Drugstore.com, Alice.com and other online retailers of everyday essentials, a new challenger with a short, pretty dotcom name just hit the Web. The founders of Diapers.com this morning formally launched Soap.com, a new ecommerce site that enables people to buy household necessities, skin and hair care products and whatnot at competitive prices.
We reported that the site was due for launch last month, when the co-founders of Quidsi, parent company to Diapers.com – on track for $300 million in revenues this year – and Soap.com Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara gave us an update on their plans.
Quidsi launches Soap.com today with more than 25,000 products from more than 900 brands on its virtual shelves, across a wide range of health, beauty, personal care, and household categories. The company has ambitious plans to eventually offer more than 40,000 products by the end of 2010 and more than 100,000 by the end of 2011.
To put this in context, the company adds, the average offline drugstore has just 10,000 items.
Soap.com will leverage Diapers.com’s back-end logistics to ensure that products are delivered the next day for two-thirds of the country and within two days for the rest.
Here’s an inside look at said back-end logistics system – it’s quite impressive:
Update – launch video: