This is just the latest push of their "AmazonSupply" and "Amazon Business" systems dating back to their 2005 "Smallparts.com" acquisition. Like Grainger, they

This is just the latest push of their "AmazonSupply" and "Amazon Business" systems dating back to their 2005 "Smallparts.com" acquisition. Like Grainger, they used to be well-curated sub-sites where you could do your parametric sorting and filtering to drill down to "the" O-ring or other part you needed. But also like Grainger, they've fallen behind on their curatorial efforts and now it's more difficult to locate the right part among all the noise. To supply a B2B part like an O-ring, you need to categorize it. You need to ask every. single. distributor. the same set of questions - composition, diameter, thickness, firmness, temperature rating, oil resistance, etc. Then allow your users to parametrically search and sort to drill down to the part(s) they need. Digikey has this internalized - If you're building a web store, go to Digikey and pretend you're an electrical engineer. Find, say, a 22k surface-mount resistor in an 0603 package, 0.1W or greater, cut tape form factor, in stock, 5% tolerance. Boom, done. Now find that on Amazon. Allow a customer to come to your site with a list of requirements who wants to find a product on your site and try to make it as easy as it is on Digikey. Ebay does not have parametric search internalized, nor does Craigslist - but they're much more seller-focused than Amazon. Grainger does not, and they're loosing business because of it. McMaster Carr curates their offering down to one distributor, which makes it really easy for me, but is a rather hamfisted way to solve the problem. Still, I'll always start my search for McMaster-supplied stuff on McMaster. Alibaba does not. Newegg used to, but they're losing the curation battle as they follow Amazon's model of 3rd-party distributors listing whatever they want whereever they want. Amazon does not have this internalized. Amazon has been trying to have their cake and eat it too: They want to provide a curated section of their site that's easy for customers, and want to make it easy for sellers to sign up and list products. If you require each part to go through an onboarding process and fit somewhere in the hierarchy, you increase the friction massively for sellers. As a customer, I really wish that they would do so everywhere. If they want to just do this for the subset of customers that aren't willing to sort through the mess, but still allow vendors to come in droves with poor-quality categorization, it will still be hard to use and people will choose specialized distributors that are willing to do the work. [1] https://www.digikey.com/products/en/resistors/chip-resistor-surface-mount/52?FV=1c0002%2C400005%2Cii2%7C1127%2C1f140000%2Cmu2.2+kOhms%7C2085%2Cffe00034%2C80002%2C80003%2C80026%2C80004%2C8022c%2Cc0002&quantity=100&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&stock=1&nstock=1&datasheet=1&photo=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/resistors/chip-resistor-...