Why Online Shopping is helpful for us?

I was just thinking about this. Last month I shopped this fairly small town for two common items. One was cloth parts bags. I forget what the other was. So, I went to two industrial suppliers and asked about cloth parts bags. One said they didn't have them. The other said "Parts. Bags." very slowly and distinctly so I would understand that if such a thing existed, he would know about it. Similar story on the other (forgotten) item. So, off I go to Amazon, plug the words into the search box, and there they both were. I could have done that first, and saved several hours driving around burning gas, but I wanted to give the local merchants a fair chance. Not so sure they deserve it.

I do prefer to deal with established merchants. I want my order filled timely, shipped to a post office address, and I want no issues with credit card security. I favor:

Amazon.com
LLBean.com
Backcountry.com.

There are a few others that come to mind, but that's pretty much the gold standard. Anyone else have some favored vendors you'd like to mention?

I might add that all three have customer reviews. Some are shills and some are just dumb, but if you keep your mental filters in place they can be very useful.