People talk about the web being corrupted by ads, but it's important to recognize that it completely fails at informing people what products are available to solve the problems they have, at what prices, from which vendors, and how to transport them most efficiently. Instead it's like walking through an unregulated flea market full of pickpockets and everybody's asking you to sign documents.

Because most products are in their own ecosystem with no overarching standard way to share information. You have some standards but usually for specific niches, no product FHIR.

Just making sure every product has a unique ID would be a revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Trade_Item_Number

Google’s Froogle was a bit like this. Obviously they had to cancel it.

I suspect that's by design.

For the same reason some department stores have the up and down stairs/escalators on opposite sides.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/49307/why-do-departme...