In February 2015, Radio Shack–an icon in American malls and towns–filed for bankruptcy. You could say a lot of critical things about Radio Shack, but in many parts of the country, it was the only place you were going to go find electronic components on short notice. A lot of people of a certain age got their exposure to electronics via Radio Shack kits and parts.

Radio Shack did close a lot of stores. In fact, from 4,000 stores they are down to about 1,700. A New York hedge fund named Standard General bought all the Radio Shack assets and formed a new company (also called, oddly enough, Radio Shack).

According to news reports, the new company will grow more online sales but also wants to take advantage of the do-it-yourself niche, which has certainly be on the rise in the last few years.

We wish Radio Shack the best.

Amazon.com Inc. is introducing free shipping on thousands of popular, smaller items — makeup, mobile phone accessories, earplugs — in its Web store, without requiring a minimum order.

The new initiative applies to all customers, including those not enrolled in Amazon Prime, the annual membership program that includes two-day shipping, the company said on Tuesday. Amazon is using the free shipping program to target cost-conscious shoppers, a group that EBay Inc. is courting.

“Maybe the thinking is they can break even on these transactions and that’s all they really need to do,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “That fits the Bezos playbook.”

Most of the inventory will come from hundreds of third-party merchants that give Amazon a cut of each sale for handling storage, packaging, delivery and customer service. It is Amazon’s latest move as an online marketplace and logistics company connecting buyers and sellers.

Offering free delivery of low-cost items is a move to gain market share from competitors such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., but it won’t help Amazon become profitable, Mulpuru said.

Chinese kit-maker Huawei reckons one in four resellers will be out of business inside the next half a decade, such is the dwindling shelf life for the classic man-in-the-middle model.

A report outlining the company’s strategy predicted: “Within next five years, one fourth of the channels will disappear, and the remaining channels will have to transform themselves from a distribution type into a more competent type [of business].”

A spokesman singled out IBM, Cisco and HP as relying too much on resellers and failing to customise services for their clients. Resellers account for 75 per cent of HP’s sales and 90 per cent of Cisco’s top line.

“If [vendors] rely on this model to do their business, in this competitive market, they may become extinct.”

No matter how you feel about RadioShack, for many hackers it was the one place that components could be sourced locally. Upon hearing that the stores are being shuttered (at least for those seeking non-cellphone items) we wondered if someone would rise to meet the maker market. The answer may actually be mom-and-pops — independent stores owned by people passionate about hacking and making.

[Martin Bogomolni] is hard at work launching his brick and mortar store called Tinker & Twist.

Amazon has filed suit against the alleged operators of sites that offer Amazon sellers the ability to purchase fake 4- and 5-star customer reviews of their products.

The case is part of a broader effort by the company to crack down on fake reviews.

“While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand,” the suit says. “Amazon strictly prohibits any attempt to manipulate customer reviews and actively polices its website to remove false, misleading, and inauthentic reviews.

“Despite substantial efforts to stamp out the practice, an unhealthy ecosystem is developing outside of Amazon to supply inauthentic reviews,” the suit adds. “Defendants’ businesses consist entirely of selling such reviews.”

The European Commission is to probe the e-commerce sector to find out why people aren’t buying across borders.

According to the Commish, despite half of all EU consumers shopping online, only around 15% of them bought from a seller based in another EU country. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager suspects that: “It’s often the companies themselves that undermine cross-border trade by erecting technical barriers, such as geo-blocking. Geo-blocking prevents consumers from accessing certain websites on the basis of their residence, or credit-card details.”

However, while announcing the sector investigation, she added: “Some barriers [to a digital single market] are due to public policies.” But the enquiry will focus on private – and in particular contractual – barriers to cross-border e-commerce in digital content and goods.

Bankrupt headphones and USB memory stick chain RadioShack has posted the complete list of 1,784 shops it hopes to close across America.

RadioShack hopes to sell off all the stock held at its doomed stores, which are due to close for the last time by March 31.

The company has not said how many employees will lose their jobs. RadioShack stores that are independently owned, and international franchises, will not be affected.

News of the closure of RadioShack after more than 90 years of business is prompting bouts of nostalgia.

A reporter from Bloomberg BusinessWeek called this a “slow motion bankruptcy” and pointed out that analysts expected it years ago, with some speculating it could — or should — have happened in the 1990s.

The purpose of this blog is not to say “I told you so,” but rather to look at the forces in play and consider what this means for the electronics community.

As I’ve pointed out before on EETimes.com, there is no shortage of online places to get all the components you need professionally and personally, with Digi-Key perhaps being the poster site for how the industry has changed. In fact, the wealth of electronic components, software, tools, and data that we can get online is truly staggering. New (relative to Radio Shack and Digi-Key) sites like Adafruit, Sparkfun, MakerShed, Upverter, and Octopart have changed our buying behavior forever, because the web opens up a vastly larger world than any brick and mortar retailer could offer.

My wider point is that we have so much more access to great hardware than ever before and the human aspect of design isn’t going away. In fact, there are more hardware meet-ups, hackathons, and local Maker Faires than ever before. So it’s “goodbye” to the Shack, but “hello” to new face-to-face events that will inspire more electronic design, especially given the potential of the “Internet of Things.” Just make sure to order your board and hardware a couple of days in advance.

Customers can select what they want. Some want more than some other.

In many business area we can slowly learn what this “lowest price win” really means.