review, and eventually I’ll do some website reviews and price comparisons as well.

So, if you’re interested, please check out Bargains4Pets.com, the pet coupon blog.  I’ve got comments shut off over there because of the high potential for spam, but if you have any questions, feel free to contact me here.  The B4P blog will look pretty familiar—I used the same blog template as I use here, although I’m hoping to change this one in the near future.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/01 at 01:31 AM

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