Bye-Bye, Buy.com

This is the way 2005 ends for Internet IPOs: Not with a boom, but a whimper.

Buy.com, the boom-and-bust dot-com that filed early this year for another go at an IPO, has postponed its offering, according to Reuters. The company blamed that age-old stalking horse, "market conditions."

As an online shopping site, Buy.com has viable operations, often beating Amazon.com and even Overstock.com (OSTK) on the electronics goods in which it specializes. In 2000, when the stock first went public and raised $200 million only weeks before the tech bubble burst, it seemed a good candidate to become a rival to Amazon. Less than two years later, the company was taken private and the stock was delisted.

In 2005, the deep pockets on Wall Street are thrilled to speculate in Internet stocks again. But only as long as the Internet stock had a name that would delight a two-year old, preferably one with as many vowels as possible, like Google or Yahoo! (YHOO).

So, there simply weren't enough pennies left over for an online play that had a plain old name like Buy.com. Especially since it bore that scary ".com" at the end, which has the dank odor of the Great Unpleasantness a few years back. (Of course, investors went gaga over Baidu.com (BIDU) -- the sole IPO this year with a dot in its name -- but only because of its attractive vowel-to-consonant ratio of 3:2.)

Or maybe it was just that investors took a good look at the world according to Buy.com, as presented in its prospectus. It wasn't just that online retail is lagging far behind online media in revenue growth.

Or that the company's attempt to integrate social networking into its operations (through a site with the uninviting name of Yub.com) is not paying off. Or that it required 16 daunting pages in its prospectus to outline the risk factors.