I did the exact same thing as you around the same time-frame and with the amount of comments I see on here extolling Amazon I assumed I was an outlier. What made you tail off? I was in the UK and I started noticing that while they had originally been cheaper for most things, they were not and the convenience (or inconvenience if I was out when a package was delivered) didn't really offset that particular delta. I made the exception for about a year after I caught on to that in order to buy second hand books because typically they would retail for 1p with a ~£2.50 postage fee but I stopped that after a while for various reasons (travel, ebooks, relocation).