Mechanical Engineer and product designer here. I've been using mcmaster daily for 20 years to do my job. It is definitely the standard by which all others are judged. I'll gladly pay 2, 3, 5, even 10x the price to get it from McMaster. The service, the CAD models, I have what I need the next day. As an example of the level of their service, you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and they'll go through it, figure out what's what, and refund you for it. They make it so easy, you just have to do the engineering. Thank you McMaster-Carr.
Alas, for some reason they only cater to the US market and have no presence in the EU, for example. So while it is possible to order from them, it's rather inconvenient as you need to deal with customs/taxes.
Digi-Key got this right: you can order DDP, which makes things quick & simple.
Incidentally, I am amazed that they don't have a meaningful competitor in the EU. It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
> It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
I'm so glad we can order from mcmaster here in canada, even though shipping is two days and usually min 30 USD even for tiny orders. All local industrial suppliers are truly stuck in the 80s. They have a paper catalog, without prices (if you're lucky you can get a PDF too). If you want prices, you have to call a salesperson, or send an email with an item list and wait a day or two to get a quote back. Then you get your quote, and some items are in stock, some others in stock "nearby" (next day delivery), others are backorder (1-X weeks). Then you have a lengthy phone or email back and forth to try and figure out what's in stock as a replacement.
So yeah, McMaster whenever possible and I'll gladly (have my employer) pay more for it. Shout-out to Misumi, too, however. I do mostly prototyping and I use so much of their customizable items, like rotary shafts. Much cheaper and faster than doing a drawing, sending it out to 3-8 local shops to try to find one that is quiet enough jobwise to take on a tiny one-off project and waiting 4 weeks for it, at a high price.
10/10 agree for Canadians McMaster Carr is a godsend. Can order random stock material and have it tomorrow and have a certificate telling me exactly what stuff is with a nice cad model. Their search is the best though, can write some half assed description of what I want and it'll just deisplay what I want. Their mobile website is garbage though.
Yeah what is going on with B2B in Europe and not showing prices? It's absolutely bonkers, I have been renovating my house the past 6 years, and to even get into the stores I had to get a business account (by cheating and using my IT business registration).
None of the websites show prices if you don't have an account, and some of them even check if your business is legit so I just get refused. The one that rejected me also seems to only allow loading goods by fully sized truck so maybe it wasn't going to happen anyway, but it's so strange.
I'll do you one better: I had to create a verified business account just to download software(ladder logic IDE for a sewage pump) from one such site.
I even got a call from a nice, older gentleman who asked me why do I want a business account and could this be avoided somehow. Funny he should ask.
To me it appears that these companies see presence in the web as a necessary evil and would rather do business the old fashioned way: calling and in-person meetings.
Apparently so far they hadn't had any incentive to change.
They haven't seen any incentive to change, but will grumble about Amazon and point to that as the biggest threat to their business. If they aren't, they should be.
I'd rather do business with anyone BUT Amazon, and its telling I still find myself having to order some bits from them every month.
Even though the EU is one market, it really isn't much of a single market due to language and cultural differences. I've helped B2B companies and most small/medium sized ones want to limit their services to their own (and their country's neighbor's) country. There are a ton of problems related to fake company addresses placing orders and having them delivered at some random company's parking lot. Problems with regards to refunds, and –mot important– it is VERY hard to get the police to do anything about it. The minute it is outside of their jurisdiction, the police just doesn't do anything really.
I wonder if it's down to having an opportunity to negotiate the price. It's either that, or things like handling get calculated to fine points - a single screw being more expensive than a box of screws, for example. Shipping is complicated as well. Maybe it's about setting up invoicing accounts as well?
Anyway, lots of barriers, makes you think it's either a requirement that I as a layperson don't understand, or a hole in the market.
That said, what about German electronics parts sites like Conrad or Reichelt?
I mean renovating your house is not B2B so it makes sense they want business registration.
I think they do it because they don't want to bother with small buyers. If people knew how much cheaper the parts are in these companies compared to hobby markets they would all want to buy few pieces to save money. This is not customer they want, they want customers that buy massive quantities.
The one that rejected me was a supplier that generally targets larger full construction sites so I totally get it for them. For the rest though, their main audience is definitely normal renovation contractors, and my order sizes are exactly the same as those.
We hade a competitor in Europe. It was called Zoro. Maybe not THAT clean but overall they also had a good website and great prices. But they folded some years ago.
DDP is probably the only good solution here for most EU customers, but frankly the hassle and expense of doing business in the EU is what keeps most US e-commerce companies from entering the market.
It is a shipping term, it stands for deluvered duty paid. Basically, customs duties are paid by the shipper and the item is delivered directly to the customer. From a logistics perspective it is a massive PITA, but for DTC sales in the EU it's the preferred option.
It stands for 'Delivery Duty Paid', i.e. customs charges, import tariffs, taxes, handling charges are included in the price and don't arrive as an unwelcome surprise.
I see a couple other folks jumped in. It’s basically a way to estimate duties and taxes up front so the EU customer knows the full price before they order.
The reality it that most EU customers already know the price before they order (or have a good idea it’s going to be 20% more). But they like to pretend they don’t.
Musumi is great too, they're cool because they have a lot of semi custom parts like plates with holes in them where you can spec the hole locations, rotary shafts with custom lengths and end finishing, etc.
I often use Conrad for its huge collection of small parts (mechanical as well as semiconductors) most of which can be ordered individually, with an interface with lots of filters and easy access to manuals and data sheets. Sometimes their categorization is a bit off, and they don't have CAD files, but it's decent enough.
Pro tip: Use M.D. after your name and you're a business. I AM an M.D. but friends I've given this advice to over the years have had success in impersonating a business with this title.
Maybe because the site is hard-coded for the US imperial system?
Quoting the article: «Bolts are commonly specified by their thread size (e.g. 1/4"-20), and their length. I'm looking for a 1/4"-20 x 1" bolt, meaning that the bolt's diameter is 1/4" and its length is 1", so I select these filters.»
> It's not like Americans don't occasionally need metric bolts.
It’s becoming a lot more common than not in fact. Automobile industry for example is pretty heavy on using metric bolts / screws. It’s not a recent thing either, a 2004 F-250 I used to have had many (most?) bolts as metric.
The US automotive industry started their metric push in the 1970s, and was mostly done in the 1980s for everything new. There are still a few parts from the 1960s and before that work just fine and so haven't been redesigned (and thus the bracket it goes on in a mix), but if there was ever need to redesign that part it would be all metric.
This only helps the tool makers. I wrench on Japanese and European cars yet every toolset comes with Metric and SAE sets. It seems to only inflate the parts count without giving you more functionality. The SAE and Metric bits are practically interchangeable.
> yet every toolset comes with Metric and SAE sets
I’ve mostly only seen that really with jumbo cheap quality “Father’s Day gift” type tool sets. If you are buying good quality tools, SAE and Metric are most often sold separately in my experience.
A friend of mine worked there right after college. I happened to buy some girl scout cookies through her, and joked with her that you can get everything from McMaster. When she brought me the cookies, she brought me a fake McMaster invoice for them too.
I've heard some mixed reviews about what it's like to work there, but I completely agree: as a customer, despite the (sometimes very high) prices, I was always incredibly happy with McMaster.
mcmcaster carr is also extremely popular in the hobby drone building market for buying bolts/nuts/fasteners/standoffs to attach circuit boards (ESCs, flight controllers, etc) to carbon fiber plate, and for attaching cnc cut carbon fiber plate piece together to build the whole frame of a small UAV.
people in the film/tv/production industry also use them to buy various fasteners and hardware for rigging lights, microphones, building complex camera systems onto gimbal platforms, etc.
Lucky. When I was in Engineering school, the Mechanical Engineering department had one catalog. We couldn't get any more - something about limited numbers printed (though, I'll confess I never tried to get my own). It was passed around among the students in Machine Design as if it were some sacred scroll.
Totally, it used to be a right of passage. You'd get your first job and (usually share) a copy of the machinerys handbook, and a yellow mcmaster book. I used to keep at least one at home long into the days where you don't need it anymore "just in case the internet goes down". It was those 2 books, the pemn 3 ring binder, and the ryerson catalog to know what mill sizes there were in what metals.
I'm sure they have internal horror stories of the practice, but they do it.
When we sold an old company to a PE group, all the McMaster loose stuff in the warehouse went back to them stacked in boxes on a pallet for them to work through. I wouldn't be surprised to learn our CM did the same thing after the sale.
Oh how I wish Mcmaster would open an EU branch... I don't even mind if they charge us more, but PLEASE for the love of all engineers in Europe, just open a branch here.
Not at all. My rate is very high, so saving a day of my time saves them way more. The burn rate on some of these projects is hundreds of thousands, millions a day. Saving time when your on the critical path (as mechanical design typically is) is worth that much. Once the design is finished there is a whole army of manufacturing engineers and sourcing folks that can drive the cost down. That's not the niche that mcmaster fills.
If it's a commonly used item, it would be much more efficient to pay an entry level CAD guy to draw up a parametric screw part. Add in toolsolids of all the subtracts that the component will do (taps, CBore, clearance), and supplier call outs. It starts to become efficient.
For like a $.5 part from McMaster? Are you on drugs?
McMaster is "expensive" but it isn't like they are charging a crazy amount of money. They are just expensive.
I still use them over randos tho bc I know I'm going to get what I ordered. I never did not, but if I did, I'd have the correct part maybe even same day.
The cost of the part doesn't matter. The cost of my time does.
For common components, I need a parametric part so that I can instantly change the length, size or type. If my M12 becomes an M16, I want all the taps and C'Bores to adjust without any further input from myself.
For more expensive parts, it's nice to have a homegrown parametric part to minimize potential missorders.
In my experience, the overhead of what you suggest is significant. Leading and instructing an employee or subcontractor, dealing with learning curves, etc. It sounds nice, but the logic in the GP comment is sound (i.e. that spending 2x or 3x the price for what you get can be worth it in most cases).
Tried that, management still insisted I get all of it from Fastenal, great pricing and they have an online catalogue, but ffs it takes a week to get stuff in.
Drawing up a component is quick, sure. Measuring and specifying is not as quick and easy, and you won't necessarily have appropriate metrology equipment or trained personnel on site.
A fair price for an electrical resistor is roughly $0.02 - $0.08, depending on what you are ordering. Buying it from McMaster will probably cost you $0.12 - $0.50.
Not every component is this trivially inexpensive, but we are working in a price range where it's very much worth paying the high McMaster prices. Let them hire the entry level CAD guy and spread the cost across many more prototypes than your company will make.
When you refine the product for mass production, then it is worth shaving pennies.
Honestly, not really. They want the project done sooner, and McMaster is a means to that end. The supply chain team can find a better longer term vendor later.
For production quantities, sure, nobody in their right mind would source from McMaster Carr (or Grainger, or any similar company,) but for their niche, they have a solid value proposition: they’ll get you small quantities of anything they carry incredibly quickly. For maintenance and repair (their primary market) or prototyping, that can be incredibly valuable.
This would be an immediate positive in my book. Most the bug reports I upstream to vendors go nowhere. Getting in contact with someone who can actually fix the problem, instead of just papering over it? Completely negates any downside from the original problem, in my book.
Really, I hear nothing back from a large majority of my bug reports. It must be around 3/4 are ignore or get a template response with no solution. Solving the problem is amazing. We all make mistakes, we don’t all fix them.
It depends on what you need. For basic metric nuts and bolts it seems to be the same price as a local hardware store but I don’t have to leave my office to buy the stuff.
Nahh, postage is $12.99; I can save that by driving 5 hours each way tomorrow to collect it - unlike you wasteful people who stupidly pay the postage and have it arrive the next morning /s
This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast.
Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc...
McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest.
> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed.
In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies!
The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling.
However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling.
It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
Really? Admittedly I haven't used them in earnest since before the plague ...
However, a quick look shows them to be dead on price for Mitutoyo dial calipers. Boring heads look a bit more expensive than I remember. Milling bits seem normal price-wise as well.
Who is your go to? Machine tooling is always expensive and I'm always looking for places that are cheaper.
They're alright for the Mitutoyo calipers, it looks like.
Kurt DX6: $650 on AllIndustrial, $737 on MSC.
Bison 7-866-0800 (a 3-jaw 8" forged steel chuck that I happen to own): $1090 through USA Bison retailers like Ajax, $1376 through MSC. I bought multiple Bison chucks through a similar site to Ajax: www.lathe-chucks.com (extremely old school web design, person owns several sites that sell different tooling, way better prices than MSC though you sometimes have to email for a quote).
Don't even get me started on their "value line" which is their Taiwanese or Chinese imports, only you get some intense MSC markup to go along with it vs when you buy the same item from a site like AllIndustrial.
One benefit McMaster gets is that they have so much stuff that they tend to be the first place you think of when you need some random item. A couple years back I had to build a prototype machine that would inspect wells and I needed 4" diameter clear PVC pipe. Went to McMaster, and of course it was there :-)
I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.
My experience around their shipping was the opposite— surprise outrageous fee to get fedex to deliver a few feet of PVC. This was back before they showed you shipping prices up front.
As soon as I saw the title of this post, I thought "best e-commerce site? they don't even show you the shipping price until the item has been sent, and the shipping prices are insane!"
I wrote them off long ago due to that - guess it's time to give them another try. Thanks for the heads up!
Yeah, the floor on shipping seems to be about $10 (CA to WA) but at least you find out the rate in advance now. Often worth it even for inexpensive items if it saves you an hour going to the store and searching and maybe not finding it.
yea... this is the one fault of McMaster. I'm within normal 1 day shipping of one of their major distribution centers and its still pricey. Doesn't stop me from using them when I really need something.
Home Depot bolts are total garbage quality compared to anything McMaster gives you. They are good for some stuff, but I would not use them for projects where you want the hardware to last. Also you don't have the choice of the type of steel etc.. which really matters for some projects. IDK if they even tell you what type of stainless their stainless are? 304?
Where are you finding pot metal bolts? Your best option should be anything from Ace/Home Depot/Lowes. The matte finish ones are zinc galvanized, that’s just the protective coating. They are made of carbon steel and are graded according to standards set by organizations like SAE.
Hardware stores will have grade 2 bolts for the most part (or the metric equivalents). These will be made with weaker steel and will be cut instead of cold rolled. If you’re doing something that needs more strength than that, you can get grade 5 or 8 bolts. These will be cold rolled from higher strength steel and may be tested with a penetrant dye to check for any fractures. You can get those at a hardware store or at many online stores. If you need more strength than that, you’re probably in an aerospace application and I recommend that you don’t ask for advice on HN.
If you’re buying a shit-load of bolts (like, more than a thousand of one kind of bolt), then you can go to a wholesale website.
Haven't got pot metal bolts, just thinking of some machine screw assortments I've bought on Amazon. They've worked fine for 3d printing projects, but makes me wary of fasteners from unknown sources if strength could matter.
Hardware store has been my go to, is that the reference people are using for saying McMaster bolts are 4x overpriced?
Yeah, it is. I wouldn’t worry about low grade bolts from unknown sources, really, unless it’s a safety critical application. The cost benefit to the manufacturer for cheaping out is almost nothing. To make it look like a bolt you’re going to have to make it correctly. You could use a cheaper metal but it doesn’t get much cheaper than low carbon steel which is already what they’re supposed to be made of.
Yeah, if you can buy what you want at big box hardware store, then do, prices won't get much lower than that, and you'll get something that's certified to a standard. McMaster is useful if your time is worth too much to waste it on trips to Home Depot, or if you want something less standard.
I don't usually find the local hardware stores to be cheaper than McMaster.
I see Home Depot has 1/4-20 18-8 stainless steel bolts for $7 a pack of 10. McMaster has them for $8 a pack of 50.
The exception is when I need just one or two of something and it is available in the single-unit bins at the local hardware store. With McMaster the minimum quantity is usually a box of N, but the price per unit usually quite a bit cheaper.
And of course the selection is vastly better. For the above example, I'd usually really buy 316 stainless, which Home Depot doesn't even have.
Self-assembled furniture seems to have terrible bolts more often than not. Instrument stands and drum kits also come with softest imaginable bolts except the most expensive gear. I'm sure there are other products like this.
Are you stripping hex bolts? If so, the solution may be to buy some good hex bits (and a bit extender) which make it much easier to avoid slipping and stripping the bolt compared to a plain hex key.
Even worse, the hex sockets are often just a bit too large so that even proper tools won't fit. Ikea also has some special screws that are not really Phillips, Pozidrive or any other standard so there just isn't a driver that would fit.
I recently moved and needed some new furniture. I purchased a bed previously with storage boxes underneath in the past and I was dreading the same experience again.
I did buy a different model[0] this time around and it's been over 5 years since my last purchase, but the quality on this bed is much better. All of the holes were pre drilled/tapped correctly and they've vastly improved the way the mattress slats are secured.
For the drawers underneath, the joining method was much simpler than before and while I still wouldn't look forward to taking it apart if/when I move, I can at least see a viable path for disassembly and re-assembly at my future house. The previous drawers were junk and got stuck or broke within a month.
I'm currently assembling a TV stand[1] and so far it's been great except for the top shelf. It's a veneered wood product and I guess they want you to pick the "best" side and you have to tap the holes yourself. I would have preferred pre-drilled holes since a TV is going to cover 90% of the top anyway, but it's not a huge problem. It's also possible they use the same part number in some other product that doesn't require holes so this way is better for their logistics.
While the bolts at home depot are made of some form of iron they often are not graded at all. There is a reason: they wouldn't pass any quality tests. The graded ones are probably okay, I'm not sure as I wouldn't attempt to use anything they have in something important as I have no way of knowing something didn't get put in the wrong bin by mistake.
Home Depot's private label brand (Everbilt) are absolutely graded. An SAE grade 1 or 2 is unmarked but if you look at their metric bolts you'll see the 8.8 grade mark.
I don't know where I got them, but I have used graded bolts in the past that broke under much less torque than they should. I am now more careful about getting bolts from a source I know I can trust.
Call a local machine shop, mechanic or welder and ask. Almost every town and city has a store that specializes in hardware for tradies that has better pricing and selection than HD or Ace or homeowner stores.
My go-to for stuff like this used to be SmallParts.com back when McMaster-Carr wouldn't sell to individuals (they do now). Amazon bought Small Parts and renamed it Amazon Supply. I haven't bought anything from them recently, but it's worth a shot.
Small Parts was amazing they specialized in, you got it, small components such as fasteners (you could get titanium screws if you needed them), small mechanicals such as tubing, solenoid valves, bearings, shafting, metal, etc. They were a prototyper's dream.
I have ordered a large amount of bolts from them, and they're quite good. They don't have McMaster's selection of weirdo stuff (ceramic bolts, titanium bolts, etc), but for your standard Grade 5 / Grade 8 etc, they're solid.
No idea. I talked with the truck driver, and he said we was being paid way more than $8 for the delivery. I used my company account, so I guess they're willing to take a loss on some orders and make it up on others.
I don't know the GP's reason, but I also orderd long aluminum profiles for LED installations (it's needed for heat dissipation, and also helped with mounting in my case).
Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together.
[0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.
Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.
I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce
Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
Weird – I have been able to order parts for a client in the UK. I've used it mainly for connector harnesses.
I love their connector harnesses and I have standardized all my prototypes around them. It sounds expensive at first, but it's cheaper and less annoying than making them myself or hiring someone to do it for me.
We use them all the time here in Mississauga. Generally we're getting next-day delivery (I think they have a warehouse in Cleveland). It's not the cheapest option, but they are great for projects still in development as they almost always have exactly what you're looking for. The customer service is also fantastic.
>On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
At my college town around 2013, any prime delivery would always take a day longer than it was supposed to. Saturday delivery wasn't common there at the time so you had to get your order in by Wednesday morning at the latest otherwise you'd be waiting until Monday.
I’m absolutely sure that there is an amazon FIFO for orders that sometimes get delayed days in shipping in order not to build up an unnecessary queue that wouldn’t get emptied for pickup. Probably has a lot to do with them running their own logistics.
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
Amazon does much better then Wal-Mart, but in either case I’ve found the best experience is to only buy products being sold by Amazon or Wal-Mart directly. I love the idea of facilitating small businesses selling through Amazon and Wal-mart, but in practice the feature is just abused by fraudsters, scammers, and disaster profiteers. The few legit sellers on either platform often don’t deal well with customer inquiries or returns. This is why we can’t have nice things.
I’ve had mostly good experiences with Aliexpress though you have to read the fine print on everything very carefully - I think most people would have a lot of problems with that. There have been a few times I ordered electronic components and received ladies handbags or, hilariously, a toddler size leather miniskirt. I did get a refund in all those cases but it was a multi week process.
I did think it was pretty funny that the same tweezers CVS sells for $7 a piece in midtown Manhattan costs 5/$1 on Aliexpress. Only difference is the CVS tweezers are available immediately whereas I had to wait 20 days to receive the ones from Aliexpress - though I more or less have a lifetime supply now. :)
DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
Next day delivery is so common for B2B that many times it's the only way to order. I won a free DMM from Keysight and while it took a month for it to be actually shipped, they shipped it next day from Malaysia to the US when it finally did. Like you guys made me wait weeks for it, I could have waited another week for snail mail.
I made a small order from Digi-Key last month and they offered UPS ground, FedEx ground and USPS. I don’t think I’ve ever not been offered budget shipping from them.
But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
Depending on the nature of the business, it’s not uncommon to have negotiated rates for 2nd day shipping that are really good, and essentially retail counter rates for ground. Sometimes that makes 2nd day service cheaper than ground for a lot of destinations. It’s weird.
Huh? I order from Digikey all the time and usually I get my packages FedEx because it's the same price as USPS. When USPS is cheaper, I select that because I'm in the same state so it typically gets here the next day anyway.
Perhaps. But all the more reason for Amazon to streamline it's UI and UX. Instead it's consistently a textbook case of TMI. If you're not paying close attention you're likely to miss something.
Maybe you didn't see the Footnote:
Footnotes
[1] "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
I can’t imagine a company wasting money on this. Distro facility space is money. Especially these days with all networks stressed. They may delay to optimize a route with more stops, or prioritize guaranteed shipping dates. But being punitive doesn’t make financial sense.
this definitely used to be a thing until like... early 2010s. Back then I completely recall watching tracking for some items and they'd accept it and run it a couple hops and then... it'd just sit for 3 days or whatever. Fedex said it was gonna be 5 business days? Then don't expect to see it in less than 5 business days.
I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other.
I don't see it all that much anymore though. Definitely post-covid but tbh it's really been years since I've seen it. I can't tell how much of that is vs me moving away from a rural home (might be more likely to attempt "batching" deliveries in rural areas due to distance) vs an actual change in behavior here.
It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too - you have to have a big warehouse or something to hold them. Even if it's sitting in a trailer somewhere, you still have to have a big lot to hold them. These are costs that are probably not justified for the return of "lol make customers more amicable to pay more for better shipping", the conversion there is ~0% for the most part. The 5-day window is nice for the courier if they need it of course, holiday is madness in the mail business (and payments, retail, etc) from what I know, but if your throughput is significantly lower than your mail volume then you've got problems, so you need to be able to ship it through in 2-3 days on average anyway, and if you can do that... why pay for someplace to hold onto it when we can JIT it right onto a truck?
Today it seems like if your shipping drops off for a couple days it's usually lost. I had one package stop tracking and then bounce 100 miles in the wrong direction, another where it stopped tracking and then showed up with box damage, etc, but haven't seen it just hang out like the old days.
Amazon, too, will play games with shipping windows... on a thunderbolt hub, they set a delivery date like two weeks out, sold and shipped by amazon. Like a week later I see a ship notice, cool it'll be here soon right? Lol nope, shipped UPS Surepost, so they got their week out of it.
> It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too...
I wonder if they are applying ML to the distribution batching and coming up with probabilities to each route's batching efficiency. With enough detailed delivery transaction data, they could identify the probability of it being worth holding the package in the warehouse or trailer to batch it, versus sending it on its way.
It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
McMaster-Carr is an incredible example of how an existing physical-product distributor with a vaunted historical operations department, when faced with moving into the e-commerce world, could choose one of two paths:
- Build an online presence cheaply because you can rely on your historical offline operations to paper over any shortcomings in the online system.
- Build an online presence with the same ethos, standards, creativity, and long-term continued investment with which you built your offline operations to be your competitive advantage in the first place.
There aren't many legacy organizations that successfully digitized with that second path in mind, at least not at first - McMaster, B&H Photo, and Sweetwater come to mind as notable exceptions. It's a useful thought experiment, I think, even for those working on startups and green-field projects.
Having worked in the industrial supply marketspace and website and technology development. Familiar with the McMaster catalog and mirrored website. I would not agree with the assessment of it as incredible. While McMaster is a leader in the distribution of industrial supplies, the website is an almost exact duplicate of it's print catalog and not all that user friendly for b2b buyers.
Funny you should mention Sweetwater because they're also near the head of the table in my mental pantheon of e-commerce greats.
Their website is honestly just above average. Page-load times are fair to middling, the pages are very busy, vendor-supplied copy takes up much of the item page, and categories are difficult, perhaps just an artifact of the industry they're in. But if you dig deep, there is a lot of detail beneath, and the related-items suggestions are usually at least relevant if not spot-on, which is more than I can say for many sites.
But where they shine is the integration of humans into the process.
Back in 2015, I thought I might pick up a digital piano/keyboard sort of thing. I wasn't having a great time making sense of the lingo, so I gave them a call, and within seconds (I think I might've pushed one button in an IVR system), I was talking to real person who knew everything there is to know about keyboards. We talked for probably ten minutes about what I wanted to do, my budget, the ergonomic and acoustic constraints of my workspace, etc. He explained some terms to help me understand how the offerings differed and how those would impact my playing, and ultimately steered me to one of the models that was already on my short-list. We also talked about companion software, but I elected not to take that step at the time.
I went from hesitant to confident, and completed the purchase minutes later. The cool thing is, that confidence followed me through delivery, unpacking, setup, and my first plinking across the octaves -- I never felt alone like I was just gonna have to figure this out for myself, I _knew_ that this was the right instrument for my needs, and set out through basic finger exercises with the determination of one who's divinely inspired.
Then something even cooler happened: A week after delivery, that same sales engineer emailed me, just checking in. To make sure I got everything set up and was comfortable with it, to see if I could use any further help. As it happens, I was fine, but if something along the line had derailed me, this absolutely would've made a difference in getting me back on track. An expert whose entire job is to make sure I have a good experience with their stuff.
Now, I've had other e-commerce sites email me and follow up, sometimes with phone calls, but it's not the same. In some cases it feels like outright harassment (lookin' at you, Global Industrial). Often it's just a ploy for reviews or further business.
With Sweetwater, it's different somehow. Yeah I'm sure their goal is to keep me as a customer so I'll spend more money with them in the future, sure, and I'm fine with that. But they don't lead with the money, they lead with the caring. And that makes all the difference in the world.
With McMaster it's almost precisely the opposite, I've never spoken to a human there and I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. They're like the supremely efficient robot that just produces the parts I need, immediately and without fail. There's no need for warm-fuzzies in this process, and they seem to understand that as well.
I sort of head up all "tech stuff" at my mid-sized church, including sound. (I also have played piano and bass, at times.) I had to talk my pastor into starting to use Sweetwater about 20 years ago. He was stuck on using some hole-in-the-wall shop in LA on Sunset. (Which I eventually visited, and, sure enough, every who's who has a signed headshot on their wall). But Sweetwater is in our back yard, and we've made the trip a couple of times, and there's just no comparison. Sweetwater's presence, with the rooms and the demos and the videos and every thing is just unbelievable. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was about salesmen. We've had the same one for 20 years, and he's always kept a close tab on us, and helped out whenever we've needed advice. It must be a great place to work to keep a salesman that long. They advertised hiring for programmers, and I'd LOVE to give them a shot, but I'd have to move, and I'm not ready for that. Kent? Love ya, man.
Oh yeah! Years before the above story took place, I happened to be in Fort Wayne and I needed an audio cable, so I swung by Sweetwater, not really knowing what to expect. Of course they had the cable, but they also had time to show me around the whole place, the showroom, the studios, the repair lab. I was a scruffy teenager spending less than twenty bucks, but they treated me like a visiting prince.
It's why, when I thought about getting a piano years later, I didn't really consider anyone else.
I've had two sales engineers now; Dontae who walked me through the keyboard choice apparently moved on, and I haven't had a need to call up Colton yet, but his name is in my notes, and I'm sure I'm in his.
MechE here as well. An alternative to McMaster is Misumi. Misumi is nice because you can order parts that are made to order (imagine a rod with the specific thread and length). No next day shipping like McMaster but being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number is huge (so you don’t need drawings or anything). They’ll ship you a couple books like the signature yellow book from McMaster. They’ll even host a seminar explaining why “good engineers design, great engineers integrate” (really only true for the industry and not consumer tech).
Misumi is awesome. It's basically Japan's answer to McMaster-carr.
10 years ago I would have said Misumi's website was better than MMC. Unfortunately Misumi has gotten a bit less usable over the past decade, while McMaster has improved. Misumi's paper catalogue is incredible though and I surprise myself to say I would rather browse it than either their or McMaster's website.
Top quality configurable / customizable parts is certainly the way of the future, and it's amazing that Misumi has the whole process figured out. You can get a custom precision leadscrew of the length you want with the ends turned down to the diameter you want and the retaining ring grooves you want, and buy just one piece for a reasonable price. Any ordinary machine shop would reject the order unless you bought fifty or more.
I think the most annoying thing about both sites is its weird ass names. Like it’s obvious that McMaster call certain things a certain way so that it’s less searchable elsewhere. Misumi takes this to a whole new level.
I've used Misumi on projects before. I've ordered all kinds of custom stuff including drive shafts and tons of different brackets. Everything comes neatly labeled and bagged. The best part IMO is the custom aluminum extrustion (8020 clone). You can order everything cut to length, with holes drilled, holes tapped, etc. The lead time sucks though. I'm green with envy over all my friends back home that get to use McmasterCarr.
Mil spec part numbers for things like screws are great! We needed a very long screw in a specific style and material that no one stocked. We pulled up the mil spec datasheet for that style of screw, made up the part number based on our needs, and sent it to our fastener vendor. We get back exactly what we designed for without having to spend time designing our own special purpose screw. The vendor already has the spec so we can just point to exactly what we want and none of us have to spend time going back and forth to find a compromise.
And Misumi works well in Europe, which helps a lot. They also have quite often great prices.
Now the catalog is not as far reaching as Mcmaster. We don't have a Mcmaster in Europe :(
> being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number
How does that work? I have been searching the internet for stainless steel M8 x 20 set screws with a torx socket, maybe uncommon but straightforward. I have yet to find these anywhere outside of having them manufactured in china by truckload - I need maybe 100.
"Set screw" means the same as "grub screw", i.e. a bolt where the entire thing is threaded, and the head is set within the bounds of the thread, not proud of it.
Torx grub screws are super uncommon, I don't think I've ever seen one. Usually they have a hex socket (for an allen key), or occasionally they're slotted (for a flat-blade screwdriver).
I think they are uncommon because torx drivers are always bigger than the head of the tool. They always taper down to the size as part of the design, so that doesn't work well for most applications.
I can get a straight torx screwdriver with shaft diameter smaller than the screw at my local hardware store. No need for worldwide shipping, I can get that on bike. There exist also torx bits with long shaft.
These are just standard parts though. Misumi's real configuration flexibility comes from parts that are parametrically defined. For example you can basically design a shaft by specing the material, coating, diameter, length, tolerances, and additional parametric features (external threading, tapped holes, flats, grooves, etc).
AND you can order that same part number again the next time! Configuration options are all built into the part number directly, so you can reference THAT exact number in your own internal documents if you choose to source from Misumi.
McMaster is a great choice when you can value your time.
There is no comparison shipping. You need an industrial tricycle that gets the job done? Great. Add an industrial tricycle to your cart. Unless there is a meaningful difference between models, there will be only one choice. It will be curated and it will do what you generally expect it to do.
You'll pay more than you can get it for elsewhere, but it will do the job and it will arrive on time.
That's McMaster's value proposition. It is often a very good one.
It’s arguably similar to the value proposition Apple brings to a lot of their customers. Time is money, and having things just work the way they’re supposed to seems to get rarer and rarer. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I dunno.
I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.
I’m sorry if you took offense to it, but none was meant and after some googling, it would seem most uses of the term are not offensive. I’ve heard engineers say it many, many times and never with malicious or hateful intent. Obviously, China is capable of manufacturing many wonderful products. For example, the Apple products I was just praising.
And then there’s AliExpress… I’m not sure how it’s racist to use a portmanteau of “Chinese” and “aluminium” in reference to low quality goods manufactured in China. But going forward, I’ll keep in mind that it could be considered offensive.
On the other hand, I take one look at this mostly-prefabricated building and I'm like "...I could use one of those." https://www.mcmaster.com/6704T998/
When a factory is a couple km long in either direction and a machine breaks the mechanics need to get their tool boxes there fast and safe. While street truck could be used (and often they are), a because of people walking around the top speed is no higher, and the trike is more maneuverable and so overall is faster than a truck.
Looks like they would be very useful on large industrial site with multiple buildings. Provide staff with bikes to get around, and cargo tricycles if they need to move small to medium loads.
It has come up when we've played the "McMaster Game" at our office, in which we attempt to guess random things that McMaster might or might not have.
Interesting things they have had in the past include basketball hoops (in a kit, ready to go, for all your "our institution needs a basketball court... today" needs) and a urinal.
But yes, there are real uses for industrial tricycles -- need to move some stuff (or a person) pretty far pretty quickly inside a warehouse? Industrial tricycle.
We use these in military aviation across the world. Stupidly useful when you’ve got 100+ lbs of tools to run out to a down aircraft that needs fixed to make a mission.
I can't talk about details but I know of large industry-leading aerospace manufacturers who don't use MMC for flight parts because they need batch-level part tracking for failure investigations, and MMC doesn't offer that.
The best tool for moving a person and up to about 300kg of stuff at 2-20km/h over nice surfaces.
Never need to charge/fuel it. A coaster brake model out of the weather can go years without any maintenance. Will work for decades with $50 worth of parts. Some models fit anywhere wheelchair accessible. Cheap enough that you don't need keys. Stores anywhere.
In an industrial setting they are extremely useful.
There is! IIRC, the first item McM ever sold through its website was an industrial tricycle (I think it was to an engineer at CERN, which has very long tunnels).
They don't have European operations so I'd imagine it's probably an accelerator in the US like Fermilab or SLAC, but otherwise that would make perfect sense.
It may be hard to find but there is a very good episode of 99% Invisible (are there bad ones?) that goes in depth on industrial tricycles. Only thing I can say to help you find it is that I think it was a 2015 episode, sorry.
Basically they are used to transport parts around large warehouses or factories.
I used to work for an auto supplier and saw the McMaster site and catalog nearly every day. The thing that was always fascinating about their site was they basically translated their Catalog 1:1 to the web and added some interactivity to it. It's similar to what IKEA did with the early versions of its website. As a result, McMaster's site is hyper-focused on presenting information in the densest and cleanest way possible because it's using techniques from print. It's not trying to upsell or advertise or offer support or this or that. It's pretty much the gold standard catalog-to-site port and one of the best ecommerce experiences out there.
That said, the way they've done things won't work for many ecommerce platforms. They're established, they have a massive catalog of highly-customizable parts, they sell in bulk, and they're (mostly) B2B. Those factors really lend themselves well to a simple, catalog-like experience. A new name selling to customers that only has 15 products isn't likely to benefit as much, although there are still things they could likely learn.
This doesn't go into the actual mechanics of finalizing your order, which is incredibly well done. I've only actually ordered from McMaster 3 times and don't have a need for anything right now so I might be getting details wrong, but basically, the "items in your cart" page has a shipping address and payment method pre-filled, and you just hit "order" and that's it. What's in stock, what ships when, etc. is all clearly labeled in each line item. There are number entry boxes to adjust quantities. You can put in your own part numbers, of course, and the items in the shipment will be labeled with that (or at least a reference to the line item on your invoice). First time I bought from them, I was blown away how clean and easy it was. You hear "industrial supply" and think the ordering process is going to end with "ok, now call us for a quote", but it's smoother than Amazon. Well done.
I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed. It's wonderful. I also appreciate that their search term tokenizer understands that you're looking for a thread size ('1/4"-20') and doesn't strip the non-alphanumeric characters like most would. (Amazon has gotten better at this over the years. I wanted to say "look at those idiots, giving you any screw that has the number 1, 4, or 20 in the description", but they bring up the parameterization as well.)
Finally, McMaster has a reputation for being pricey, but sometimes you just pay the same price that everyone pays for something. For example, say you want a set of Mitutoyo 4" digital calipers. On Amazon, which is rife with counterfeit knockoffs, you'll pay $136.94. On McMaster, you'll pay $129.19 (plus shipping, yeah I know). And it won't be counterfeit! As always, shop around, but they are not trying to screw you on price, or by subbing in counterfeit trash to make a few bucks. Truly a marvel of online shopping. I wish they sold everything.
> I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed.
This is something I wish more e-commerce sites would grok. I go to Lowes and type in
1/2" 10-32 stainless bolt
in the search box. Now I get a search result page, with filter parameters on the left side. Great. There's a checkbox that says "Stainless steel". Oh oh! What do I do now? Aren't the results already all stainless steel? I specified it in the goddamn search. If I select the checkbox, will I be filtering out things I want? Can I click the checkbox and remove "stainless" word from my search query and get more things I want? (hint: not usually). Why do I have different choices for screw thickness and thread pitch when I specified them, too? Come on, e-commerce developer-wizards, get your shit together!
Same for you, Amazon! "64GB sd card" and then Amazon's filter lets me further drill down... by capacity. DUHH, I specified the capacity! How can Amazon operate for almost 30 years and still not have this one figured out?
Amazon is shockingly bad at parametric searches. Products are routinely miscategorized, often ridiculously so, and frequently have missing or woefully inaccurate parameters (like treating a bundle of four 16 GB SD cards as "64 GB").
Even when Amazon's product parameters are correct, their filters are frequently outdated -- for example, their category for "internal hard drives" has a single filter for "4 TB & Above", even though capacities as high as 20 TB are available. They also have a filter for 1500 RPM (not 15k!) drives, which I'm pretty sure have been out of production for longer than Amazon has sold hard disks.
That's because labeling items with attributes and filling them correctly is manual work on behalf of a multitude of 3rd party sellers.
Some of them do a decent job, most don't. There are also incentives to completely ignore parametric search and throw as many ads at the customer as possible instead of relevant results.
I wanted to show up with an argument about how third-party sellers were lazy, but I think Amazon can fix this if they want to. If typing "4GB SD card" is parsed by their search engine into "select * from items where storage_capacity='4GB' and product='SD card'", then sellers that don't update their metadata simply won't sell another card ever again. As a result, they will instantly update their data and make sure it's correct. (I suppose "make sure it's correct" is where the plan becomes less clear, given how many fake drives there already are on Amazon. I guess they can figure that out with return rates, but by then a lot of fossil fuels have been squandered and a lot of time has elapsed.)
The 3rd party sellers are penalized already to some degree, and Amazon has begun suspending certain listings (you can still buy them if you have the direct link, they just won't appear in search) for missing certain attributes.
But IMO, it's not enough in some categories. Especially where item parameters and specs are critical for its interoperability and functionality.
Ecommerce filtering for electronics generally is terrible. I even made a hobby website for used electronics, specifically inspired by the precise parametric search we expect from McMaster and Digikey etc
I disagree with one thing: I usually go to Mcmaster to browse. I often have a problem, and I know that it must be a relatively common problem with an elegant solution, but I'm not experienced enough in that area to know what the solution is. Browse through the catalogue for a while and sure enough, there's a widget that's specifically designed to solve your problem. The design of the website makes it really easy to do that. Everything is well curated, labelled, described, tagged, and hierarchical.
There's also something weird with the way they programmed the site itself, which prevents you from opening certain links in a separate browser tab. it's really annoying when I'm not sure exactly what I need and I want to read all 10 product descriptions or whatever. I end up having to copy and paste the product URL and work backwards, rather than going all through the parts-filtering flow 10 times over from the beginning.
This drove me nuts for a while until I figured out the workaround:
Expand down to a specific item. Click the item number to open the "last choice for quantity and stuff before adding to cart" dropdown. In this, rightclick "Item Detail" and open in new tab.
Now in the new tab, head to the top right, "view catalog page", and you're back to the category.
On the point of hierarchy they are messing up their categories:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/
Hovering over the links in that category, you get links such as:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/foam
But clicking "foam" takes you to: mcmaster.com/foam/ and there's no link back to raw-materials. This is a mistake. They've booted you out of the hierarchy and neglect to offer breadcrumbs or equivalent category navigation.
Clicking "browse catalogue" menu fails to identify what category you're currently in.
If I'm in mcmaster.com/fabricating/ and click "drills", why am I taken to a page called "hand drills"? The naming is a mess. Why am I seeing screwdrivers on that page?
Pardon the pun, but if I drill down to the hammer drill product page, the URL is:
The issue is that their products don't fit into a neat hierarchy. Yes foams can be raw materials, but they can also be packing material, or insulation, or liners, or safety equipment. Similarly, polyurethane foam and stainless steel are both raw materials but no one thinks of them as the same thing, nor is there often a need to navigate easily between the two.
As for the urls, just having it be the part number is super convenient. There tend to be many different names for things and it's so easy to miscommunicate. Part numbers avoid ambiguity - it doesn't matter who made it or what you call it, if it has the right number it works. You can have an intern who doesn't know the difference between nut and a bolt but as long as they have that number they know exactly the url they need to go to.
It might not be a great set up for all ecommerce sites, but it's ideal for any site selling hardware.
> foams can be raw materials, but they can also be packing material
That's what sub-categories are for:
/foam/packaging/wrap or /foam/sound-absorbing/countoured
Hardware isn't some special case to abandon hierarchy. Hardware is perfectly suited to neat categories.
The site dips its toe into categories, but goes no deeper than /foam, even though it clearly lists about 20 foam categories. Each of those can be clicked, but the URL remains /foam. I highly doubt this is by design.
You mentioned packing foam. What if you wanted to send a link to your colleague showing all the packing foam this site offered? You can't do it easily. The best you can do at first glance, is send them to /foam and tell them to scroll down to "packaging and shipping" where 7 sub-categories of packing foam are listed.
There actually is a way to get the link to packaging foam, but you have to use the search bar to type it in manually. But don't press enter! You'll get taken somewhere else if you press enter, you must choose from the drop-down.
Amusingly, the site search doesn't want to respect my search term. When I search for "pickles" it takes me to "picks and pullers". What it should do is tell me it has no matches for pickles, but offer a suggestion.
Anyway, all good.. it's nice and fast and no doubt much loved site for parts pickers who know the part they want.
Eek I'm going to go against the grain here a little. That site is useful when you already know what you are looking for. For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
Obviously it's been made for exactly that purpose and does it well but for general e-commerce it's bad. The retailers are looking to send you to an area of their website with "stuff" you are interested in. For example you like toys because you're a parent who's buying your kids stuff for x-mas. The site wants to know that sort of thing and send you to the toys for x-mas section.
What Mcmaster.com looks like to me is an old fashioned mail order company that's converted their old mail order catalogue straight to a website, perfection.
Also note with Bezos tinkering with every pixel on the website is very old news, this doesn't happen anymore.
This is why I love building B2B software. You get to help people do their jobs, rather than trying to sell them things. The site in the OP is a fantastic example of building a tool to help someone be successful at their job.
To be fair, "searching for a present for my kid" is a legitimate job in the jobs-to-be-done sense... it's just a lot fuzzier than a "business job" which has external constraints.
Yeah the title is clickbait. McMaster is regularly praised in engineering forums, which is great. Clearly they nailed the UX for their users. There are some good lessons to learn from it, but it's not some sort of golden standard for e-commerce as a whole.
The main praise is usually search/filter, but that really comes down to this quote from the article:
> McMaster is able to provide such intuitive searching and filtering because everything that they sell is highly legible – it's all defined by quantitative specs.
Most products don't lend themselves so well to filtering.
An awful lot of products _would_ lend themselves to filtering, but the folks putting the sites together don't bother coming up with good parameters, or when they do, they don't populate them on all the relevant products.
This vexes me constantly on HomeDepot.com, for instance. I was looking for a set of sockets, either 1/4" or 3/8" drive, metric 6-point, deep, impact. I was shopping for sockets at the Depot because I was already buying some other things, and I honestly like Milwaukee's offerings in this space, so let's take a look.
Search for "metric deep socket", so far so good. Gets me into the category so parametric filters appear. Filter by "6-point" and all the sets disappear -- that parameter only applies to sockets sold individually, despite most sets consisting exclusively of 6-point or 12-point, rarely a mix, and they even indicate this in their item titles. The data is there, but you can't filter by it, because the site sucks.
Just the first example to mind because it happened two days ago.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible
Maybe that's the core issue. How are people expecting to interact with the site?
I think when you're selling with an obvious B2B focus, the "value subtract" nature of a lot of consumer-targeting selling practices become clear.
There's no point trying to jump a B2B customer through a bunch of cross-sells and (poorly) related products, because there's a fair chance he doesn't even have the purchasing authority to add any of them.
If your search or filtering sucks, time is money, and they're going to go somewhere that respects that.
Maybe what retailers should be looking at is ways to break up the "browse" from the "focused buy" experience.
Instead of getting me in-cart for the browsing experience, build some external content. Instead of "here's a category of 3000 toys, start clicking", write up some high quality articles about different products, target markets, etc. with deep product links. Since you're curating the content, you have a chance to "conveniently" sort the products to promote what you want or whoever gives you a kickback for browsing customers, while not frustrating the "focused buy" customer with a deluge of EKTIBAQNN brand USB cable/fire-starters.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
No one is going on McMaster just looking for something interesting to buy. And frankly if you're not amazon, odds are people are trying to buy something specific from you as well.
Besides the handy website, their many-thousand page phsyical catalog is great. We have a copy at work and it's easy to spend a long time flipping through, learning about all of the different things they have, and why they are useful.
My homebrew keg was leaking CO2, and the brewing supply company only sells the same crappy (= non-silicone) o-rings that had just failed. They wanted something dumb like $25 for a replacement part.
Enter McMaster-Carr. For significantly less money than fixing one bad o-ring, I have a pile of replacement sets for every seal in the system.
Another vote for McMaster-Carr. It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all. I don't know of any other websites that meet that relatively simple standard.
Perhaps part of why their website is so good is because they deliver the goods. They follow through. Ever need a 4x8 sheet of copper? It gets delivered to your front door. Sooner than you expect, and at a very fair price.
Yeah. It's kind of like how in chess, many learners study openings and gambits and obscure checkmates, when the low hanging fruit is just learning to spot and avoid blunders.
MMC is mostly about not making the mistakes everybody else makes, which puts it near the top even before you consider what they do well.
I think everyone knows what the "mistakes" are, it's just that its en vogue to "hate your customers" the way amazon and similar companies do, racing to the bottom to squeeze money out of them with dark patterns instead of just charging more for good service
Amazon doesn't hate their customers nor do they love their customers.
They clearly are indifferent to customers except to the point required by law, or as needed to keep the cash flowing in.
It costs money to do the things that MMC does and Amazon prefers volume and revenue over the margins that MMC can command by providing quality service.
McMaster's pricing and structure also self-selects for the right kind of customer -- customers who are willing to pay a reasonable premium for quality, speed, and customer service.
+1 for "self-selects" for the right kind of customer. Self-selecting is interesting. Mine was a need, not a hobby, it was not a luxury. And like the original post pointed out, there was no need to convince me to buy. So I wonder if there needs to be another Amazon, one that it focused on those customers who "need" something?
Also, my own experience was that I did not pay a "premium". I really did need 1/2 sheets of copper on a regular basis. I could get small pieces at a premium. I could get larger sheets by driving for a hour or ... I could pay about the same total cost or less and get them delivered to my door... This was not limited to a few items. I needed plastic bags, about quart size. Again I got just functional bags - not shoddy at all - at a very reasonable price. The same things at amazon would have been a) not functional or b) impossible to find among all the shoddiness.
> It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all.
Sad to say, comparing them to most other sites where you try (or attempt to try -- yes, often it is that bad) makes a case for saying, yes indeed, they are great!
I like buying auto parts from RockAuto. Their website is dead simple to use. They have nice features like good/better/best, showing the most popular item of that category for that car, an icon for OEM parts, and another icon that shows items in the same warehouse as the item in your cart. So when you can't decide between a dozen brands of sparkplugs, you can pick one that is both OEM and is in the same warehouse as the air filter you needed so you only have to pay for one shipping cost.
I used to. Then I bought a part that didn't fit (a switch that obviously didn't have the right number of terminals), and the return process turned me off.
I still check them though as they often have good enough parts for a lot less than OEM prices. Though I also still go to the OEM when I get tired of third party parts that don't work (after the switch issue above I went to my local auto parts store - the switch fits but doesn't work, I'll see what the OEM part does. Rock auto was $8, local store $20, deal $140 - but I trust the dealer switch will work for another 20 years)
I find that to be the case for many "industrial" (for the lack of better word) online stores. E.g. for plastic containers, https://www.usplastic.com/ is similar.
I’d like to add RockAuto as a peer to McMaster. It’s auto parts, and somehow uglier than McMaster, but damn if it isn’t the fastest no nonsense website I’ve seen for parts.
I can drill down to a specific part for a specific car in seconds, and see pics of the product, part numbers, specs. It’s lovely.
Rockauto is one of my favorite things in the world. The site is a perfect case study in how to make a UX that's ugly as sin but has evolved to be a million times more usable than anything the "minimal sleek modern UX" crowd could ever come up with.
You always roll the dice with aftermaket parts of course, but my experience has been that they usually don't sell utter crap like you'll find on Amazon and eBay. They make some effort to verify that the parts are not bottom-of-the-barrel because they don't want to deal with returns and after all, they are car people themselves.
My favorite thing that I like to tell people that have not heard of RockAuto yet: I can buy a full of wiper blades for my two cars for about the same price as ONE mid-quality wiper blade at Walmart.
"People visit McMaster-Carr with high intent to buy a specific part, that's it."
Mcmaster is great, but it's important to point out there's no brand or product selection decisions. You pick your criteria and get exactly one option. It lends itself to a very different experience.
How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
> How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
This would be great for many things! I'm sure there are plenty of people who just want a good quality, reasonably priced -whatever- and would be fine with this model. Actually, that seems like it's basically just the business model for Kirkland.
If there was a retailer who just sold one carefully-chosen thing in each category, I think they'd do pretty well. They wouldn't be able to capitalize on market segmentation, fashion trends, etc. which would hurt their profitability, but they'd also benefit from being the "default" choice for many people.
You never have to worry about it being junk, though. When I order fasteners, metal parts to be machined/used in fabrication, or just misc. supplies from McMaster-Carr, I know whatever supplier they are using will be high quality and the part won't be a counterfeit. It also seems that they tend to stick with US manufacturers if possible.
I agree. Amazon over-indexed on being the world's biggest store and chose to do zero curation. I'm thinking they thought reviews would solve for bringing quality to the top before learning how badly gamed they'd become. Now about half of what I get on Amazon has to go right back. So much junk.
Wouldn't that be exactly the same, just with more filters?
When I am on Amazon, trying to find something, I always feel like I have to fight the site, rather than being helped by it. Paid ads, very poor categorization/property-search, deceptive UX, fake reviews, "amazon picks" etc etc etc. And when I find the right product, I might receive a fake.
I think what people enjoy and celebrate about McMaster-Carr is that it is exactly the opposite of that.
It might not work, and it doesn't have to. McMaster isn't designed to be a highly competitive retail marketplace for the average consumer or the average consumer product.
It's for people building things that already have a good idea of what they need. For the most part, if you need an 18mm long 1/4-20 flange head hex-socket grade-8 bolt in a black oxide finish, you don't care about having a ton of options from different manufacturers, because there should not be a meaningful difference between any of them.
This is basically Costco, Trader Joe's, or IKEA -- all well-loved business. Small selection but their customers like what's on offer and don't have to comparison shop. Turns out that people really like soviet store style businesses and "huge selection" doesn't really live up to the marketing hype.
This is almost exactly the problem Thread is solving for clothing (I worked there for >7 years).
Big retailers will have 100 different white t-shirts to choose from. Thread will (roughly) tell you which white t-shirt to buy.
The tricky bit is that fashion is _so_ personal, so what you have to do is actually have all 100 (or in many cases _far_ more), with all the necessary data to be able to differentiate, and then understand "style" in such a way that you can confidently recommend specifics. I'm biased, but I think Thread has become really very good at this.
The counterpoint to this is that a site like Amazon can still succeed to dominate the industry despite being a horrendous mess with nonfunctional search, a horrendous counterfeiting problem, and widespread review fraud. Does take the wind out of the sails of IA/UX purists somewhat.
Amazon does not dominate the market that McMaster-Carr exists in. It's not even in the running. If you attempted to use Amazon for the type of project McMaster-Carr exists to support, you're going to get laughed at at best. MMC/Misumi/Grainger/etc. own industrial/mechanical, Digikey/Mouser/Arrow/etc. own electronics, RockAuto owns automotive aftermarket, etc. It's actually incredible how little fight Amazon has put up in these markets.
I feel like the part everyone is ignoring is that McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection. The features people are raving about in this article and thread only make sense in the context of selling bolts for industrial use, and could never be implemented at a place like Amazon.
I don't love McMaster due to their insane over packaging and environmental issues, but this
> McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection.
is not the case. They sell virtually anything anyone in an industrial environment could possibly be interested in. See other comments about "industrial trikes" and feel free to choose some arbitrary thing and try to find it there.
This is the frustrating thing for me, they are objectively very good at what they do, but in a completely unsustainable way.
What's wrong with mcmaster's packaging? Every time I've ordered, it's been plastic ziplocks or carboard boxes in a main box stuffed with brown paper. That's about as minimal as you can get.
If you have a problem with that, well, I have some bad news about how commerce, medical, and industry go about wastage in general. Bought 1000' of foobar filler rod and only used 50'? Chuck the rest cause it'll cost more in labor to deal with the excess.
Maybe they have changed, I'll admit it has been a few years. But I would routinely get a gigantic box that was 99% empty space. For example, I ordered ~8 feet of a specific brass rod (~1/4 inch diameter). Instead of a tube they used a rectilinear box that was big enough to fit a human inside.
Never mind industrial uses. It’s nearly impossible to find the right sized bolt or screw for a basic residential task on Amazon. For example, to replace a furniture screw that was lost during a move.
Amazon succeeds because they can get a tube of toothpaste, an onion, a washing machine, an extension cord, a can of paint and an iPad at your doorstep in under a day. Sure their search interface might not be the best but no one really cares. They are a logistics company, and don’t go too deep into any one niche.
I've never emailed them but I have called them on a few occasions. Somehow they pick up before it even rings once. And it's a real person, not a phone tree. Pretty remarkable.
They are really fast to get back to you and will tell you what stuff is which can be helpful in certain situations where the material or vendor might matter.
It's a lot less common than you think, especially by email. In my spare time, I work on motorcycles, and I often have to source specific parts or - in rare cases - reach out to a local machine shop. I've given up on email, a phone call is often the only way to get a response.
When you work in the tech industry, you get accustomed to everything being done by text, but the rest of the world isn't so convinced :)
I agree so much. It's what every single mail order company should have done. Freaking parametric search eaverywhere and uniform engraving style pictures so that your eye quickly catches the difference between the screw types.
McMaster is like the backend of an auto parts store. You tell the clerk what you need and they might ask if you want the cheap or premium version, then you pay and leave. You don't want to walk the aisles looking at stuff because you've got a dead alternator that needs to be replaced by Monday morning. Shopping at Amazon is like going to a massive department store. They've got everything but they lay out the store in a way that almost forces you to browse. You aren't in a rush because you are just looking at kitchen gadgets and might also be interested in buying a new pillow.
At some point several years ago, Amazon actually tried to compete with Mcmaster and others selling in this niche. They had a sub-site or something like that, I think it was called "Amazon Pro" and it focused on nothing but the sorts of parts and fittings that Mcmaster sells. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as Mcmaster, and it sank (AFAICT) without a trace.
I referenced Small Parts in another post. They weren't really a McMaster knockoff. They specialized in physically small items while McMaster carried everything industrial.
I still have an 8"x10"x0.062" 6061 aluminum sheet I bought from Small Parts probably 15+ years ago, still in the plastic wrap. Don't even remember what I wanted it for :-)
I really wish DigiKey would fire their web team and have McMaster's web team run their site.
DigiKey's website has gone downhill so dramatically the past five years or so... it's astonishing. Random failures, login attempts just redirect back to their homepage, horizontal scrollables inside of vertical scrollables (?!?!!), and that new filtering scheme that has javascript that grays-out/disables options randomly in response to you moving your mouse the wrong way. WTF.
Please DigiKey, learn from McMaster. Your website is junk, kill it with fire and start over. I love everything else about Digikey.
most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
I wish digikey was as good as McMaster. With digikey I often have to parse through a huge table with many pages to figure out what the difference is between a bunch of search results. On McMaster you can clearly see search results categorized in sub tables and densely arranged to make clear what the options are.
Are there any electronics websites that actually organized like McMaster?
Electronics are a different market than the one that McMaster serves. Frequently at Digikey, you need an exact part number from a specific manufacturer. Or, if you're buying parts at scale, you might be quite price-sensitive.
At McMaster, there would be one 555 timer, one utility op-amp that implements the LM741 spec, one low-noise op-amp, one 5V regulator, etc. They would all perform at or somewhat above average, but you wouldn't know precisely what you were getting.
There probably is room for a McMaster-like Digikey (or a simplified Digikey storefront for those who aren't picky about details), but it is unclear how large its market opportunity might be. It might look kinda like SparkFun.
A lot of the time, details in electronics really do matter. I think I've ordered almost every variation of the LM35 temperature sensor over my career. Sometimes you care more about price, sometimes you care more about accuracy. McMaster would probably only stock one of the grades, not sure which.
I was thinking the same. Digikey, Mouser, etc. are great, but their websites don’t give me the same confidence that McMaster does. There’s always a fear in the back of my mind when browsing these electronics sites, wondering if the part I’m looking for slipped through the cracks of my filters.
When filtering McMaster on the other hand, I have absolute confidence that I will find the part I’m looking for, assuming it is stocked. It’s really intuitive and robust. I’m sure much of this can be chalked up to the fact that McMaster has a much smaller and more specific catalog, but still.
EVERY online retailer should take notes on how McMaster is able to create psychological safety when browsing. It’s a real peace of mind, as strange as that may sound.
digikey, mouser, and arrow are the big ones that I'm aware of. All of their UX is really bad compared to McMaster though.
I love when a field value table has redundant values for 20mm, 2cm, 2.0cm, 20mm with a trailing space, etc. A lot of the value-add here from McMaster comes from pure data cleanup and categorization and cleaning up the categories and fields. That gets way harder to do on something the size of mouser or digikey though, they have a LOT of product types in the catalog, and tens of millions of products in their warehouses. Just cataloging it all is a massive amount of work.
I'd actually be curious what the data structure of the McMaster catalog is to support that. It's a cool website, it makes it seem so effortless to search for parts.
Digi-key definitely could sanitize/normalize their field values better. But I feel they are intentionally being conservative about touching datasheet values given by the vendors.
In practice (based on experience of selecting electronic components), I don't find this a big issue; after filtering on some other obvious, more binary fields, what left is often a small enough pool of values (like 16V, 16.0V, 12-20V, etc.) to be manually selected/checked.
https://tme.eu does a better job of this. If you enter "16V", it knows to also select the 12-20V ranges. It also works the other way around, you can enter "10-22u" in the parameteric search and it will find both 10uF and 22uF parts.
So annoying that digikey doesn't do this, you have to click each value/range separately.
I was also intimidated by the huge table and hundreds of columns the first time I use Digi-Key, but only later realized how handy it is to have all the parameters listed together. It makes comparison subtle difference of each parts so much easier.
The filter above will also tell you existing enum values within the current showing list, so you will instantly get an idea you are comparing.
Again, both have their advantages, but I recommend give it a try. Finding parts isn't any harder this way.
I use filters all of the time, but they frequently don't work (as mentioned but a sibling comment) sometimes the filter value don't allow a range so if you want anything between 10 and 100 you have to select all of the values between 10 and 100. Other times, the options aren't sorted so you have to select 10,000 uf and 10 mf and 0.01 F. Still other times numeric values are sorted alphabetically so you get 1 ohm, 1.1 kohm, 1.2 megaohm, 2 ohm, etc. So to select a range you need to clock through around the entire range of values looking for the order of magnitude you want.
also, the reason why they're all good is because they're not trying to sell you anything. they're for people who are at work, know what they need, know they have options on where to buy. therefore it's streamlined as much as possible to make life at work easy (which becomes their differentiator, along with easy billing terms and fast shipping), rather than market things to people who aren't even making decisions on what to buy...
"Functional websites" is not what we are discussing here, but amazing websites.
I've seen a carparts store online and it had something really similar, a few words like "oil filter 2017 ford mustang" and you were literally looking at the part in the dropdown list, exactly what you want.
What do most sites do wrong?
1) Not loading the search data into RAM on the server so it is really fast - most companies could do this with their level of stock and only need a couple of GB per web server
2) Requiring a postback to start filtering
3) Not allowing the ordering of search terms to be changed e.g. "Ford Mustang Oil Filter" should match the same as "Oil Filter Ford Mustang"
4) Not having images for all results
5) Not being able to zoom in on images to check something is what you think it is
6) Using a stock image which doesn't necessarily match the item
For companies whose primary interface with the public is searching for stuff, most e-commerce sites I use are shamefully bad at both performance and usability.
Wow, Jameco -- I haven't thought about them for a long time. When I was a kid I used to get those paper catalogs full of electronics parts and browse through them, wishing I had both
1) the money to order whatever I wanted from them
and 2) the knowledge to make cool things with all of those parts.
One of these days I'm going to find some time and do a few electronics projects. I've always been interested, and I did a fair amount of simple experimentation as a kid, but as an adult life has kept me busy with other pursuits.
RS, on the other hand, are so-so. The new JavaScript stuff looks shinier but still they don't surface out-of-stock status in the search which is infuriating when do many things are on long lead times.
I often hear about McMaster from US sources and how great it is (though you pay for convenience), but are there equivalents in Europe? France in my case.
Small note on the part about the price range UI controls: the author criticizes Amazon for using min, max number inputs rather than a slider control.
2 arguments against a slider:
1. Potentially it is much harder to make an accessible slider control.
2. Sliders break down when you have a distribution skewed away from normal. For instance, if 90% of results are in the range $0-$50, but then a few results are over $1000, how do you calibrate the slider? A naïve approach would render it almost unusable if you want to limit to products between $20 - $30. Otherwise you need some sort of logarithmic scale. I've not seen examples of this being done well.
Agree with you here. I thought the article made some good points but I've also been bitten by the "naive" [mix, max] slider you describe - I did yearn for some good old text boxes back then!
What a beautiful, functional, perfect e-commerce site. After so much frustration looking for parts and tools at big box store web sites, this is fresh like a sea breeze. Sold, 100%.
In fact, I was just browsing Home Depot for some tool hooks, but I think I'll buy them from this place instead.
The website design itself is very similar to how other ecommerce sites used to be 20 years ago, at least in my part of the world. Unfortunately we seem to have lost a lot of the simplicity over the years.
McMaster is the golden example of only trying to sell people what they need.
No upselling, no "popularity" filtering, no cheap imports that under-perform. You don't reviews to select between items because if you know what you need, you just buy that.
Of course this requires some expertise. You need to know what you need. And that's where the value of a physical trade shop comes in, where you can go, talk, even show the problem to somebody who might have seen your problem before.
I was very confused when Ben Krasnow pronounced McMaster with a "mick" at the beginning. For 10+ years of my English education nobody bothered to explain that Mc is "mack", but sometimes it's pronounced "mick".
I was aware something is going on when Tyler McVicker introduced himself with "mick".
English teachers usually have a typical repertoire of their pet details like schwa and so on, but seems there's a blind spot here.
I expect pronunciation largely boils down to regional and personal preferences.
The "Mac" prefix means "son of" and "Mc" is an abbreviation of that. The "a" is schwa and where I grew up, is pronounced with a short I, as "mick". But I have heard others pronounce it "mack". The McDonalds ads on TV and radio seem to try to split the difference by pronouncing it "meck".
It's also possible that some people go out of their way to say "mack" in an attempt to acknowledge and avoid the "mick" slur that was sometimes used in England and in the US against Irish and Scottish immigrants.
I love having a Grainger within walking distance of my workplace because it means I can order some bearings (or whatever) and go pick them up on my lunch break. Grainger's prices are nothing amazing but sometimes the total purchase price ends up being less than all other options when you don't have to pay for shipping.
That Amazon sucks at finding what you‘re looking for is perhaps not a bug, but a feature. Many here on HN have the engineer‘s mindset where shopping for an item is just solving a problem. But perhaps, for most people, online shopping is something different altogether. Perhaps the a sizable majority of people actually enjoy „hunting“ for a good deal. They, perhaps, enjoy getting „inspirations“ along the way. So Amazon, through testing, might find that making search very fuzzy and even customer reviews not very reliable to actually boost sales.
In an ideal world, I‘d like Amazon to filter fake reviews, weigh the rating of products with hundreds of reviews higher than those with just a handful of reviews, and give me filters to exclude words, search by strings, block particular brands, sort not only by price but by price per unit, and so on. I used to think that Amazon was just lazy in not implementing these things. But I now suspect that the real reason is that they‘ve found that most people do not want to shop like that. For them, shopping perhaps is much less about mere „procurement“ than about gamification, the thrill of the hunt, and entertainment.
I believe it's not about customer enjoyment, it's about profits. If a customer spends more time on the website, they might buy more stuff they don't even need.
It's the same reason why you have to waltz to the back of every supermarket to buy essential items, walk back to the front, and look at individually packaged, overpriced snacks for several minutes while waiting in line at the register.
Allow me to correct: "Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used" that only those of you in the US, or possibly North America, will be able to use in any practical sense, which is I'd guess at most about 60-70% of HN's readership.
I got pretty excited looking at this site because I'm refurbishing my home at the moment, and doing most of the work myself, so new suppliers of materials and tools always catch my eye. I'm not sure Screwfix et al really cut it next to this but then, of course, I noticed all the prices are in dollars and all the measurements are of the somewhat ironically named imperial variety.
Is there anything like this for the UK market? I've noticed that CPC and their various subsidiaries (Farnell, for example) can be pretty good, depending on what you need. But you seem to need a set that includes Screwfix, Toolstation, CPC, Farnell, RS, and a bunch of tool vendors (like SGS and Toolden) to really cover it off. I ended up buying specialist drillbits from a niche supplier that I can't even remember the name of now.
This is a great example of doing one niche incredibly well. Another example I've seen of doing this well is motorcycle parts[1]. You select your motorcycle, it presents you with a set of schematics of the bike split by function - for example you pick the Cam chain tensioner. You pick the schematic for the part you want and it'll show you the schematic with every part numbered, and a numbered list beside it with the name of the part, the part number, the price and a "buy" button. So simple, works absolutely perfectly.
It sort of reminds me of a video game UI for an RPG or something. Game UIs usually do a great job of organizing and simplifying complex hierarchical information and making it quick and intuitive to find what you need. A lot of the web tech I've built over the years has been inspired by well designed games.
Yes completely agree. I was going to post the same thing and did a quick CTRL+F to see if anyone else felt similarly. I don't even play video games that often but this immediately made me think "Wow this really feels like a video game somehow"
mcmaster is great, i had ordered a small part from once and wanted a catalog, asked them what the order minimum was for a catalog and they emailed me back basically saying "a catalog is on its way" no asking if i actually wanted a catalog or what my address was, they just sent the 20lb book over
The first thing I tried is, does middle-click open a new tab properly? Turns out it does, which already puts this site above average compared to a lot of online shops I use, simply for not breaking a standard browser feature!
Ways I've seen it done wrong include middle-click/Control+click not working at all, because the links are some kind of onclick="javascript:" monstrosity, or the link working but some script in the background also redirecting the page on the tab I originally clicked on.
(I can understand some kind of "flow control" during the checkout process to stop you from double-submitting the "place order" request. But not when I'm browsing the products, and sometimes want two tabs open side by side to compare things.)
Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
/s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
But the whole point is that the UX of the website is perfect. It has nothing to do with what the webapage is built on.
It could be built on PHP, it could be Java, it could be node, it could ASP.NET but if it's fast and with perfect UX like Mcmaster.com, what's the difference?
It is definitely possible to build such a website using all the mentioned languages, they have happened to have chosen ASP.NET and have done it well, but I wouldn't blindly throw everything else under the bus with such a comment.
And they aren't clear of "fancy web shenanigans" as well, they use socket.io and their website is unusable without Javascript so there's a lot of going on and this isn't your typical static website anyway.
So I think your sarcasm is a bit out of place in this instance.
And yes, I'm biased as I've been node.JS developer for a long time but I don't agree that the languages are the ones building shitty UX webpages that are slow... it's the developers that do that.
> Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
Ah yes, the oh-look-a-shiny-thing development paradigm.
It's pretty good. On at least two occasions I've had to look in multiple categories for stuff that I wanted.
Sometimes they sell a bolt, but sometimes they don't carry the companion nut (when dealing with specific stuff like alloy or specialty breakaway nuts, etc).
My one complaint about their website (they don't give you an estimate of shipping costs in advance, so you just have to hope they're reasonable) has supposedly been fixed since the last time I ordered from them
I don’t always see it but sometimes on their home page there is an element that shows a few random products with their nice line drawings they do for the product. This just feels like it would be a really cool thing to put up on an e-reader as a kind of digital photo frame. Just random nice line art of McMaster products, hopefully just reusing the existing web element they display on their home page. If anyone works this up please let me know!
McMaster in general for all things high quality if I need to make something. Calipers, verniers. Tap sets. Electrically conductive TPU filament. Amazon is for crap.
OMG I frikkin hate McMaster's navigation and comparison options. Their standardization is even quite sloppy, i.e. some screw vendors apparently include the head height in the length spec, and you don't find this out until your box of #2-56's show up for your precision fixture and are ~1mm too short.
I always tolerated McMaster's crappy UX as just a symptom of how MEs are willing to tolerate more shaggery than CS types.
IOW the "principle of least surprise" is not even expected to be observed in the ME world. We're talking about a product category -- machine screws -- that has been full standardized for over 100 years. And when McMaster still manages to crap the bed, the rebuttal is "why didn't you load up the CAD model and verify things yourself?"
They are very smart. And weird. During my final round with the CTO I was waiting for him in his office on a couch. The couch was in a living room-like area of the office. After a few minutes of waiting I turned around. The CTO was sitting there staring at me; I've no idea for how lone. I stared back, then said "hi, I'm moeymo1. Are you Mr. X?" We started the interview.
They are conservative because the owners "like getting their dividend check and eating caviar" I was told. Apparently they tried to expand internationally in the 1970s when an employee wanted to move home and start a warehouse there. It turns out "home" was Iran, and the warehouse and its contents were seized after the revolution. That apparently put them off international expansion for a very long time.
They can pay big bonuses like financial firms. I didn't take the offer because they were too odd. Years later I ran into a woman that used to work there. Apparently they are super, um, not nice to women, at the exec level. She left for Grainger.
I had a question about a bracket and its datasheet. The secretary put me on hold for 45s, and someone with a Japanese accent answered and said he was the lead engineer of that line(?!?!)
Like within 1m total, I had the authoritative answer down to the .002 deg, and the head engineer answering me.
So, I buy Misumi.
I also find McMaster is also in that top list of "Just buy from them and not worry!"
Wherever possible, I vastly prefer to buy online from a company who actually:
A) Understands what they’re selling
Really, there is no B, except for another feature that’s made it easier to buy from retail sites: Apple Pay.
Apple Pay on websites has made it much easier to buy from companies where I won’t drop by often enough to warrant creating an account. One-click checkout without the Amazonian death by a thousand cuts.
McMaster is the greatest retail website to ever exist, albeit in a bit of a niche.
I used to absolutely LOATHE tracking down a specific bolt, nut, fitting, coupler, etc... but McMaster completely changed that. If I need something specific, I'm going to McMaster first every single time, and I'm almost always ordering from them. If it's something really expensive I might cross shop elsewhere, but McMaster is easily the most pleasant platform out there, and I like knowing I can just immediately ship stuff back if it doesn't work for me (no authorizations, just return it).
You pay a little premium, but it beats driving to 50 different local stores to find out no one has what you need, or ordering from another online retailer and not really being confident when your order will show up.
I'm a hobby guy when it comes to this stuff, but if I owned a business I'd be drinking the kool-aid even more. Time is money, and McMaster is reliable and fast as hell.
I normally browse HN incognito on my phone but had to go to my desktop and login to say this: I fucking love MMC and their website. I got into woodworking during the pandemic and eventually built a loft bed for my son. I needed some very specific sizes of furniture bolts in small quantities and Amazon just didn't have what I needed. McMaster-Carr to the rescue!
I agree that they aren't the cheapest, but the quality is unimpeachable and the shipping is fast and reasonable even for small (i.e. retail) orders. I also love how everything in the catalog includes a brief but concise description of what it is used for.
Also, at the risk of perpetuating (largely accurate) stereotypes about gender psychology, it's clear that the website is designed around the typical male shopper: I am shopping to fulfill a very specific need and I want to acquire the solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I think the stereotypical female experience is wanting to see the breadth of items available, and maybe "oh wouldn't this go nicely with that thing you bought?" I really don't think the stereotype is true, though. I LOVE browsing McMaster with no specific items in mind, and would not at be mad about "you just bought 1/4-20 18-8 stainless steel screws. here are nuts."
All in all, I'd say to be careful with stereotypes. I'm sure women love the McMaster-Carr shopping experience.
I am lucky enough to live in the same town as a McMaster Carr warehouse. If you are close enough you can pick up your own order a few hours after it's in... I highly recommend checking it out if you can! So much automation... Conveyer belts... :)
McMaster is defintely amazing. Now I wish that Digikey and Mouser got their shit together when it comes to providing models and footprint files without me having to scour the internet for them, without having to login to various sites.
I guess it's a pretty complicated problem. There are so many suppliers, standards, file formats and competing interests. But it does seem like it's a market ripe for disruption... somehow.
I’ve posted this on HN before, but I’ll say it again. At my work, an idea is more likely to be prototyped if it can be done with parts available on McMaster. Sometimes I just browse the McMaster catalogue to come up with design ideas.
McMaster doesn't show you shipping and tax before you place your order! How is that legal? Everything else is fantastic though. I adore their catalogs and having the print version is a point of pride.
Because most of their business comes from other businesses that receive quotes and pay net 30. The buyer already has a FedEx account so they just send that and it's billed monthly.
Purchasing from McMaster is a very refreshing experience. Couldn't agree more. Loads quickly, looks the same on any browser I tried it on, I don't feel lost or like I'm wasting my time. However, it raises a quetion for me, how is it that they're able to stay in business and simultaneously respect their customers' time and sanity? If you look at the way other sites are designed, you'd just assume there's no way to make money with a frictionless, no frills, no distractions, no tricks storefront.
You answered your own question - they're able to stay in business because they respect their customers' time and sanity. People may not use McMaster because they land on the homepage and see a “Mega Deal” going on in a product they don’t need. People who visit the site are almost certainly going to buy something. Compare that to other e-commerce sites where people just visit to check specs, compare prices or just landed on the page from the search index.
I get it. Only certain customers get to have their dignity respected. It makes sense I guess, if you're a low value customer you're just not going to get the same treatmeant as valued customers.
Their description of the site and its usefulness is probably correct, but I think people are taking the wrong message from it. Mcmaster.com isn’t good because of its UX. The service would be exactly as useful had it looked exactly like Amazon.com. Its UX is simply secondary to its inventory and logistics.
Simply put - to build a successful business focus on the entire business and not just the website. People can get over an unintuitive UI and slow search. They cannot get over the fact that you don’t carry what they want.
It is clear that it is a site designed for people that just need to order parts for cars. I’ve never spent more than 45 seconds to find the exact part I’m looking for.
I don't fully agree with the slider the author is sugegsting.
If my price range is 21 - 45, I don't want to fiddle with a double tick slider dragging it pixelwise to get to the exact numbers I want. Not everyone has perfect hand and mouse dexterity to move it a couple of pixels. Not some senior citizens.
It's easier and faster for me to enter two numbers or just one number for the max. I don't need to enter a min number. Plus Amazon is already showing some popular ranges. I think
Living in Germany I'm really disappointed there is nothing like Mcmaster here. Misumi is kind of close, but is online-only and doesn't work with private customers.
>It's not the most visually stunning site, but that doesn't matter here - McMaster has chosen function over form.
Why do we tend to pretend this kind of thing isn't beautiful. Most people would agree it is.
Why do we tend to pretend function and form are two different things. Even as a colloquialism it's misleading. No need to throw visual design under the bus, what you enjoy about this site is the product of such design done thoughtfully.
The inverse to this website being the Australian equivalent blackwoods[1] which is the worst website ever.
As you search I’m pretty sure it downloads the entire database of items after each key stroke. No standardised tags on things like bolt sizes ( try quickly find M20 grade 8.8 galv bolts).
My only complaint about McMaster is that their search integration is a bit wonky:
- However they've managed SEO, searches for their part numbers on normal search engines never have the part page as a result
- Searching for part numbers on their page only takes you to the series page for that part number, rather than the "Product Details" page for the part.
Last I checked they don’t deliver to Canada so not the best site I have used as I couldn’t order the parts I needed. They were the only one who had the part I needed so had to get an American friend to buy it and ship it to me afterwards. I really hope they can see Canadians would buy from them if we could.
When you target the general population, it's sadly more profitable to design for exploitable, manipulateable, lowest common denominator. You can only have nice things if your consumer base isn't generally morons and you are therefore somewhat protected from predation by unscrupulous companies.
The world would be a slightly better place if everyone had some form of engineering background. Not necessarily software nor mechanical, just an inkling of making things more efficient, more logical, and more usable.
Part of McMaster is the execution. You order 5 different things, as you realize you need them during a build. They show up tomorrow in one box. There is one shipping charge. Amazon doesn’t even come close.
I tip my hat to them, the most reliable execution I’ve seen from any supplier, always on time, always on target.
I build my own HVAC system for a guest house last summer and I got to be really impressed with supplyhouse.com. You can find all the part you need very easily and they shipped quickly. Some of these specialized store websites are WAY nicer than trying to find something on Amazon on Ebay.
Rock Auto is great, definitely more consumer oriented and delivery is much slower, seems like professional mechanics rely on same day delivery. The biggest difference I see is that McMaster is curated, you want something there is usually one or maybe a couple options and it doesn't usually openly display the manufacturer. Rock Auto shows you all the options.
Aside from their very good and intuitive site, McMaster's delivery speed is excellent. I use them for parts for my 'non profit' old car addiction, orders appear ridiculously fast in stout cardboard boxing. Perfect gold standard ecommerce imo
My absolute favorite part about McMaster-Carr as a 3d printing enthusiast is the 3d models. Countless side projects have been saved with the ability to print a weirdly specific m<x> nut/bolt to validate a build before purchasing them in bulk.
I have fond memories of the Small parts catalog (and e-commerce site). Amazon bought them and then destroyed the ability to search. I've since discovered that the tubing and small screw portion of their company lives on as componentsupply.com.
The illustrations/photos/images are extremely well done. This sort of consistency and “flattening” of the stile is not trivial at all (the author mentioned the absence of color, but the point of view and shading is also consistent).
I know someone who worked there for several years. From what I heard they take very good care of their employees as well and because of that tend to have folks that stick around for ~5 years on average. Unheard of in tech.
I love McMaster-Carr. It’s one of the only places online to reliably get quality titanium fasteners for racing applications. Between all my hobbies I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with them.
I worked as an engineering technician in the facilities management realm for a couple of years and this resource was a godsend for just knowing what materials were commercially available for use.
The only downside to their site is that it does not render correctly on mobile. But they now have an app (at least on iOS) that provides a UI and workflow akin to their website.
I used the YUI framework back in the days for "backoffice" / "admin" pages. It was one of the most productive frameworks. It had a lot of really good abstractions around dom manipulations, data sources and events.
It also had an amazing set of components including an awesome charts library. The data table was state of the art at the time, and could probably beat many of the react tables that are made today. From my point of view it was so much better than most of the alternatives, but it had the negative stigma of a Yahoo ownership.
I didn't know about mcmaster.com, but I took a look at it, and the images was a surprise. The uniformity of the product images is nothing sort of amazing.
Most websites don't care to much about illustrations, even though that's what many people use when buying. Taking your own photos, or doing illustrations is pretty expensive, but it really helps the customers pick the right products.
The grayscale may be a way of insuring that customers aren't overly focused on the illustrations, and instead actually read the product descriptions.
In a better world, we’d have more companies like McMaster selling people what they need and providing a highly valued service, instead of using ads and weaponized psychology to convince them to buy some more junk they don’t need that’s going to end up in a landfill by December.
McMaster has the most environmentally unsustainable shipping practices I've ever experienced. I once ordered a particular kind of 8 foot brass rod. They shipped it, not in a tube, but diagonally oriented in a gigantic rectangular box that was 99% empty.
Completely absurd and I'll never order from them again.
Yes, because its catalog is also a CAD library, so you can put the parts into your design and be sure the parts will fit when they arrive tomorrow. Because every part is neatly categorized, searchable by its properties.
I am infuriated when shopping for clothes, computer parts, etc. because the items are rarely categorized and when they are, it isn't comprehensive so searches tend to miss out on the obvious so I end up browsing a site's entire catalog.
And, they do sell a lot. They're the industry standard. The only problem I've had is that they won't ship to individuals in Canada so I had to think up a fake company name.
The not delivering to Canada was my only complaint. I had to get a US friend to buy it and ship it after to me. I didn’t think of using a fake company to get it shipped.
Ok, but if we're being honest, you can make that sort of claim about anything and it's equally as unhelpful. Things can have value even if you can't perfectly define a metric, and even if others might use different metrics.
The author explained why they think it's great, so rather than waving your hands and denying that greatness could ever be defined, what about a constructive approach? Engage with the elements the author identified. Criticize specific ones, or suggest others. Say something you actually believe!
If you don't know what a great ecommerce website is, what is has, what it does, does reading a piece where someone says some site is a great e-commerce website influence your opinion? Does it shape your view?
If so, how does previous literature about the subject influenced the writer?
So, a great e-commerce website should be measured by it's form or by it's results?
Why non functional and not great websites thrive?
Would Jeff Bezos be fixated on those pixels because he believed that as long as amazon.com kept growing and selling, the site must therefore working great?
Those are all sincere questions, not rhetorical or trolling.
I don't think you're trolling, but again, you're not actually saying anything here. That's why you need to make the disclaimer that those are sincere questions. I'm suggesting that you instead take positions, even if weakly held ones. In other words, I think that you're doing something covert when you say "[N]o one knows what is a great e-commerce website. Is one that sells a lot? ... [T]hat is very easy to use?" or ask "So, a great e-commerce website should be measured by it's form or by it's results?"
What do you think? The article emphasized form and function. You seem to be proposing that results matter. Say that!
Just cobbling together bits of what you're "asking" it seems like you might instead have written the following: "It seems to me that the article focuses on form: simple design, great search and filtering, and useful information like CAD files. But being 'the best e-commerce site' needs to include succeeding at e-commerce. Being very easy to use might help. But there seem to be non functional and not 'great' websites (by the article's definition) that thrive."
I haven't read the article, and I think the site is great. I've used it many times and it exemplifies what I think a great e-commerce site should be (from a customer perspective). They've built their website so you can find and order what you need with the bare minimum of effort. If I imagine trying to search for some of the things I order on McMaster, except on Amazon, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to.
I came across mcmaster.com like 10-15 years ago and I thought its design and experience was amazing. I didn't understand why other sites weren't like this.
Then I talked to regular people (like my friend who builds high-end magic tricks) who happened to use the site and like me wondered why more sites weren't usable like this.
And then after a few years, I saw that people in the comments here and elsewhere thought the same.
lol, mcmaster carr is probably one of the only specialty e-commerce sites that anyone will randomly bring up in UX discussions or hobby conversations. everyone loves mcmaster carr, like actually everyone, so yeah, lots of people who haven't read this already independently decided that mcmaster carr is great.
even if you're not going to buy there (their prices are high, compared to alternative suppliers, is what I've heard, and there are items and brands they don't carry) it's still a super useful reference of what's possible and what general solutions in that area look like and cost, or even just basic lookup for what types of nuts and bolts you should look for in a project. like it's actually just a really nice pleasant interface for working with hardware in general.
> My point is: no one knows what is a great e-commerce website
I disagree. I know what is a great e-commerce website -- in the sense the article is talking about.
- loads fast
- makes items easy to find quickly
- has a simple, efficient shopping cart mechanism
- gets me in, order placed, and out in the shortest time possible
- is run by a company with great customer service
Yeah, there's probably an item or two I've forgotten from that list, and yeah, other people likely to order from a site might have a slightly different list.
But I have no doubt that I would recognize the same qualities on other websites that I and many (probably most) people would recognize as great -- or at the very minimum, as websites that don't suck.
That website routinely comes up in a lot of crafts and craft-related hobbies (in my case, it was guns, where gunsmithing can involve parts they sell), so it's not exactly a secret. And yes, people do actually like it regardless of the article.
OTOH I don't know of any serious hobbyists (of whatever) who get the majority of their supplies from Amazon. When you ask, people generally say that selection is poor and quality is always highly suspect.
