Buy.com Pushes Another IPO

Here we go again. Buy.com, an e-tailing pioneer that did a respectable job of nipping at Amazon.com's(AMZN Quote) heels before disappearing into e-tail oblivion, filed once again for -- wait for it -- an initial public offering.

You may recall that Buy.com went public five years ago, listed at $27 and fell to less than $1. The company's strategy was to offer electronic goods and books below cost, an approach that proved more popular with customers than with investors. Buy.com had high inventory turnover, but kept posting loss after loss. Founder Scott Blum, a man who knows a bargain-basement price when he sees it, bought back shares in 2001 and took the company private.

Now, Buy.com stands again at the gates of the public markets, hat in hand. Like last time, it's using the ticker BUYY. And like last time, it's brought its long string of losses with it. The risk section of the prospectus is like a walk down Memory Lane -- or rather, a dark alley leading off Memory Lane: "Our limited operating history makes evaluation of our business difficult."

"Our future operating results may fluctuate and cause the price of our common stock to decline."

And who can forget this old classic? "We have incurred substantial losses to date and may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future."

These are sentences that were for the most part banished from technology IPO prospectuses after the great stock bust of 2000. But the successful reception of recent IPOs such as Shopping.com(SHOP Quote), which was priced at $18 last October, seemed to have signaled that investors were warming up again to online retail IPOs. Shopping.com's stock rose as high as $35.62 in early December but was trading at $21.24 Tuesday.