[adrianhoward]

The competition is doing a terrible job with info organization and communication

This is an often overlooked one. I once talked my way out of some work after doing some usability testing on a bunch of recruiting sites. The client chose not to fix some of the issues that we discovered not because they didn't consider them important - but because the competition was so much worse (e.g. in one case only 1/5 people could register!).