Exactly. The early internet was full of promises of taking over retail. None of that worked, at first. Instead the internet was useful for messaging and putting up personal websites. All the responsible people at the time kept whining -- how is it going to make money??
Well, people kept working on it. For years. Business cycles came and went. Eventually the promise worked out.
What? This is nonsense alternate history.
The early Internet had active, useful messaging long before anyone thought it would be useful for "retail". The arrival of commercial spam on Usenet was a shock to everyone. And personal websites came before the dot-com craze.
Timeframe? The early Internet was pretty non-commercial and the commercial services were generally proprietary and/or run by telecoms (Minitel, Prestel). There were a lot of failures in the 99/00 boom, but Amazon was founded in 1994.
> how is it going to make money
Ironically the question was more "how am I going to give you my credit card safely, given that cryptography is a technology subject to US export control".
Online shopping was not a "promise" on which the Internet and its predecessors were built, it was merely one of an uncountable amount of use cases on top of an already useful thing.
In the early days, there were always way more users that wanted to get on the Internet at more times than possible. The scale of the Internet was never capped by interest or potential applications, but by available funding and technology. To me, that sounds like the opposite of cryptocurrency.
$6.00 an hour, outside of business hours, for 300 baud access to CompuServe.
Don't forget The Source as well...man did I ring up some outrageous bills back then ugh.