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Greentree branches out online

One of the Internet's largest health sites is launching a new health and beauty online store next week and has changed its name.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
2 min read
One of the Internet's largest health sites, Greentree.com, is launching a new health and beauty online store next week and has changed its name.

The new site, called More.com, will sell a wider selection of health and beauty products at discounted prices, the company said in an email to CNET News.com. The Greentree.com store, which competed with sites such as Mothernature.com, will be folded into the More.com site.

Though the site is now available, customers won't be able to buy on it until next week. The company plans for it to go live Tuesday. Products sold on the site will range from soap to flu remedies to homeopathic herbs. Through a partnership with pharmaceutical and heath product giant Bergen Brunswig, More.com will have access to more than 300,000 products.

GreenTree.com launched in May 1998 to sell vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other "wellness" products. The site also includes health and nutrition advice.

The company said it decided to expand because of customer demand for more products outside of the natural category. It's now marketing the site as "a new and better way to shop for your health, beauty, and wellness needs," touting improved technology that makes check out faster and easier.

In June, Greentree also talked about offering prescription medications by this fall. If it makes the move, it will join an already crowded market that includes Drugstore.com, PlanetRX, CVS-owned Soma, and others that are positioning themselves to provide both prescriptions and health information. More.com currently offers an "Ask the doctor" feature and an "A to Z" guide to vitamins.

Founded in November 1997, Greentree.com's investors include Health Business Partners, HealthCare Ventures, Rho Management, Sculley Brothers, Softbank Technology Ventures, and 21st Century Internet Venture Partners.

Market research firm Jupiter Communications expects the entire market for consumer health goods to reach $205.2 billion by 2003.