Close your eyes and remember the carnage. Dotcoms were speedily becoming dotgones.
Who could forget boo.com, which was set up by Swedish model Kajsa Leander and was valued at more than £200m before it launched? It collapsed just 18 months later, owing millions to its creditors.
So, when Paul Cusack decided to jump on the "e-tailing" superhighway in late 2000, sceptics wouldn't have expected too many people to leap on board with him. He would have to wait until Darwinian forces wiped out his more clueless rivals.
The fact that Cusack's global HQ was a Rotherham garage suggested that Ebuyer would remain an enterprise of modest proportions. Even the company's title proved a curse.
Cusack recalls: "When we started Ebuyer it was around the time of the dotcom implosion. We had to change the name from ebuyer.com to Ebuyer (UK) because nobody would open a credit account for us. They were terrified of having anything to do with dotcoms, due to the likes of boo.com."
Despite this faltering start, Cusack's vision never became clouded. He wanted to create an online technology products retailer that could outperform its lumbering high cost "bricks and mortar" rivals.
On the first day of business, back in November 2000, Ebuyer had three customers. Today, as it moves into a £19m headquarters in Howden, East Yorkshire, it has 1.2 million registered clients and an annual turnover of £220m.
It sells everything from iPods to plasma screens. Unlike other dotcoms, which only seemed to provide jobs for a handful of table-tennis-playing techies, Ebuyer has become a sizeable employer. It has 232 staff on its books.
In a move which is in keeping with the times, Ebuyer is owned by venture capitalists Vida Capital Partners, and Cusack has become the company's business development director.
Why does Cusack think Ebuyer survived when so many went under?
"We are fanatical about keeping our costs down,'' says Cusack. "Our aim was to automate everything we could. We did this when our competition struggled, because we had written our own order management system from scratch and this allowed us to automate many of the tasks that required a human in other businesses.
"Our aim was to ensure that 90 per cent of orders needed no staff intervention until the pick sheet was printed in the warehouse."
Born in Doncaster, Cusack's early career was driven by the property boom of the late 1980s.
"I started my first business, called Paul Martin Associates, in 1988 at the age of 21,'' recalls Cusack. "The company was a mortgage broker based in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, which I started in partnership with a colleague (Martin Yates) at Legal and General, where we both worked as financial advisers.
"We started the business because we saw an opportunity to help people re-mortgage their property and release their equity, after the big increase in property prices during the 1980s. I look at the companies that have cashed in on this over the last couple of years and it brings back memories."
Bust, alas, can swiftly follow boom. With the property market's downturn, Cusack left the business but took some of the computers with him as part of the settlement.
"I decided to take a few months off work to decide whether I wanted to stay in the financial services industry or do something else," he recalls. "During this time I kept tripping over the computers given to me as part settlement and eventually I decided to try and sell them. I put an advert in my local paper and got a lot of interest but everyone asked the same question, 'How big is the hard drive?'.
"Because these computers were used in the mortgage business to process mortgage applications they never contained a hard drive, so it was impossible to sell them. I called a local distributor of computer parts and convinced him I did computer repairs for a living, so that I could buy the hard drives at trade prices. I fitted the hard drives and re-advertised the computers, and I could have sold them 10 times over. I realised at this point that not only had I got rid of the computers, I was actually having a great time doing it. I was having the time of my life, so I decided to start Choice Peripherals, a computer re-seller, in 1991."
The business grew quickly, and in late 1997 he was approached by US companies looking for a presence in the UK. He sold Choice Peripherals in 1998 to Insight Enterprises, based in Tempe, Arizona. His career was heading towards the newly created World Wide Web.
"In 1996, one of my employees at Choice Peripherals came to me with the idea of starting an ISP (Internet Service Provider),'' he recalls.
"He explained that he had done his degree in computer science and that he knew how to set up an ISP," says Cusack. "I told him to come up with some numbers and I would look at it. The numbers looked good and we ended up setting up Plusnet Technologies. Plusnet followed the same route as Choice Peripherals, and grew to become one of the leading ISPs in the UK.
"I sold my interest in Plusnet at the end of 1999 and decided that I had enough money, and I was going to retire at the ripe old age of 33. I decided to take up scuba diving to fill the gap left by my working life. I did this for five months and gained every qualification I could without going professional. I realised that my working life had not been a job, but something I loved, and I missed the daily wheeling and dealing of business life."
He decided to start Ebuyer after a meeting with former colleagues from Plusnet and Insight. Like many great business plans, it was hatched in a pub.
Cusack says: "We literally sketched out a basic business model on a beer mat. We decided to look for a domain and, after a lengthy search, we found that the domain ebuyer.com was up for sale and bought it for around $100,000. I started Ebuyer with an initial investment of £250,000 and then a further investment of £150,000.
"We started the business in May 2000 by writing our computer system from scratch."
The business went "live" six months later. In those days, Cusack and his business partner Mike Naylor picked, packed and shipped the orders themselves, using Cusack's garage as their distribution centre before securing their first premises in Sheffield. By the end of 2000, orders were coming in at
30 a day.
Ebuyer US was planned "on the back of a napkin" and in February 2003, after six months of development, the website was launched. Today, the US operation employs 35 people at its HQ in Arizona.
The chief executive's role has been filled by Bob Armao, who helped establish Ebuyer in the States, and also worked with Cusack at Insight.
Cusack says: "I expect the online technology market to continue to grow as more people become comfortable buying online and more people in the UK get broadband.
"I think other retailers will continue to find it more difficult, due to the cost of owning bricks and mortar. In fact, we are starting to see them offering web-only pricing where you collect in store. How long before they realise that this is a flawed model?
"I also believe that there will be fewer online players, as many of the smaller
e-tailers find it harder to compete."
His advice to anyone wanting to emulate Ebuyer is terse: find a niche and keep costs to a minimum.
Cusack feels proud that Ebuyer can finally shout about its virtual credentials, long after rivals have been buried deep in the dotcom graveyard.