At 02:25 PM 6/17/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
>problems. It's easy enough for me to buy a 20-pound sack of cat food
>when I need it. Ditto for fertilizer. Internet startups like Pet.com
>and Garden.com will have a tough row to hoe, I think.
>
>--Tim May
The net provides more options than meatspace for conventional purchases.
20 lbs of cat food is common --but try finding pound-size containers of
goldfish food at bricks & mortars. Or esoteric cat foods. Or books the big
chains don't carry. Or music the local chains have never heard of. If
garden.com has stuff my local home depot doesn't, there will be value to me
in checking their inventory if I'm looking for exotics.
Its like Burpee's mail order, only more convenient to collect and search.
(PS, I wrote this before reading Bill's reference..)
Saves time and petrol. And comparing prices is easier; shopbots will make
this faster if you can trust your bot. The folks who invest in amazon.com
(*other* than those who use the market like a ponzi scheme) must be expecting
that either people will buy from them in the future even if their prices
rise, or that bricks & mortars will drop their prices to compete, or
that a future amazon.com that can only sell exotics will still be profitable.
Precisely because of the convenience/diversity aspects I think this
is reasonable.
Amazon predates the dotcomipofrenzy. As such it faced no competition
at first and was so massive and complete it dominated. Recent dot coms
come into an environment where other people are doing the same with hardly
any differences. In fact, current dotcoms selling only static bits (e.g.,
ebooks, music) come into the 'gnutella' or 'post-napster' environment.
(BTW you can use the altavista text-only search interface, if you
don't like ads, or you can write your own HTML to use their engine.)
