[teorema]

Actually I'm shocked to read this because I have the opposite reaction. To each their own — you make a good point about the accuracy of their inventory information — but to me the Home Depot website is on of the worst websites I have ever used.

It's unbelievably slow for me, a perfect example of bad JavaScript. Product menus appear at the worst possible moment, inexplicably spreading across the page after I've looked for them and given up. It's impossible to bulk edit lists you've bookmarked. I could go on and on.

It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.

[TeMPOraL]

> It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.

This is so common. I can't count how many times I wished someone just exposed a normal desktop DB browser or an Excel sheet instead of their bullshit web storefront / SaaS service. Hell, I actually semi-jokingly suggested just that in a startup I used to work for[0]. I've given it some thought then, and I realized the reason for offering subpar experience is often because the vendor wants to railroad the users into a very specific workflow. This... well... is not how I want to do computing[1], so I tend to avoid SaaS whenever I can.

--

[0] - Wasn't totally unwarranted, given that our main competitor was a company literally selling an Excel plugin. Even with us having stellar people doing the frontend part, it was pretty clear we spent more time reimplementing a fraction of spreadsheet functionality in the browser, instead of working on the "unique selling point".

[1] - My full thoughts on this are too large to fit in this comment - this approach can be the right thing to do by the user, sometimes.

[Johnny555]

It's unbelievably slow for me

I have that same problem too -- the Home Depot site is painful to use because it's so slow.

I prefer Lowes, but I can't use it while on my my work VPN because they think I'm a bot, so when my wife sends me a link to look at while on VPN, I can't see it until I log off VPN at the end of the day. So we stopped using Lowes. I complained about this to Lowes and asked them to whitelist my company's VPN endpoint, but got a generic response back about cyber security and keeping me safe.

[neogodless]

I'm with you. Quite often I simply cannot add items to my cart on HomeDepot.com. Endless spinner of doom. Frequently incorrect aisle labels too.

It seems to have gotten better, or maybe hardware and internet just got faster, but it used to take minutes for pages to load sometimes.