"hey, instead of paying to print millions of catalogs... why don't we just put it on the internet?"
With 2400 baud modems, and most of America needing long distance charges ontop of the $12/Month Prodigy charge, would take forever to download a page with pictures, and that forever would cost a pretty penny.
9600 baud wasn't available til 1991, and then modem speeds stated to increase, 14.4k in '93? and 28.8 shortly after.
This is when it was first possible when graphic heavy pages could be done