My biggest frustration is how many orders I make get email replies telling me the item is not in stock. I think a lot of retailers just aren't very good at syncing their inventory to their storefronts. You would think everything would operate off a centralized inventory database, but there pretty clearly are multiple systems that don't check in with each other nearly often enough given how often this happens.

Yup basically if we're talking about building a distributed sort-of vendor-neutral fulfillment system and storefront, that's basically what Amazon is. :)

So there's pretty much nobody that can catch up to this level of dominance, not even the second place players. Which is a clear sign that Amazon should be broken up by the government.

This happens even with WalMart, BestBuy, and Target though. So it doesn't even need to be vendor neutral. Even within a single vendor they're screwing it up.

Yeah because they are all traditional retailers and have that brick and mortar mentality. They have to pay the "but we have all these properties already" strategy tax every time.

The other companies can compete with Amazon, they’re just too incompetent to do so.

Depending on the store, it's not as simple as the systems not talking to each other. It's more likely that the system for the store front is either out of sync or incorrect. The systems that multi-tenant warehouses use were made for a time before e-commerce and has had more modern updates shoe-stringed on.

Even if the software is well implemented, there's still issues of items being damaged during the pick/pack step, items being labeled incorrectly, put into the wrong bin, misplaced, or even stolen. These are things that smaller shared-warehouse store fronts don't have the capacity (in space or money) to cope with it.

I'm pretty sure some 'on back order' emails are a deliberate attempt to get you to call so that you can be upsold.

> A good shopping aggregator would go a long way in helping.

For some European countries there's PriceSpy that scrapes prices and shipping costs (I suppose it scrapes as I would guess e-commerce entities would not publically expose API to query their products). It works OK most of the times, but sometimes it reports old or not updates prices, so I would say it's not foolproof.