Clutter and confusion. Slow, unresponsive customer service. Lack of information. Way too much merchandise ends up being unavailable only after the site visitor has filled up her shopping cart. But her fulfillment provider, the Time Customer Service unit of Time Warner, explains that it has an older computer system that takes awhile to search the database.
Inadequate infrastructure is certainly part of the problem.
But so are poorly designed shopping sites that are confusing, time-consuming, slow, crowded and uninformative. This is all Retailing 101, of course. So the traditional retailers should know better. And maybe they do. Maybe he should have.