A digital success story

The Spanish online pet shop Miscota is a spin-off of the consultancy firm Digital Road, which specialises in technology consulting and e-commerce, application development and online marketing for companies who want to become established on the Internet. Based in Mataro, close to Barcelona/Spain, the company was set up at the start of last year by two young entrepreneurs, Albert Costa and Xiaolei Jin. Although it has been operating for barely a year, Miscota can already be regarded as a remarkable success story. “We now ship our products from Mataro to the European countries of France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The recent agreement signed with UPS will allow us to open in the rest of the European markets in 2013. Of course, Spain is still our main sales market, although we tend to reinforce international trade before local trade,” explains Jordi Español, purchasing manager at Miscota. The extent of the distribution channels is reflected in the turnover figures of the young company with its 45 employees. “We managed to close our first year with a global turnover of more than € 1 mio, positioning ourselves as the top website for our industry in Spain, almost without marketing investment.” Variety brings success In the increasingly competitive pet supplies market, Miscota aims to raise its profile among the customers above all with a particularly extensive range. At present the catalogue offers more than 15 000 articles in Spain, and a 7 000 average for each of its websites in the rest of Europe. “We know that in our industry we have strong competitors with a great path and experience of the market, such as Zooplus and Medicanimalia in the online channel and Fressnapf in the offline channel, or Mascoplanet and Tiendanimal in Spain. We understand that the only way to make a difference is to offer the widest product catalogue of all Internet operators,” says Español. Apart from variety, a well-established distribution structure is also highly important to the young entrepreneurs. “Brand agreements and our suppliers allow us to make fast and efficient deliveries that we implement for our clients. Delivery deadlines are shortened this way. We work just-in-time, but we also have at our disposal a warehouse and a stock of our higher turnover products.” The company has plans for the future too. “At present we have traffic of 8 000 people per day in our online shop. Our objective is to reach 16 000 within this quarter…