Then you have Linux, which is a distributed software ecosystem on top of a distributed hardware ecosystem. UX is terrible, but flexibility is through the roof. You can pretty much have exactly what you want, although you might have to do parts of it yourself.

That long, twisty maze of interlocking decisions, and the fact that every decision could and did go wrong, usually necessitating several hours of troubleshooting, that's bad UX.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Linux. But Mac OS X is the real Unix on the Desktop.

Even an app for your phone that communicates with a server is a distributed system.

Even a programm performing a simple read/write operation on the file_system_ is part of a distributed system. Handling exceptions is precisely a way to deal with the uncertainty of these two systems working together.

Unfortunately, a lot of problems eventually grow beyond centralized solutions and thus have to be distributed.

If your server is in Virginia and you have a customer on a phone in Jo'burg... they're gonna have one sucky comprised experience.

Latency kills, and if you are centralized then your latency goes exponentially up the further away you get from that point.

Unless you can make the two systems independent, it's distributed. For most applications like shopping, for example, you must have a eventually centralized database. If you have multiple centralized databases that must talk to each other, guess what, that's a distributed system.

An example of this kind of architecture would be to have server per country, where each database synchronously maintains inventory for the warehouses it is (uniquely!) responsible for.

Don't you by definition have a distributed system?

Or are you saying these are isolated units that never talk to each other? If you say yes, I would again question the legitimacy of the UX.

Not in the sense that it matters to the customer.

You can have a customer connected to their local centralised shipping centre before confirming an order, so every customer who would be supplied from that centre is seeing the same real-time stock indication. If supplies of a product the customer is trying to order are low, you can manage expectations accurately, for example warning that the product is almost out of stock and saying you'll confirm the order within 15 minutes to deal with races, or providing a "we're holding this for you, but you need to complete your purchase within X minutes to guarantee it" system as many on-line event ticket systems do.

You can certainly have distributed infrastructure and logistics behind those local centralised shipping centres. You still have to physically transport the products there from your manufacturing facilities or suppliers. You still have to do marketing and PR. You still have to do your corporate accounts. However, you have 100% isolated your customers from the distributed aspects of your business, and those aren't going to result in a bad experience for a real life customer just because a delivery driver was stuck in traffic for 10 minutes and arrived later than scheduled with the new stock.

In your case you choose to minimise the risk of not fulfilling an order by having a shop per stock. This is a perfectly acceptable choice. But there are other options which maximise sales opportunities at the price of more risks, which have to be compensated in turn by a whole chain of business/logistic/human/technical processes and mechanisms.

If the customer is directly exposed to a distributed ordering system, then it is inevitable that they will sometimes see symptoms of the kinds of technical problems we've been discussing. However you dress it up, that is never going to give the ideal buying experience to all of your customers all of the time.

On the other hand, if you can shift the distribution mechanisms behind the scenes, you still have to deal with similar sorts of problems, but only internally. Your staff can be trained to understand and deal with the kinds of race conditions and scheduling conflicts that might arise, and they aren't going to get upset and take their business elsewhere the way an angry customer might when those things happen.