Vultures can do very well capitalizing on the difficulties of others. That is the case with Overstock (NASDAQ: OSTK).

The company buys excess inventory from struggling brick and mortar retailers and sells the goods online. By passing savings on to the customer, OSTK is positioned to beat the pants off the competition.

In the wake of the dot-com crash, short sellers pummeled this stock without any regard for its real business prospects. Those prospects have only improved in the time since.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) seemed to be the poster child for the dot-com bubble. The company had a slightly goofy leader and a business plan that seemed to be created out of thin air. During the peak of the net rally, Amazon exploded in value. When the market crashed, so did AMZN.

But behind the hype was a real business that has been slowly flexing its muscles out of those ashes.

The poor economy hasn't helped retail spending, that's for sure. In fact, it could be argued that market saturation has really hurt certain segments of the retail market.

Take Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX). In the past few years, you couldn't walk down some city streets and not run into multiple Starbucks outlets. Today, Starbucks is scrambling to reduce the number of stores.

Online retailers, on the other hand, are in a completely different position. Not only is there still plenty of room for expansion in the online retail space, but e-tailers have key advantages over their brick-and-mortar counterparts.