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Alice.com

MARK McGUIRE ensures you never run out of household products.

Consumer packaged goods like toothpaste, toilet paper, and trash bags are a $1 trillion industry, but less than 1 percent of it is online. After Microsoft purchased our last venture, Jellyfish, my partner Brian Wiegand and I started wondering how we could change that. That’s when we came up with Alice.

Still in beta, alice.com is an online supplier for nearly all of your most common non-perishable goods. We offer free shipping, big-box prices, and over time, the ability to predict when you’re running low on certain items.

Manufacturers use our shared platform as their online store. In exchange, they pay us to warehouse and ship their products. For consumers, Alice automatically applies sales and discounts to each purchase. We also offer personalized coupons and give manufacturers the means to reward you for your loyalty without sharing your personal information. Those ad opportunities are very profitable for us and for the manufacturers.

It’s been difficult for these companies to connect with buyers on the Web. Alice finally provides that platform.

Mark McGuire is the president of Middleton, Wisconsin-based Alice.