I agree here. I don't remember price being an advantage at all in the 2000s. I remember it being roughly comparable to local stores, and a refrain was often "but at least you don't pay the sales tax!"

Perhaps on certain things like accessories- IE cables that stores normally had huge margins on- you could find generic equivalents for cheaper prices, but not in a general case.

Until maybe 2009 or so, it was always about selection. I spent a good portion of the 2000s using their recommended book list to figure out what I was going to read next, and when I was almost done with my current book, giving my self a ~5 day lead time to order the next, because that's about how long it generally took. It was an easy tradeoff to make, since a few clicks was a lot less effort than going to a store. I was also reading a lot of somewhat specific programming books in those days that weren't carried by most stores.

I agree with your memory. I think they would undersell bestsellers, but Amazon has always been meh on price.

If memory serves it usually wasn’t that dramatic but there were significant outliers where it was 50+% cheaper and I don’t think I ever saw it go significantly the other way so there was a strong inertial tendency to just buy it on Amazon rather than put time into shopping around.

One other neat thing was international availability — Amazon.co.uk had Terry Pratchett books months ahead of the US release, so I could read them at the same time when people on Usenet were.

Yeah a brick and mortar book store could never compete with an online retailer warehouse when it comes to selection.

Eventually book stores started to create their own websites but by then it was too little too late.

Yup -- and some (Borders) made the strategic mistake to literally just use Amazon. When Borders finally broke off the relationship, not only was it too late [1], it was at literally the worst possible time it could have done it, from a business perspective -- given the financial crisis.

Toys R Us did this too and as a result, never built a really solid e-commerce strategy. In fact, when Toys R Us left Amazon in 2006 (after years of litigation to get out of the contract) [2], it had the unenviable position of being behind from a tech perspective in a massive way. Not only that, the experience was considerably worse than it had been under Amazon.

[1]: http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3749336/Bord... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113798030922653260

Borders tried early on - IIRC they had a partnership with IBM in... 1998 - again IIRC it was early 99 that their first public site went up. My recollection was that you had to register an account before you could search, which many in my office laughed out loud about. They (Borders) were a company down the street from us (a web company) and Borders had gone with IBM instead of us, so there was some bad blood there (but it had started before I got there I think).

Knew a couple other folks at Borders, and visited them at work a couple of times. Borders was just clueless at tech, and BN was starting to take a lead in tech, which helped them with sales a lot more.