[hultner]

I can only talk from personal experience I did not trust most online payments around the turn of the millennium, but I did order quite a few things online. I usually payed either by collect on delivery or by invoice like regular good old fashioned mail-order, or by the early 00s VISA had something called e-card or similar, where you could generate a temporary one time use CC via a Java applet, this card was only valid for a day and could only be charged by a pre-determined amount, making the risk very low.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

We were aware of this in the earliest days of amzn, and included a phone-in payment option to try to deal with this reluctance. It was rarely, rarely used.