Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability" link.

That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores.

So far so good.

Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again!

This is just irritating.

At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip.

Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up has a zip entry field for doing that.

Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores.

Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up.

Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up today in your local store.

And yet, from my experience no place in the city has a more comprehensive catalog of magazines (some come close). Go figure!