I'd buy more from the local stores of some retailers if they would make their websites work better. I'm willing to pay more now and then to support keeping the stores open, but not if they make me jump through too many hoops.

A good example of doing it wrong is Barnes & Noble.

Suppose I'm thinking of buying a book, and would like to go take a look at it in person before making my decision. So my first question is simple: is it in stock at my local Barnes & Noble?

That's fairly easy to determine. Just go to barnesandnoble.com and search for the book. On the page for the book there is a "Want it Today? Check Store Availability" link. Hit that link and you get a pop up to enter your zip/postal code. Do so and it will then show you a list of their stores near that area, and whether or not each has the book in stock.

OK, that's fine if you are only interested in one book. But I'm usually interested in taking a look at several books. So navigate to another book's page and click "Want it Today? Check Store Availability".

And guess what happens? You get the pop up that asks you to enter your zip/postal code! They didn't set it in a cookie when you entered it for the first book. You have to enter your stupid zip/postal code for EVERY book you want to check!

OK...maybe it works better if you login. If you login you can set a store as your local store, and the site remembers that. For instance when you ask about upcoming events it shows the events from that store.

Nope. Logging in makes no difference. There is no way I've found to make it use the "my local store" setting to save from having to actually enter zip/postale code for every book you want to check.

If I'm looking up a half dozen books or so I usually get annoyed around #4 and say "screw it" and make do with Amazon's "look inside" feature, and then buy from Amazon.

I could simply not believe that they could do this, and so guessed that it might be because I use Safari on Mac. Maybe they don't test with Safari? Nope, I then tried Chrome and Firefox, and had the same problem. I then tried them on Windows, and also Edge, and same problem.

At the very least, B&N needs to use a cookie to remember the zip/postal code for that browsing session.

I say "very least" because that just solves the problem when I have a specific list of books in mind that I'd like to come look at.

Another common case is when I just know the category I'm interested in. For instance, I would like to get a book on improving my memory. There are a lot of books in that category. To find out online which are at my local B&N I've got to find them all on the site, and then check each one by one to see which ones are at my store.

What I really want is an option to select a store, and then have the site show me only items that are in stock at the store. If I search for "improve your memory" I don't want to see the 244 matching items that are available at the union of B&N stores and B&N online. I want to see only the 5 items that are actually at my local store.

What B&N needs to realize is that I don't care what B&N sells online. If I'm going to buy a book online I'm going to buy from Amazon because I have Amazon Prime. If I'm at their website it is because I'm interested in what is in their retail locations.