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Mr. Woodard said the company, which does not disclose actual online sales figures, has, like Petsmart, used the Web to entice people to shop at its stores. For instance, he said the company recently began e-mailing coupons and other promotional items to online customers when new stores open in their area.

As for the results of that initiative, Mr. Woodard said: "You can't put a number on it. But when you look at the fact that customers who shop both online and in the stores spend more with you, and then look at what that means over the lifetime of customer purchases, it can be significant."

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Other pet supply executives who preceded the Internet-only companies said they had benefited from the estimated $100 million that these Web sites poured into marketing before they shuffled off to the pet cemetery. Joe Vollinger, Internet marketing manager for Drs. Foster & Smith, a catalog and Internet pet supply retailer, is one. Three months after Pets.com and Petopia.com evaporated, "All of a sudden our online sales started to climb even faster," Mr. Vollinger said.

Now, he added, online sales are way up at 35 percent of overall sales, and growing.

The company, which is named for the two veterinarians who founded it, expects to sell $156 million of pet supplies — and live fish — this year, primarily on the strength of the 38 million catalogs it will mail.

Both the catalog and the Web site, drsfostersmith.com, are dipping their paws into dangerous waters by selling pet food for the first time, including a new brand bearing the company name. The difference for this dot-com, though, is that it is charging customers for shipping, which can reach $8 for a 40-pound bag of dog food.

In January, the company will also begin testing an auto-replenishment service, in which customers give the site permission to continue sending dog food, vitamins, treats and other supplies regularly. On the issue of dog food in particular, Mr. Vollinger said the company would be watching the program closely.

Forty-pound bags of dog food, Mr. Vollinger pointed out, can waste a lot of space in a warehouse, and can pose difficult quality assurance issues. "We're being realistic about our expectations on this," he said. "We don't want to end up where those other guys ended up."