The Facebook of ecommerce — Benedict Evans

Amazon in particular and ecommerce in general is good at search. Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle.

Particular product is bought because it was ranged and placed at eye level.

There is a broad middle of more-or-less commodity, more-or-less undifferentiated choices that depend on distribution and aggregation to be chosen.

While same-day delivery and free returns are eroding much of the rest: we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it. These are things where a lot of the role of a physical shop is curation, recommendation and dem... See more

Etsy, ProductHunt and Pinterest (the latter two both A16z portfolio companies) are building solutions from different directions, and a great many people trying to replicate some form of the boutique model online as well, as I suggested here - to create some kind of specialist curation.