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Ditto. I always figured buy.com a site that snapped up the domain in the early days and either was just a shopping portal, reseller or affiliate site.

Maybe this was due to poor marketing on Buy.com's part?

I get the same feeling; probably just because 'buy' is just a too generic term.

I imagine that most of Buy.com's traffic is driven by the parent company's affiliate network, Rakuten LinkShare. Buy.com is prominently advertised throughout the backend interface and it's clear that you should be pushing Buy.com as an affiliate.

This finally explains to me why I've been seeing all the graphics for the Buy.com campaigns change to 'Rakuten Buy.com'. I didn't know that Buy.com is a Rakuten brand. Honestly, I didn't know it was a company outside of Rakuten LinkShare. TIL.

I believe the same thing is happening with Play.com too, which has all the Rakuten branding applied.

I used to buy from buy.com often, back during the dot com bubble. They were pretty big then, and they had pretty decent deals. Then mid-2000's Amazon stepped it up with their free shipping and lower prices, and basically buried buy.com.