B2C dreams

again I find myself frustrated with the current state of e-business. Here's my scenario: I recently tried on a pair of shoes that I liked. The only problem was, they didn't seem to be very sturdy, being of the glued variety, and not stitched. For some reason, I seem to go through my shoes pretty quickly, so I like a nice stitched version. What's this got to do with e-business? Well I'm sure some shoe store out there has what I want. Or a shoemaker could make a pair for me. But how do I find that store/shoemaker? Yellowpages, you would think, would be a good start, but the Australian Yellowpages is pretty useless for any detailed information. Google shoes? What alternative do I have to physically walking into a shoestore? It's almost 2004. Why haven't we got every small business exposing their inventory / services into a discoverable directory? Where is UDDI?