A new start-up wants you to never run out of household items like toothpaste, detergent and, yes, toilet paper. Alice.com looks like your average online retailer and, for the consumer, functions just like one too. But things are a lot more interesting than you would normally expect, behind the scene.

“Brian and I left Microsoft just over a year ago after they acquired our last start-up Jellyfish.com. At the time, we set out to answer one question: ‘Why doesn’t anyone buy toilet paper online?’ It sounds kind of silly—it did to me anyway—but that question was a metaphor for the larger challenge we wanted to tackle. Namely, could we figure out a way to get the mainstream consumer to buy Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)—non-perishable stuff like toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry detergent, and diapers—on the Internet? ” Alice.com Co-founder Mark McGuire asks.

Well, they might. Alice.com works on a very different business model than your traditional retailer, in that it doesn't take any markup on the products it sells and it doesn't even charge for shipping. It makes money from the consumer packaged good (CPG) manufacturers, by offering them a direct link to the consumer and taking care of the shipping, but also by providing them with data about consumer purchasing behavior. It's great for the manufacturers, who have seen increasing competition from the big retailers' own brands.

And it's great for the consumers too, as it means they get cheaper products, less trips to the shops, and they don't even have to remember buying something when they've run out of it, as the site has a system that keeps track of all their purchases and alerts them when it thinks they are about to run out of a product.