eroswebmaster

Well in my opinion it was inevitable...too much growth too soon and not enough people actually willing to do all of their biz on the net.
Take for instance e-toys...a few short years ago they were the #1 online toy presence on the net.
Toys 'r' us decide to venture on the net and see if they can grabe the same market share they enjoy in the brick and mortar world...they fail miserably.
So Toy's 'r' Us decide to piggy back with Amazon.com a website that already has a well established internet presence...and e-toys has it's worst year yet and within a few months after Christmas 2000 (spring 2001) they go out of biz.
Point is...people don't trust the net. In the beginning those who wanted to purchase their kid's santa toys on the net used what was available...but a name people knew and trusted teams up with another name that people have learned to trust on the net and those two power houses (amazon and TRU) run them out of the biz.

I think part of the problem stems from the porn and online auction industry.

I've been doing online auctions for a number of years now and it seemed at least once a week there was a story somewhere on the net, in the papers, on t.v. about some major rip off going on at eBay where some asshole took people for some quick pocket change.

Same here with porn...so many people have been burned by dialers, hear the horror stories about cc processors getting hacked etc...I do believe this scared off a large part of our customer base.

I think we will see "real" growth over the next 10 years...nothing like what happened prior to the dot com bust, but a growth that will be stable.

It will take regaining the trust of the average citizen who is so fucking scared as soon as they log on the net.

eros