Buy.com's plan was to sell things for less than they cost and make the money back somewhere else. The Southern California store priced computers, software, books and music at or below what it paid for them, and counted on ads and volume to cover the gap. It went public in February 2000, in the last weeks of the dot-com boom. Investors bid the stock to almost three times the offer price on its first day.

The Lowest Price Online

Scott Blum started Buy.com in 1997, after founding a computer storage company. The idea was simple. Shoppers comparing prices online would find Buy.com first, because its prices were the lowest. Sales grew fast, past half a billion dollars a year, but the losses grew with them. Blum stepped back from running the company before the offering. He still owned close to half of it when the stock began to trade.

Thirteen Dollars, Then Pennies

Buy.com priced at $13 a share on February 8, 2000, and traded on Nasdaq as BUYX. The stock touched $35 on day one. Within a year the dot-com crash had pushed it below a dollar. In November 2001 Blum bought the company back for about $23.6 million and took it private. Japan's Rakuten bought Buy.com in 2010 and later renamed it Rakuten.com.

Cover: The Arcades at the Palais-Royal, Louis-Léopold Boilly. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a crowded shopping arcade (online store).