Online stores group products by who sells them. One of the challenges of abstracting this layer is that who sells the product still adds or subtracts value fro

Online stores group products by who sells them. One of the challenges of abstracting this layer is that who sells the product still adds or subtracts value from the purchasing experience because of those mundane details (shipping speed, reliability, returns, etc.). There are various ways of dealing with this. Amazon [1] is already active in this space using what you might call the "user review" model combined with enforcing some exacting standards on their vendors. Already having a huge channel of course made it easier for Amazon to get vendors to accept this. [1] Incidentally, I've never thought that Amazon did a great job with sorting products within its general categories, so I always search instead. But I do wonder, how many more people would window-shop at Amazon if their sorted product catalog was more interesting?