28-Dec-2021: I have long been buying books from Booktopia, as they often have books either cheaper or with faster delivery dates than Ebay. Not always, but often enough for me to usually consider them, or Angus and Robertson online, which by the way is also a 100% owned brand of Booktopia. When I'm in the market for a physical book, or even an audiobook or an e-book, I check them all out and usually go with the cheapest, and/or the fastest delivery. Same principal as Webjet. I might use Webjet to compare prices on flights, but I will usually book direct and save the Webjet fee. So I don't really see a lot of potential upside in investing in Webjet compared to other options that are available to me.

A lot of people do not realise that Booktopia own Angus and Robertson (A&R). Amazon is always going to be the cheapest and fastest, especially if you're an Amazon Prime member, but Amazon have a limited range of books, far more limited than Ebay, A&R, and Booktopia, so often what I'm after is simply not available through Amazon.

That said, I do not have any reason to think that Booktopia is going to be a superior investment than the companies I am already invested in, and they are not even on my watchlist. They certainly should scale well, as most online businesses do, and they are relatively capital light, in that they don't physically hold all of the books that they list on their sites as stocked items, or available-to-purchase books, they often order them to be delivered directly from the publisher (or the publisher's warehouse) to you, so they just clip the ticket without doing any of the physical work. However they do also stock millions of books themselves, so they do have higher costs than a SaaS business for instance should have, as a generalisation. While I see Booktopia (including A&R, which they own) as the leading 100% online book store in Australia, I think that they are going to often struggle to compete against Ebay, because pretty much any and every other book seller throughout Australia and overseas as well can sell through Ebay if they choose to, so Ebay is providing an online platform for ALL of Booktopia's competitors to use to potentially compete against them on. What then - other than price alone - is going to keep customers loyal to Booktopia (and/or A&R)? I don't know. If it just boils down to price then I fear they are never going to be a highly profitable company - their margins are going to forever remain under pressure.

Just my view. Happy to hear a persuasive bull case.