Although much research has been conducted to reduce the thickness of PET bottles in order to save manufacturing costs, the challenge remains of guaranteeing mechanical strength for top-loaded thin PET bottles. The current study investigates the large deformation characteristics of a circle shaped PET bottle and a square shaped PET bottle when compressively loaded using FEA. The arc length method is used in the nonlinear FEA to understand the buckling phenomenon. For PET bottles with the same capacity, the circle shaped bottle shows more resistance to buckling and compression loading than the square shaped bottle.