Good engineering teams working with KISS frameworks build good sites. Counter example: Sears.

Resellers are a necessary evil for warehouse retail. You need the scale for margin and product diversity for long tail sales, but you've got to keep a tight leash on them. I can't begin to express how unreliable their submitted metadata about listed items is.

I feel like auditing and kicking people off the platform would honestly be the best approach, although that'd probably just cause more fly by night "new" vendor signups.

>HomeDepot and Bestbuy are what I would hold up as the best websites.

https://www.mcmaster.com/

Menards is great for this. The stores tend to fullfill orders and ship. Also, you have flexibility in how you get it shipped. Also, they tend to show live POS stock counts. (Expect 1 item to be 0 left)

They're not the best in shipping.. but I haven't see the garbage resellers on their platform.

Home Depot is good, but their iOS app still lacks a lot of polish around selecting a store, payments, and list management.

I was bummed about the target third party stuff - how hard is it to add a target only toggle?

Target was good 5 years ago. These days they're pushing more and more items into "same day delivery" only with some gimmicky subscription service. No thanks - I'm looking for a transaction, not a long term relationship. If you really want to charge for shipping, then reduce your prices so that the cost of shipping is no longer built in.

And yeah, the "marketplace" cancer is everywhere. It's turned Amazon into trash, yet traditional companies seemingly can't help but follow in their footsteps. If I want to sort through vendor reputations for gensym-branded white label gadgets, I'll go to eBay or AliExpress.

FWIW the Home Depot website is much faster if you use noscript to block all of their surveillance vendors. Probably the worst website I've seen with regards to that - by default I think they backhaul all of your mouse movement.