The problem is, it DOES increase the price. Who pays the commissions to BFL? Ultimately, the customer.
And their strategy involves paying further commissions down-stream.
Sure, retail has a multi-tier distribution system. But I'm not sure that there is much of a need for that on the Internet. The Internet makes it possible to cut all that out - and I think that is, largely, what will happen.
No, you won't go directly to book publishers. (Unless, perhaps, you are doing a large corporate order of something specialized, say training books for tax auditers.) You'll go to a big book distributer's site (Amazon, ferinstance).
You see, the Internet itself IS the mall. The stores are all there in the mall, and you can travel from one store to the next with a URL.
You want an easy way to find stores without typing in a URL? Yahoo.
And they don't increase the price of goods by extracting a commission from the sale.
I do think that sites that find the best price will play an important role, but they can't extract a commission from the sale, either, because if they do then they aren't unbiased, and would be anti-competitive. Consumers will drift to the sites that are pro-competition, and that save them money. These sites will have to be advertiser-sponsored, rather than commission-based.
(There have already been some stinks, BTW, about so-called price-shopping sites that aren't legitimate. Merchants pay to be included. Expect big FTC hoo-ha's over this in the future.)
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