Famous e-commerce flops, each fed to Kasspian with the name stripped — 3 of them, averaging 2.3/10. Below: the score, the verdict, and the assumption that killed each one.
Webvan built warehouses for a hundred cities before proving it could win one.
Fatal flawThat razor-thin grocery margins and costly home delivery can support hundreds of millions in custom warehouse infrastructure — built nationwide up front, before a single city has shown the orders and the economics actually work.
The AI doing your shopping was hundreds of people in a Manila call center, clicking buy by hand.
Fatal flawThat a single AI agent could reliably complete checkout on any merchant on the internet — thousands of unique, constantly changing, anti-bot-defended flows — with no integrations and no human stepping in, and that this was already solved at 90-plus percent.
Pets.com went from IPO to liquidation in 268 days.
Fatal flawThat you can sell heavy, low-margin commodity goods below cost, subsidise the shipping, and still reach profitability before the cash spent acquiring each customer runs out.
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