I find it average. My gold standard is Digikey, everything else has its own flaws. FWIW I have more problems with Amazon hiding straightforward matches than Home Depot or many other places for that matter. Amazon seems to always want to distract me with gensym brands.
FWIW Home Depot loads in half the time with NoScript only allowing what's essential. Otherwise they seem to be backhauling every single mouse movement, at least the last time I checked.
I was going to mention them, but I've never had the occasion to order from there. Their parametric seems equally awesome! A bit daunting, but I guess that's how non-EE's see Digikey.
For home improvement stuff I often order from Zoro and end up looking through manufacturers' catalogs. It's a burden, but awesome in its own way.
I hate Digikey's too (tons of script dependence even in the checkout page, including a recaptcha iirc). Really by now, I'd rather bypass the web site altogether and just use an ordering API instead. Digikey actually has that, but they only offer it to large customers. Seems lame.
While I agree with you completely, I find that ship has sailed. Most web stores pop up recaptchas, and have extremely heavy javascript. I find it utterly unprofessional, but somehow it's acceptable in this new age.
I'd love for APIs, especially common APIs, where consumer-agent software could create one cart that would optimize between vendors on price/shipping minimum/etc. But that's not in webstores' interest for the obvious reason of decommodification.
FWIW Home Depot loads in half the time with NoScript only allowing what's essential. Otherwise they seem to be backhauling every single mouse movement, at least the last time I checked.