That was a healthy attitude. Even toward the end of the season the number of visits didn’t go past 2,000 a week, and only a handful of actual sales resulted. The only customers were Luciana Gores; Stuart Lowry, the computer jock turned family man; Michael Wolfe, a West Virginia professor studying Internet commerce, who ordered half a dozen stuffed toy caterpillars; a second academic, in the Midwest, who bought a Ravensburger Snail’s Pace Race game; a Massachusetts woman sending three customizable dolls to her sister (“I’m testing business on the Net—aren’t you lucky?”); and David Fry, the operator of a cybermall nearby who was curious about the White Rabbit, and who bought First Blocks.

Not that the Lilienfelds had completely wasted their time. As of Christmas, a Wall Street Journal story hadn’t appeared, but the Detroit paper and others had gone ahead with articles, and customers poured onto the floor of the real White Rabbit, one even buying the giant polar bear that Bob had been hoping to give his nine-year-old son. The publicity may have brought in some $20,000-$25,000 in extra sales by Bob’s estimates, on which the Lilienfelds may have netted around $2,000—compared to $750 gross and $75 net from Net orders. Bob told me that other merchants on the Web were also reporting a low number of sales. The week before Christmas the number of visits to White Rabbit itself actually declined; many of the prospective customers had been logging on from school or work, and now they had partly emptied the Web along with their dorm rooms and offices.

From a get-rich-quick perspective, then, the virtual White Rabbit had been a zero. Bob and JoAnn were smart marketers with MBAs from a Big Ten business school, and he had a real feel for the Internet, which he had successfully used to expand his consulting business. But even the Lilienfelds could not score right away. Oh, how tantalizing the gargantuan numbers had been—the tens of millions of users said to exist; the million by which the Net was supposed to be growing each month. And yet in the end, when the time came for customers to key in the credit card numbers, the market had vanished like the Cheshire cat. That didn’t mean the Lilienfelds were foolish; just a week or two after Christmas, a wonderful twist happened. The number of visits to the toy store fell off. But sales leapt up. By mid-January White Rabbit was moving an average of a toy a day—not a Kmart volume, but an improvement. Bob explained the difference. Now White Rabbit’s first screen told customers that the store could often get toys not mentioned online.

Encouraged, Lilienfeld added yet another improvement, an 800 number. Now customers could ask their questions the old-fashioned way if they preferred, and they could also order by voice if they didn’t trust the Net with their credit card numbers.

With enough tweaks like this, the virtual toy store might eventually flourish as the number of Web users grew. Just like the characters in many children’s stories, the White Rabbit would keep on changing—adding ever-more-intriguing links to newsgroups and other Web sites, putting in the software to help novice toy shoppers choose just the right ball or train set, figuring out new ways to use the interplay between the Net and the traditional media. Sooner or later, the Netheads would reproduce, and when they went looking for rattles and Lego sets, Bob and JoAnn would be ready for them. The story of White Rabbit Toys, like that of the Internet itself, was far from over.

The Electronic Billboard: Grant’s Flowers

Larry Grant just might be doing better at the moment than the Lilienfelds were. He was selling flowers, and what better merchandise existed for grad students who were alone at the keyboard in a dark office at two o’clock, and who had forgotten their girlfriends’ birthdays?

A newsletter publisher named Rosalind Resnick—a former staff reporter for the Miami Herald and the author of an Internet business guide—was grossing more than $20,000 a year in subscriptions and expecting to do much better in 1995.[[2.4]] And her media-oriented newsletter helped pave the way for a lucrative consulting business. I also knew of a network expert named Gordon Cook who was able to jet to a three-week research expedition in Moscow at his own expense, and who lived satisfactorily on the revenue from The Cook Report on Internet and related activities.[[2.5]]

Grant’s Flowers, however, was more of a typical business. Larry Grant wasn’t a writer. And his work was not as network-related as that of Resnick and Cook; unlike the latter, he hadn’t evolved into a net.personality on some key mailing lists. Instead the word was that Larry Grant just paid his $28 a month to an electronic mall—a collection of stores that shared a common subarea of the Net—and sat back and watched his fax machine spew out orders. Grant might not be Davy Crockett in terms of action, but certainly in terms of fame he was coming along. He had appeared as a success story, after all, on the front page of the New York Times business section.

As I wended my way through the Net to Grant’s Flowers, I passed through an area called Branch Mall. A logo with a tree branch greeted me. I saw listings for enterprises ranging from cosmetic sellers to H & H Logging and Timber Company. Under “Flowers, Gifts, Foods,” I didn’t see just Grant’s listing. I saw White Dove Flower and Gift Shop, Flowers on Lexington, Exotic Flowers of Hawaii, Bonsai Boy of New York, and half a dozen others. Bob Lilienfeld was skeptical about cybermalls, and right now I could see why. With all this competition, could Grant’s make money off the Internet?