"BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it."

Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.

As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is.

You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.

The point is that if you're selling widgets, you have to sell them through the stores you have and not the stores you wish you had.

Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.

I think it's the issue of the fact that they're selling so many different brands of products across so many different product lines (from fryers to washing machines to routers to laptops). So building the optimal sorting algorithm becomes an exercise for each and every line, and also involves standardizing the fields you receive from a variety of different manufacturers and distributors.

Certainly not an easy game, and definitely a tedious one. I know I'd hate to be on the team tasked with figuring that one out.

Size does not automatically imply competency