They feel the Internet savvy are going to eat their lunch and they are right. I was pretty amazed at what has happened over the last few years. Five years ago, not one of the sites even existed. None of the businesses had a web site to advertise hours, let alone sell their merchandise. There are so many web sites that are attempting e-commerce that I decided to not go into detail about any particular site in this article due to length.
Word of mouth is one of the best barometers of the Internet business, or at least it was.
Every time you send a post to a news group that you use product 'XYZ', you are a 'net hyper' too. They use Internet news groups to plant users who hype various sites and products. The news groups have become big business, whose users are the targeted Internet aristocracy who purchase electronically. In the past, a relatively small group of users purchased over the net, but that number is tripling yearly as more homes are getting on-line. Even my employer, Hewlett-Packard Company, monitors news groups targeted towards our products to see how the consumer views them.