Buying books online is a counterexample if anything. Books are a great product to sell online because they're relatively compact, there are a ton of them (way t

Buying books online is a counterexample if anything. Books are a great product to sell online because they're relatively compact, there are a ton of them (way too many to have them all in a single physical bookstore), and two copies of the same new book are generally undifferentiated (unlike, say, produce). At least based on the way Bezos and other early insiders talk about it decades later, Amazon was never intended to be just a bookstore, but they were pretty intentional about starting with books.