Pets.com turns up paws and a blow to MotherNature

NEWS Pets.com and MotherNature.com, pet supplies and alternative healthcare products e-tailers respectively, have both gone bust. Pets.com will continue to accept orders until tomorrow. It will then attempt to sell most of its assets and intellectual property. The company announced that 255 of its 320 employees will be made redundant as it winds down operations. Directors of MotherNature.com, which was backed by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, voted yesterday to liquidate the site on the back of mounting losses and poor results. Shareholders will be asked to approve the decision at a special meeting on 30 November. eBay is making 32 people at its Butterfield division redundant. It is claiming the redundancies are because auctions at Butterfield, which it acquired in 1999 for $260m, are increasingly conducted online. Butterfield employs 220 people in total.