Buy.com led the Cyber Monday charge this year, having the best sales day in its history. While predictions for this year's retail holiday season have been pretty dire, it would seem more holiday gift buyers have the "shop in your shorts" mentality, taking advantage of free shipping and no sales tax to ramp up online holiday retail sales.

Buy.com, which competes with larger retailer Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), has been around for over 10 years and features retailer categories just as diverse as its larger competitor. Some of the folks I've talked to say that, for the first time, they are doing the majority of their shopping online this year, mostly due to the deals they receive, the lack of local sales tax and with the majority of goods being offered with free shipping.

In other words, we're all value shoppers this holiday season. Once the Black Friday novelty wore off last weekend and prices returned to normal, shoppers kept lining up at the virtual doors of online merchants and will continue to do so until the end of the Christmas holiday. When one of the largest online retailers has its best sales day in its history despite the bleakest economy in its history, perhaps that is a signal of a paradigm shift. For many of us, it happened a long time ago. For the others, the gravy train of online shopping is becoming a clearer picture every day.

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY)'s growth decline started nearly two years ago. Now, as reported by The New York Times, the final spike has been driven into the very heart of what eBay once was. In a Johnny-come-lately effort to revive a growth curve which eBay's top brass blindly shackled ten years before its due, the company is shifting its focus from the tried and true, mom-n-pop auction strategy to a business model of "stock the shelves with all the discount crap that you can, and don't charge for the benefit."

It's okay though, anyone who can achieve eBay's new "diamond power-sellers status" will be qualified for the same discount perks that eBay has negotiated with Buy.com. It's just too bad that the eBay stuffed shirts never figured out that eBay's sellers were its buyers also.

The discount store concept might have worked for eBay, if it had been tried as a parallel effort, while leaving the original working eBay alone. But of course, they had to tinker with the formula. I tried to warn you. Honestly.

If you got out in time, I applaud you.

Gary Sattler is a freelance blogger. He holds no position in eBay. His wife does still operate an active eBay store.

Amazon.com (NYSE:AMZN)still gets all the headlines for being the Internet's leading online-only retailer, but there are plenty of other games in town. How well are they doing, though? Buy.com has been around since early 1998 and sells over two million products to an established base of 10 million regular customers. Is that enough for the company? Founded by an former Ingram Micro executive (Scott Blum), Buy.com apparently is still going strong, although I doubt it will ever match Amazon.com from just about every angle.

Buy.com's gross profit of $60 million in 2006 seems like a pittance compared to other internet companies, but for a retailer that sits in the shadow of Amazon.com every day and generally seems content on being a market follower instead of leader, 2006's profit number seems pretty decent.

Buy.com's President and CEO, Neel Grover, continues to say that Buy.com's focus in the past and now has not changed: it wants to sell brand names at commodity prices. Interestingly, that service is not mentioned in that statement. But here is the twist: Buy.com uses a virtual model -- it has no real inventory.

Fleshed out during Blum's Ingram days, Buy.com has connections to a few dozen distributors who store and ship orders for Buy.com customers. In contrast, Amazon.com does have physical locations and inventory and handles its own inventory. Is that how it provides superior customer service, or is that a weakness of online retailing? Buy.com would say the latter, most likely. Maybe, just maybe, Buy.com's "no inventory" model will soon become a competitive advantage.

I live fairly close to Buy.com's headquarters. Back in the internet heyday, the company went public and raised gobs of money. But when the dot-com nuclear winter hit, the stock cratered. The founder of the company, Scott Blum, bought it for peanuts.

Since then, Buy.com has tried to go public – but there's been much resistance. Why? First of all, the company's business model is not really sexy anymore (don't most major retailers have ecommerce sites?). Oh, and the company has struggled to achieve profitability.

Well, things are starting to change. According to a recent press release, Buy.com was able to churn out an $8.8 million net profit on net sales of $162 million (for Q4). Even in the slow Q1, the company posted net income of $722,000.

For the past year, Buy.com has had a filing with the SEC to go public. But, that has been withdrawn.

Actually, the company was able to snag a private equity investor -- Clearlake Capital Group – that bought a 9% stake.

Having such a backer should be a big help. The company is likely to undergo some changes and get more streamlined.

It may not necessarily result in another IPO – but Buy.com could ultimately be a fit for bigger ecommerce players like Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) or even traditional retailers.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Buy.com, the large online retailer that is seemingly in a constant fight with Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) to sell just a little bit of everything under the sun, has been the most aggressive supporter I've seen yet for Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google Checkout payment system. Evidence is to the right of these words -- Buy.com is offering $20 savings on a $50 purchase -- if you use Google Checkout to complete the purchase.

With many items at Buy.com shipping for free, this echoes the strategy Amazon.com has in place. Amazon.com ships everything for free if the combined price is over $25 (no including purchases from third-party stores).

I have to wonder who else may be supporting Google Checkout insofar as larger online retailers. The payment system, once you've read how it works, is actually quite nice, but it is no means a "first mover" in this space. That accolade belongs to eBay Inc.'s (NASDAQ:EBAY) PayPal division.

Although Google's clout may make Google Checkout survive and even become more popular, it will most likely be slow going in the short-term. If Google can convince more high-profile online websites to support and display its payment system, that day may come sooner rather than later.

After doing some research recently on the newer Google Checkout payment system offered by the world's largest search company (but wanting to be more, of course), a recent ad showed up in my email from buy.com, a company I have done business with many times. Amazon.com is a great place to shop, but I'll search buy.com on occasion to find a rare item I just can't find anywhere else.

Although Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been pushing out the Google Checkout system for a few months now, the highest-profile co-branding campaign I have seen is with Buy.com -- see the ad image here?

Ever since eBay locked out the use of Google Checkout on its site (no doubt to rid competition for eBay's PayPal system), Google Checkout has allied itself with many other web properties, like Starbucks.com and Ace Hardware. While those are large names, they can't hold a retail candle to Amazon.com in the area of Internet retail sales.

My point, you may ask?

Maybe it's time for Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) to offer Google Checkout as a payment selection. It's hard to imagine many Internet-savvy customers these days who have not purchased anything from Amazon.com -- and therefore have their payment information stored at the online retailer. But giving yet another choice to consumers -- especially a new one -- might just be a good idea.

After all, marrying the world's largest online retailer with the world's largest search company is probably not a bad thing for either. Some think Google Checkout is a huge threat to Amazon -- I say, let them work together. It's all about serving consumers and increasing sales, isn't it?

This is a battle I've watched since 1999. Buy.com, founded by former Ingram Micro executive Scott Blum, has forged a rather low-key but extremely important online retail war with leader Amazon.com. Amazon.com is revered for its selection, it's intuitiveness in navigation, its low prices, free shipping on most items, and the deft at which it handles customer concerns, and they way it proactively addresses customer service.

In fact intangibles like customer service are a main reason why Amazon.com is where they are, in my opinion. I've not once had a bad customer service interaction with the company, and I do I fair amount of shopping there every month in all categories.

Buy.com also has its moxy together. It has matched Amazon's ubiquitous "free shipping" mantra on most items and has a fairly intuitive shopping process as well. The selection Buy.com has is also very impressive, although its search engine leaves quite a bit to be desired. With Blum's claim of Buy.com offering 10% of Amazon's price on all books this was a pretty meaty marketing promotion in my book (no pun intended). What have the results been? SeekingAlpha put that to the test and the results were, well, interesting.

Although statistical correlations can almost never be made against single marketing promotions where there are so many uncontrollable variables in the mix -- and especially online retail -- Buy.com's "10% off Amazon book prices" promotion certainly has not hurt the online retailer. But has it helped?

My guess here is that Buy.com's goal here was to lure new or old customers to Buy.com with lower book prices and hook them into low prices on all the other categories of goods offered at Buy.com. That's a great strategy, and one that, hopefully, has worked.

Slow morning so far at Bloggingstocks.com but I am bubbling over with story and investment ideas. It is very frustrating to have to recognize your mortal limits on a regular basis. So here is food for thought this morning...

Why in the world are eBay competitors not joining forces to challenge the quasi-monopoly? Why cant Buy.com merge with Overstock.com and embrace Ebid.net, uBid.com, and Bidz.com?

Here are the top twenty sites according to http://auctions.nettop20.com/. Why is that Yahoo Auctions and MSN Auctions or Amazon.com have not helped to facilitate this? The aggregation of these sites might form a true competitor for eBay. What is preventing this? None of them by themselves has shown any real challenge to eBay, but as a group, they might.

Consider this: one set of managers, and accounting departments instead of 20! One central advertising station, cost-cutting gone wild, and the scale of a real web powerhouse! The new entity could use Google Check-out (TM) or it could be Google Check-out!

What is stopping this from happening? Is it big egos? Is it divergent company philosophy? Are you listening Barry Diller? You could do this! Are you listening Ruppert Murdock? Maybe they already have something in the works.

Since nobody has done this, maybe it should be Google. But if they do it, it should be as a wholly-owned subsidiary. A different company. A new ticker symbol. Oh, if I only had the time.

In fact, I think I might do it myself. Why not? I do not see anybody else doing it and I sense a world of demand. Alas, I am just a mere mortal. I sometimes have trouble just collecting my thoughts. I don't know about collecting companies. So maybe it should be a real Titan of Industry.

Any of you Titans out there reading this? Share your thoughts!

Disclosure: I hold no position, long or short, in any of the companies mentioned.

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Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the vice president for Design and Research of an Architecture & Planning firm.

What happened in August? Say it isn't so -- both Amazon.com and eBay.com outperformed product-king Google during August. Although the line between e-commerce companies and new media companies is blurring quite a bit, there are still perceptions of head-to-head competition. Amazon.com, for example, is a retailer of everything, it seems. Google is an information provider that's moved into all kinds of areas lately, like payment processing. eBay is an online flea market/auction house, one that facilitiates billions of transactions every month probably.

eBay shares rose 17% in August, even with a seller revolt that is underway as we speak. This revolt stemmed from a recent eBay decision to spike fees to a level that is making some larger eBay sellers fret with disgust. With eBay owning online payment processor PayPal, the online auction giant gets to siphon all kinds of fees into its coffers, from a listing fee to a final value fee to a transaction cost fee.

Fees are everywhere on eBay these days, although Wall Street has not taken notice of these potential powder kegs. If even 2% of sellers stop selling, eBay's revenue could take a downturn. I doubt this will happen. Why? There is hardly an alternative for online auctions, yet.

On the flip side the market really gave no love to Google in August, although several huge announcements were made from the web search leader. Products like Google Apps and the strange-but-predictable Google-eBay advertising partnership were inline with what Google announcements usually are: movers and shakers. But, Google shares barely pushed 1% gains in August. What gives? What do you think?

Daily Tech is report that Google CheckOut is being used by some well-known internet retails like Buy.com, Starbucks (SBUX), and Sports Authority. PayPal's parent, eBay, as Melly points out, is not budging.

Personally, and speaking as someone who jumps on every new Google thingy and doodad that I hear of, can't see bothering to sign up for GoogleCheckOut until I have to. I do a lot of shopping online, and most of it seems to end up being through Amazon one way or another, and they already have my information. Unlike, say, GoogleMaps -- which blows Yahoo and Mapquest out of the water -- GCO seems like just another way of doing the same thing I'm doing too much of anyhow. I don't need another shopping cart, I need a way to prevent myself from the check out impulse. Google UnCheckOut, that's what I need.