[closetohome]

This is going to sound ridiculous, but ecommerce? Between the .com crash, and a few high-profile failures like Kozmo, Outpost, and Pets.com, there was definitely an era of skepticism about the whole idea. Also keep in mind Amazon didn't show a profit for the first 10-15 (?) years. They had a decent reason for it (reinvesting it all back into the business) but they took a lot of criticism for it.

[Jtsummers]

Was there ever a serious belief that ecommerce was a bubble? At least in the case of Pets.com they were doing things like free shipping and selling products for 1/3rd cost to try and increase their customer base. It was not sustainable. Mail order catalogs (the analog analog to purchasing through online stores) had been a major driving force in commerce for well over a century by the time ecommerce got started. As a model, ecommerce had something well-founded to draw on at least.