Comment by zikduruqe
14 hours ago
> This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen.
You must have not lived through the dot com boom. There was almost everything under the sun was being sold under a website that started with an "e". ePets, ePlants, eStamps, eUnderwear, eStocks, eCards, eInvites.....
Those things all worked, and all of those products still exist in one form or another. It was a business question of who would provide it, not a technology question.
The Pets.ai Super Bowl commercial will trigger the burst.
That was certainly a bubble but I don't think pets.com was doing a research experiment.
From what I recall there were some biotech stocks in that era that do fit the bill.
It's funny that the Netherlands seems to still live in the dotcom boom to this day. Want to adopt a pet? verhuisdieren.nl. Want to buy wall art? wall-art.nl. Need cat5 cable? kabelshop.nl. 8/10 times there is a (legit) online store for whatever you need, to the point where one of the local e-commerce giants (Coolblue) buys this type of domain and aliases them to their main site.
This is still the case in the US, too. I don't know why people are talking like it stopped happening. amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com
All these things are still e-tail here, too. We didn't go back to B&M.
I was making commentary about the niche/independent nature of these online retailers (another example: graszaaddirect.nl, specialized in grass seeds), not that e-commerce itself survived the bubble.
Having a dense country where you reach any opposite end in <3 hours is probably a major factor. You don't really care where it's coming from (sometimes it's Germany) as delivery time is the same. That would not be the case for the US, you'd require a web of distributors.
Pretty funny, looks like it works in France too! animaux.fr redirects to a pet adoption service, cable.fr looks like a cable-selling shop. artmural.fr exists but looks like a personal blog from a wall artist, rather than a shop.
These are not the same.
Yeah, this time is different. Really
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
None of those were science experiments or research projects in any way.
Even hardware. eMachines.
flooz
It did make sense though. ePlants could have cornered the online nursery market. That is a valuable market. I think people were just too early. Payment and logistics hasn’t been figured out yet.