> McMaster-Carr shoppers don’t encounter distractions; you can see proof of this on the homepage which jumps right into the action:
The web site is based on the paper catalogue (book), from layout, visual interface, and organization. The paper version was excellent and useful. Instead of trying all sorts of "fun" (for the designer) web capabilities, they focused on ohw the web could augment what they were already successfully doing. No redesign for design's sake.
Some of the best paper catalogues like McMaster and Sigma had excellent, customer-centered design, which led to long term loyalty. Easy to find what you needed, and useful as references, not just as a place to buy. They have retained that philosophy into the web world.
Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers', with the obvious result of reduced loyalty and the need to shore that up with rewards (prime, discounts, advertising).
>Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers'
I'm not sure that's the whole story. A critical point is that this is a B2B site. The people shopping here would tend to have a need in mind that can be solved by finding the exact right part that meets their specifications.
By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching. Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I might like to "get in and get out" but so many consumer shoppers LOVE to go to a place like Target or HomeGoods and browse around aimlessly, window shop, discover, explore - and that indicates a far different type of UX than what B2B would look like. These shoppers value stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com
> By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching.
Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.
> Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I might like to "get in and get out" but so many consumer shoppers ...
Yes I love to stores and see various items that I wouldn't typically buy. I could even go to, say Costco website to see random "newly arrived seasonal items".
But on shopping websites when searching for products most people are not looking to enjoy "incredible joys of discovery" by being forced to scroll through search results for things which they haven't even searched for.
Its purely ads and "marketplace" bullshitery from Amazon and others.
> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.
When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? They're called end caps, and stores make a lot of money from brands to put them there because customers are more likely to see them and purchase whatever.
Also, have you noticed that the shelves at stores usually contain the most well known brands at eye level while the cheap stuff or weird stuff is usually down low or up high? That may be store optimization, but more commonly those top brands pay for that eye-level placement.
Amazon didn't invent this. They just came up with the digital equivalent of what stores have been doing for decades.
Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.
As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.
At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.
Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.
I can ignore displays and go to right aisle to choose on products. On Amazon there is no equivalent. If they just ignore my search request I am stuck with trawling through irrelevant results.
Amazon search may have lots of results that I don't care about, but is generally accurate on the first try.
The brick and mortar experience is ostensibly 10x worse than being able to use a search box. Grocery stores and Home improvement stores are the worst - I probably spend 80% of my time there trying find where things are, with the overhead labels generally being useless.
I find when amazon doesn't show what I want when I get specific, it's because they don't really sell it. When they do, it matches pretty close or 1:1 fairly quickly. Also notice they're not good about items that have a lot of customization, like macbooks that a very specific config or something like shoes that let you chose 6 different color combos for various parts. For those speciality things I find you just need to go to the brand store which creates custom software for it. Maybe your looking for things they don't sell or is pretty customizable?
I was (and still am) frustrated with Amazon's practice of showing me what _they_ think I want, instead of what I searched for. It violates a basic tenet of the server-client relationship, serve what the client asked for.
I was happy to discover that AliExpress didn't do these shenanigans. You search for an item, it shows matches. Wonderful — and then they changed it, so now halfway through your results, you'll see completely unrelated items.
So now it's just a garbage web filled with garbage results.
Exactly right. And considering how many here do appreciate Amazon's position here, to me, it just shows Amazon/ e-commerce web sites have conditioned tons of users to find terrible user experience agreeable.
I have made the opposite experience. I enjoy the search results Amazon provides, but find it incredibly difficult to find the right product on AliExpress. How do you navigate the seemingly auto-translated jungle of similar products on AliExpress?
A critical component of being able to change high rates for sponsorship is to not show people precisely what they’re looking for. Also, once people find what they’re looking for they stop looking which reduces ad impressions.
Amazon are just in the exploit stage of the build-exploit cycle and are making so much money doing it I doubt they’ll stop.
True. Founder CEO is out. Incoming one just has to keep growing ad business and leave Amazon with probably billion dollar retirement/severance package. After all it wouldn't be unheard of in 1-2 decades.
Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them.
> stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com
In meatspace this is often discussed as customer-abusive design - overloading senses with shapes, colors, sounds and smells, confusing and ever-changing shop layout forcing shoppers to wander and explore, defeating the no.1. normal people advice for responsible shopping - make a list beforehand and stick to it.
I don't think HNers are that much different. We complain more, because we know more about how the web works, and realize things could be much better.
> Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them.
I can just about guarantee it's mostly the latter.
My elderly dad was shown how to do a couple things on Craigslist, years ago, and has been using it without assistance for years.
Meanwhile he often has to ask for help with the fucking phone app on his phone. And every time Google updates it or he gets a new phone, he has to figure it all out again. For no benefit, just to be able to do the same shit he already could.
Design thrashing and all kinds of slow-downs and animations and "helpful" pop-ups and crap make things harder on everyone, it's just that some of us can push past it. It has a cost, but we become blind to it because we're so used to putting up with it. A few seconds lost there, a couple minutes here, but we've forgotten about it by the end of the day. For those on the edges it's catastrophic to their ability to actually use their devices for anything.
At this point it is pretty clear Amazon is fattened on sweet billions from ads. To add insult to injury they also get to say We are delighted to offer ten thousand brands of USB cable in hundreds of colors to suit every personal style
McMaster is also better for wandering the aisles than Amazon! Just hop onto a catalog page, and see related item after item.
Amazon tries to sell you things that are cross-correlated, so if you buy tiny resealable bags for your board game collection, they try to sell you portable precision scales.
> McMaster is also better for wandering the aisles than Amazon! Just hop onto a catalog page, and see related item after item.
It’s all fun and games until you get blocked for viewing too many pages. Been a few years since I needed to use them but that was always super annoying.
Ordinary people are well known to suffer from "choice fatigue" and overstimulation. In a supermarket though it's considered a zero sum race between independent players.
On a web site run by a single entity that need not be the case.
> all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com
The point of my comment is that crap was not removed but rather was never introduced in the first place.
Not only this but Amazon is a marketplace for buyers AND sellers whereas it appears McMaster-Carr is the seller. Sellers on Amazon are also Amazon customers who want their own pages, copy, etc.
I don't know if it is the same as amazon. but I suspect it is.
Newegg: the store, I love, newegg: the marketplace, I dislike. newegg at least had the grace to include the filter "sold by newegg" when they made the transition to marketplace.
So then "amazon: the store" would be what? books? does amazon still sell books? or is that all amazon: the marketplace" as well? it is impossible to tell with amazon.
I wish Amazon was more like McMaster Carr or RS or any of the good websites. The ability to have filters that are meaningful (sort by random technical parameters, filter by dimensions or manufacturer, warranty, lead time, item location and that of manufacture, as well as price) and datasheets that were informative world be absolutely fantastic. I'm probably spoilt by datasheets for chips but God I miss them elsewhere...
I’m surprised you mention RS in the same breath as McMaster— their website is awful. Yes, you can put in very detailed parameters, but if you want a fairly generic part (like a DPDT 12v relay) you’re presented with hundreds of options, only one of which will be in stock— which they only tell you after you add it to your trolley… Given that RS is mostly ‘I need one of this part, tomorrow’ the inability to filter by stock completely ruins the usability of the site. It’s bad enough that I just use Farnell or Rapid—who both let you filter by stock—despite their sometimes worse selection. (and about a year or so ago the RS site stored state on the server side so if you hit the back button, or opened something in a new window the site would freak out and bring you back to the homepage)
I learned so much from keeping a copy of the yellow catalog in the bathroom. Like, how many different kinds of nuts and bolts and fittings there are. I still remember that stuff when a colleague is trying to design something.
In addition to a paper catalog that "just worked," they started out with a business that just worked, before the Internet came along. I'd say that Mouser and Digi-Key stand out in that regard too. About 25 years ago I remember calling McMaster and ordering a heavy steel machine base. It showed up the next day on a flat bed truck, and had to be unloaded with the forklift. It must have been drop shipped from their supplier, meaning they had already worked out a huge amount of logistics stuff before ever going online.
A huge advantage of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is the 3D models - for nearly every fastener, and for certain other products, you can instantly grab a 3D model and bring it right into your CAD design. As far as I know no one else offers this, definitely not at the scale McMaster's dataset offers.
An annoyance of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is how they don't show you the shipping cost until after transaction is complete. That's fine for my day job when I'm not paying, but when I order stuff for home projects I generally would like to know how much it costs to ship say, an 8 foot piece of steel tubing, before I click submit order. EDIT: they updated this apparently! See user Certified's comment below.
> As far as I know no one else offers this, definitely not at the scale McMaster's dataset offers.
As an industrial engineer, most of my vendors offer this. I can get 3D CAD for robot arms, grippers, IO blocks, motors, cameras, enclosures, valves, cylinders, and just about everything else that goes in my machines. However, you're right that these don't have the same scale that McMaster does; they're selling the huge variety of nuts and bolts that bring these separate vendors together.
One of the underrated parts of this kind of CAD offering is that you can test out 3D printed parts directly from their CAD. Not sure if you're accurately understanding their otherwise very helpful documentation on the gear modulus of that thousand dollar hardened, ground steel rack-and-pinion? Download the step file and print it in a few bucks of PLA. No, it won't actually be strong enough to move that 3-ton casting even once, but you can trivially check that the meshing works as you expect.
Although I've had an engineer fuss at me for using McMaster's bolt models in a rather complicated assembly. They actually model the threads and all the little details of the head, which make for a much larger model.
*People who don't work in CAD may not get it, but threaded interfaces are basically modeled with cylinders that overlap where the threads are engaged. It's funny what gets represented accurately and what doesn't, but just remember that the map is not the territory!
One thing they offer which is really uncommon is parametric models instead of geometric models only. It's like getting the source code instead of only a binary file. So, you can easily suppress unwanted detail.
They've doubtlessly improved things in the decade since that happened, but the important take-home for me was to just use my Parts Library for standard socket head bolts.
For weird things? Full parametric models would be great!
> No, it won't actually be strong enough to move that 3-ton casting even once, but you can trivially check that the meshing works as you expect.
This is the opposite of what I have found. I wouldn't use 3D printed parts for any sort of interfacing / tolerance check because pla usually prints > 0.2mm out of spec.
But, maybe you have a better 3d printer or I misunderstood exactly how you use it.
Do you have a 3d printer that can made dimensionally accurate parts? Or would you mind clarifying the use case?
Perhaps gear meshing was a bad example requiring higher tolerances. You'd not be able to set the depth to a tolerance of a few microns, but you'd know if you were off by a factor of 2 due to confusion calculating diametral pitch vs OD.
We most recently used it to check timing belt compatibility, whether the belt could be installed over the pulley using the very limited travel available in the belt tensioner, or whether we needed a pulley with smaller flanges or a different way to adjust and change belts. Trying to figure out in CAD whether you could stretch a belt over the pulley, or slip the pulley over the shaft while the belt was pre-installed, is pretty difficult. Printing it and proving that it was easy cost $2 and reduced risk a lot.
I have one 3d printer that ca. Do dimensionally accurate parts as long as they're smaller than ~50mm all dimensions.
With the most fine settings the slicer will do, it's within 20 microns in all dimensions, and usually it's so accurate my calipers show no error at all, which puts the error either under 5 microns or 1 micron, I forget.
The biggest issue with PLA is it shrinks a bit, so a perfect print is usually about 102%ish of the drawing size; the slicer manages all of that, though.
"An annoyance of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is how they don't show you the shipping cost until after transaction is complete."
I use McMaster daily and can see the shipping cost in two places when viewing my cart. The lines above the Place Order button on the top right side of the screen has
Merchandise ####.##
Shipping ##.##
Total $####.##
In the same bar below that is tax and directly below that you can click Delivery Method and it also displays the cost for each delivery speed. Maybe if you are set up with an account that is Net-30 this is hidden, but it certainly shows up for me when set to process the transaction by credit card.
The shipping always killed it for me. I started ordering fasteners through the office. It's basically the same whether you order an envelope or a pallet.
Seriously - how many "large" stores can you just call up and actually not have to wait on hold to talk to someone who is helpful, kind, and knowledgeable?
Mcmaster is great at what they do
Heck, forget the phone, I had an extended job once across the street from the New Jersey McMaster warehouse (Robbinsville Twnship) and you can go in there to get the same treatment. We spent A LOT of money on same day parts.
Shipping is a Hard Problem, especially when dealing with large volume (bigger than UPS, usually strapped to a pallet) objects, and/or very dense objects (cartons of metal nuts and bolts). You still need to call your freight person and get a quote directly from the carrier over the phone. Low density LTL (less than truckload) is a pretty known quantity and delivering to a known business (like Walmart warehouses) with a loading dock is easy. Delivering two pallet loads of high density metal to a single story engineering office in an office park with no facilities to service an 18-wheeler (let alone allow one to enter/maneuver) is another thing entirely.
The article focuses on the UI, which is good, but the number one reason McMaster is the tops shopping experience (IMHO) is that they have a rock solid taxonomy. Every single product is meticulously categorized a dozen different ways, allowing me to drill down the feature tree to get exactly to the part I want. On Amazon even the product categories that have a few filters are hopelessly difficult to navigate. I'm stuck guessing at search terms and browsing "related" lists. If you want to build an Amazon killer, you can let UI, price and shipping slide, but nail your taxonomy and I'm in.
Exactly. In fact almost everything in the article is icing on-top. The entire experience of the McMaster Carr website is the taxonomy and the fact that the search and navigation _within that taxonomy_ are all built to work seamlessly and get you to exactly what you are looking for.
Search for "bolt" - you won't get 10,000 different bolts with a pretty little filter to whittle down, you'll end up on a page with broader categories of things that may or may not have "bolt" in the name, but are all things that are in some form bolts. From there you keep drilling down, selecting different attributes until you get to an individual product (or a grid of variations, like different lengths).
Honestly, it feels like the original authors have never actually used the site, they just browsed around, thought it was laid out nicely, etc
Although I have never used McMaster but use Amazon most of the time, I definitely agree. And it's not even really related to taxonomy. The amount of disorganized information on Amazon is frustrating and many times leads me to believe that something is just fake, drop-shit, subpar quality, etc... There's so much "WxHxD: 2", "color: yes", "weight: 34.6 inches" that I just end up buying something else or not at all
My favorite recent Amazon search: looking at LCD displays, one was categorized as “Style: Women’s”
Was this a classic case of review laundering, where a blouse was replaced with a computer monitor? Or did some code somewhere overlap with attributes that normally apply to clothing?
Whatever it was, the categories and filters on that site continue to degrade.
Most underestimate how important laying out a clear map of your content is. Rather than letting the user build some incompletely inefficient map inside his head, lay it our clearly somewhere easily accessible.
That's why I love websites with sitemaps or when their url scheme tells me the topology of content clearly.
Indeed, one can search by your area's local trade name for an item and still find it in their catalog, even if no one else in the country calls it that!
For an example that's not hyper-local, search "roll pin," which about half the world uses to describe that particular item. For a more dramatic example, search "hickey."
This is more of a lead-gen ad for Medusa, tagging on the back of a deservedly-popular HN article.
The dissonance of this juxtaposition is comical. Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room? That Medusa's very own site, and the stores built with it, are the exact opposite of McMaster.com? If you started with Medusa, you wouldn't end up with McMaster.com. McMaster.com is as good as it is because it doesn't use the latest flavor of a bloated JS framework.
The points made in the article (they have a search bar at the top, they have sidebar....on the side, a cart page, a checkout page) are basic ecommerce, and have been for 20+ years. That's not what differentiates McMaster.
This comes off as a poor attempt to jump on the McMaster news cycle than to actually point out things that make it good.
It's their service, their longevity, their dependability, the simplicity, the availability, and the specificity that make it good. They're not good because of their ecommerce and web design choices. Their ecommerce and web design are good because they didn't jump on the latest tech fad every other year for the past 10 years.
There's many things to love about the design, but the fact that they use actual anchor tags and override the default behavior with JS is extremely frustrating and makes opening in a new tab impossible. When I'm looking for parts I tend to want to open up several categories or parts across a few tabs and they make it impossible. Horizontal scrolling is also remapped to scroll vertically as well, which breaks the trackpad swipe behavior for going forwards and backwards on MacOS.
This has been happening to so many commerce sites for the last several years. It's infuriating. They absolutely hate the idea that you might want to look at several items at once.
Anyway, in Firefox I kludge around it by right clicking the tab I'm on, selecting Duplicate Tab, then clicking the item in that new tab. Sometimes you gotta duplicate a lot that way, but it usually works.
> There's many things to love about the design, but the fact that they use actual anchor tags and override the default behavior with JS is extremely frustrating and makes opening in a new tab impossible.
I've only ever dabbled in webdev, but I thought this _was_ the right way to do it? Having an actual anchor tag with an href that overrides onclick means that your fancy javascripty partial page load works, but so does middle click and regular clicking without javascript. Is there some other way that's even more compatible?
Middle-clicking everything on mcmaster's site seemed to work for me in firefox.
Oh this is interesting; right click and "open in new tab" seems to work, but cmd+click (my preferred method) doesn't. They must have something else going on that interferes with it, very strange.
I'm on MacOS; I think I found the issue in the code they use for navigation. It's checking for ctrlKey on the MouseEvent and not MetaKey as well, which is what CMD maps to on MacOS. I might email them about it.
Oh McMaster... how I love thee. They pioneered same day delivery in 2001.
I worked at Idealab in Pasadena California. We ordered SO much from them that they would deliver to us (and others in the area) directly and daily. If you had your order in by 10am (11 if you were SUPER lucky and there were a lot of orders to process) the truck would show up at ~2ish. This was 2001... WAY before Amazon Prime 2 day deliver, let alone same day. It was EPIC to design something and have the parts show up hours later.
The other beauty of McMaster is the breadth of their inventory. You could order a safety vest, a billet of Al, a 4x8 sheet of plywood and some screws... all from the same place! One of the software engineers cooked up a web scraper tied to a randomization engine. It would randomly order $100 worth of things on our account each day. He was stopped before it was turned on... but it would have been really fun to see what random stuff showed up on a daily basis. We spent a few lunches laughing about the potential boxes that would have shown up.
I used to do a lot of metalwork/fabrication in the early 2000s and ordered from them frequently. Even as a no-name so-and-so, stuff would be delivered same day or next day at the latest. It was amazing and they still do it!
Does anyone remember Small Parts? They had an awesome catalog somewhat akin to McMaster. When Amazon bought them out, for a year or two, Amazon search maintained the really detailed category stuff and was approaching McMaster utility for things like machine screws. But then, like much with Amazon, it died.
I'm very much confused about why there aren't more Amazon competitors that do better with this sort of UI stuff and charge more. At this point, I'm happy to pay a 10% (or maybe even 50%) tax from McMaster or Digikey because of the time and effort it saves and the backend customer service if something goes wrong. When I started my university lab 10 years ago, I was so excited by what Amazon is doing. At this point, the only reason I still use them is that its hard to set up sales tax exemptions with all the small vendors. If someone could automate that process in checkout, I'd never use Amazon for work...
I think is article is written from an eng/design perspective and thus fails to address business realities.
Example: “product pages are way too long”
Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO. Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates.
Sure, maybe a better global maximum exists, and every once in a while a startup finds it and achieves great success.
However, that kind of “bet the farm” mentality should be very intentional, not just based on design best practices, because in reality, companies live and die by their balance sheet, not by their UX best practices.
This got a bit rant’y, but I just wanted to provide this counterpoint. I’d love to hear what others have to say - I feel this is such a complex, nuanced topic…
I don't know how to describe it succinctly, but I find there to be a stark category difference between what the article talks about and what you mention. In particular, the former is what I appreciate as a user, the latter is what I hate.
> Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates.
That's probably because e-commerce stores aren't commodity. The user is going to convert anyway, even if they hate every minute of the experience.
It's the design musings of a non-designer who barely considers the actual discipline of design, let alone marketing. "This site suits my immediate needs best it must be best," is as good of a design practice as a naive non-developer slapping together some PHP and saying "well it runs great for me on my laptop so it must run great everywhere else."
Someone who'd name a potentially customer-facing piece of software "Medusa" probably isn't considering users needs nearly as much as they assume. If a non-technical user saw an error with the word "Medusa" in it pop up on a website they just handed their credit card info to, even if things go fine, that's going to generate a lot of anxiety. On the business side of things, stuff like that actually matters.
This is what crosses my mind and bugs me whenever I see an article like this. As much as I hate the Amazon-style pages, I understand they're like that because that's what their business is, and that saying everyone should do it like McMaster is pretty futile.
Don't get me wrong, I love McMaster - but I feel like people attempt to over apply their patterns everywhere else.
I feel like all of the discussion misses a key point - when you shop on McMaster, you already have a very detailed idea of what you're looking for. McMaster becomes rather difficult to use if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Many of the product categories get rolled up as representative products. Many products have meaningful variations nested deep. It's very hard to quickly scroll through a list of items to figure out what might be represent you needs.
Now, that's not necessarily a problem McMaster should fix. They cater to the professional market. They cater to people who know exactly what they want. They can do this because their products are mostly derived off market standards.
There's a _very_ good chance that your user base won't be the same. There's a very good chance that your user base won't know they need a "Surface-Mount Lift-Off Hinges with Holes made of stainless with XYZ dimensions".
McMaster-Carr out-Amazons Amazon when it comes to specialty items that you can't find online anywhere else. For a lot of product categories they have every conceivable variation that you might need. Specifically in the past I've used them for electric relays. I don't know of a brick and mortar locally that has the selection that I want, and you won't find these on Amazon. Next stop? McMaster.com.
One thing that annoyed me recently:
They don't take Discover. This led to me attempting to pay with an old Visa debit card which appeared to be accepted at checkout. In fact, they even shipped my order, and then sent me an email about my card being declined. It was a small order, but it still surprised me that they shipped without confirming payment. So I have an outstanding invoice. Not a huge deal, and as others have mentioned they do actually answer the phone, and you can talk to a human being about whatever customer service issue you might have.
This is a good thing IMO often you need a part right away. McMaster sends before they worry about you paying for it. They are a really solid company. I order from them whenever I can.
This year's UI/UX trends have been an absolute disaster. Many brands are now using some kind of an amalgamation of animations + on-scroll effects that transition into this linear 3D experience. Replit is a good example of this, even though what they are doing is quite tame to what I have seen.
Now, the crazy thing about this trend is that I honestly just close the page whenever I encounter it. And I am 100% positive that many other people do this, too. So, unless your brand has outstanding reputation and you were introduced to their service through word of mouth, a lot of these bombastic landing pages are left to rot by themselves.
And lastly, these pages are supposed to leave you feeling something, or at the very least - fire up a neuron or two in your brain because the experience is refreshing. I have not experienced that a single time. And I bookmark quite a lot of random pages I am inspired by from a design perspective.
> This year's UI/UX trends have been an absolute disaster. Many brands are now using some kind of an amalgamation of animations + on-scroll effects that transition into this linear 3D experience. Replit is a good example of this, even though what they are doing is quite tame to what I have seen.
Probably because those trends are set by UI designers sitting in ivory towers.
If UI trends were instead set by people who actively used sites over and over for their day job, they would be far more appropriate and effective.
I love mcmaster and it's cool to see an article explaining their website design intent. Recently discovered Digikey and Mouser last night (via a random HN comment actually) and it was just what I was looking for (a more electronics focused Mcmaster basically) - but the websites have a similar filter/taxonomy which was refreshing to see. No B.S.!
I do have some business/commercial reasons for shopping these vendors (which is how I'm familiar with mcmaster in the first place) but my life really started to change for the better when I started leveraging them for personal projects.
Had a kick to make biodiesel and mcmaster was still the best place I could find to buy methanol
Edit: mcmaster just exudes the essence of "engineering" to me - it's amazing to be able to find parts by their size/dimensions/material/finish rather than jumbling together things that "work".
Reminds me of the joke: "a mathmagician calculates the volume of a ball by integral; a physicist calculates the volume of a ball by water displacement; an engineer just looks up the part number in {mcmaster}"
It's because they'll have your order at your door next day for an extremely reasonable cost of shipping. Nobody excels at pick, pack, and ship like McMaster-Carr.
Where they can be a little tough is searching for things you don't know the exact name for. I needed screws that have a smooth section to run through a bushing with a fairly tight tolerance. You know: turns freely but doesn't rattle. I spent hours looking until I finally found what I was looking for (shoulder screws).
I hate to mention it but this would be a killer feature of a ChatGPT like search. Imagine being able to describe something in such vague terms and get a good answer.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned information density yet. I find the modern practice of adding so much spacing and making the font size gigantic extremely annoying. Sometimes you need detail- and it’s harder to put together a well designed information dense way of displaying that detail. Instead it seems everyone decides to just ignore that detail and make you click everywhere and scroll all day to find what you need.
Unmentioned is the helpful explanation text in some categories, for example if you search for "compressed air fittings", you get a small box labeled "How to Identify and Measure Fittings" at the top of the page that can be expanded. Included in this is a table of *all* the different kinds of fittings, including measurements. In my case, I had something that I didn't know what was and this allowed me to identify it, then narrow my search for compatible parts.
I wrote the original article they're basing this on. I kinda wish they would've linked my article directly in their post (although they linked the original HN thread). Especially since this post basically just reskinned mine for SEO and missed some important substance IMO.
The website speed is also worthy of praise. When I visit McMaster.com, I get DOMContentLoaded: 348 ms. When I visit Amazon.com, I get 2.39 SECONDS, and this is with a 10-core monster of a CPU.
This article touches on search a bit, but it doesn’t quite capture how useful I’ve found its capabilities as a hobbyist.
For example, I needed to replace a bent gear axle for my lathe during the height of supply chain issues in the past few years. The part was proprietary to the vendor, who did not have any spares on hand and was awaiting an order from their manufacturer in China.
The top search results on McMaster for “axle” yielded both axle stock and pre-fabricated axles that would likely be great solutions in other scenarios, but ultimately neither of those categories contained a part that would solve my issue.
However, third on the list of results was a category for “axle bolts”, which makes sense based on my use of one of those strings in my search. But “axle bolts” weren’t a category of things you can find by manually navigating the menus to barrow down your search. Following the link to that category actually presented you with a list of products under the category of “shoulder screws”. Within these, I found a part that fit the bill for a temporary fix!
I found it incredibly useful that it helped me navigate through industry terms that I wasn’t familiar with. It almost seemed akin to Netflix’s highly specific “shadow” categories such as “90s sitcoms with female leads” or similar.
Actually (and perhaps it already can), a ChatGPT model that could help me design projects with specific tolerances by recommending parts from sources like McMaster would be very useful.
For example, I want to build a simple hoist with a working maximum weight of 1 ton. Which grade of steel bolts should I buy that are most effective for that application? What thickness of steel square bar do I need?
There are fairly straightforward ways of calculating what a material is capable of and modeling its performance using simulation software, but a passing grade doesn’t tell me that my choice of grade 12.9 bolts is less cost effective than grade 10.9 bolts, which are significantly cheaper.
Tip: have a fun car that you buy rockauto parts for? Send them a photo by email for their magnet series! They do a new one every month and so they can often oblige you within a few months. They send you a stack of magnets with your car on them, and of course there's a chance they'll be included in everyone else's orders. A few of my cars have appeared on rockauto magnets and they bring me much joy.
Rockauto sends the wrong parts and list the wrong parts for certain cars. Not a fan any longer. I now will call around dealerships some will let you open a personal account with them and give you a better pricing. Just call the parts departments.
ULPT: Another thing you can do when you call is just ask "Whats our price on it?" They will ask who you are with. Just mention the name of the largest specialty ship matching the brand of the place you are calling. They almost always have an account. Now just say you'll come and pay and pickup in person. "I'm sending the new guy" Now you just got your car part at the MAP price.
McMaster is definitely B2B oriented, but I think one of the reasons they're much loved is because they do a lot better job of dealing with individual consumers and small orders than a lot of B2B. There are sometimes annoying MOQ and sometimes high shipping fees (they do sell a lot of bulky/heavy/long items), but for the most part McMaster is still perfectly pleasant to deal with if you're buying a few bits and pieces for a household project. This really matters to me: doing some electrical projects, for example, there are things (like certain Legrand raceway) that are difficult to buy other than through electrical distributors that only want to deal on account and have a fifteen-step process to open one. McMaster sometimes has a good equivalent and they'll just ship me one!
It works pretty well for consumers, but McMaster is 100% aimed at MRO/B2B. The couple of complaint comments here in this thread make it pretty clear that people don't know that, and are blaming the website for business choices that have made McMaster as dominant as they are.
The UX practices used on McMaster are most suitable for B2B sites.
If you were trying to sell beauty products to consumers with a landing page like theirs it likely wouldn't perform that well. You could, however, draw inspiration from McMaster if your brand was selling the same beauty products wholesale to retailers.
If there were a beauty products web site that was organized that well, I'd switch to it immediately.
I've spent more than 3 hours linearly searching local CVS and Walgreens for basic stuff in the last week, so you've touched a nerve!
For any given product category, they now group some stuff by brand, then function, and other stuff by function, then brand.
A given brand or function can be split across a half dozen such hierarchies. Also, they then slice the inventory by attractiveness to shoplifters, doubling the already intractable search problem. Finally, the aisles for a given type of product are not necessarily contiguous.
Amazon actually has a landing page like the McMaster one for beauty products:
- It displays "featured categories" which can be expanded with "show more", but there is no "show all categories" button.
- The first screen is spam, the second screen is content. More spam (== algoritmic suggestions not based on intent) until roughly screen 10,
- At that point, there is a helpful "filter hair care by ethnicity" table. Since this is their second most important flow (apparently), let's focus on it.
Back on screen two, tapping "hair care" drills down to hair products, but there is no ethnicity filter. Why even have an ethnicity grouping (and waste scarce landing page space on it) if it is not discoverable by people shopping for hair care? Also, how do you filter skin care, cosmetics, etc by ethnicity?
What about other facets, such as medical issues (e.g., sensitive skin or allergic to fragrances)?
This might fit into edge cases. I've used McMaster-Carr as a consumer many times, and though I might get a discount if I bought a minimum quantity, I've been able to purchase what I needed in singles each time. I doubt if there's an e-commerce site out there that will let you purchase and ship 4 screws for less than what you would pay for 200. Even at brick and mortar hardware stores you're ripping yourself off by buying 50 screws instead of 200 (or 1000). I get that you don't need them all but the price per unit is still astronomical.
I bought a bunch of defective keg o-rings that waste CO2 and emptied a keg on to the floor over night (looking at you: More Beer!). For the price of one retail kit, I put together 10 rebuild kits worth of o-rings at McMaster. In that case (5 hours of researching which $0.05 o-ring to buy), the minimum quantity was more a feature than a bug.
I can understand the annoyance for non consumables, like screws.
A B2C store has flashy 'modern' design, sparse text, ads, a blog, logos, customer reviews, pay-later options, a wish list, discount codes, a newsletter sign-up, up-sells during checkout, etc.
Business consumers find that revolting, so it won't work for them.
Consumers on the other hand are easily tempted with 'discounts' and 'up-sells'.
If I'm looking to buy some 316 stainless bolts, I'd like to see links to the applicable nuts for that size/material/threads/etc. For certain sizes, the nut selection can be limited and might not meet my needs. Then, I have to start over with 304 or something else. In my most recent case, I had to order some of the components from a different store.
My gripe is they do ranges very poorly so you wind up spending a lot of time specifying an exhaustive set of possible sizes that may work in order to see all the various options of things that have some critical feature or dimension you need.
It is great, but one annoyance is it's pretty easy to buy a small threaded coupler with one side blank instead of threaded like the other side--uncommonly needed parts like this will show up in my searches higher than the more common variant, and it takes careful reading of the specs to differentiate.
I like how rockauto puts heart symbols next to the commonly purchased parts.
Correction, not higher in my searches. But when browsing the table-like listing of all 1/2" NPT SS adapters, for instance, I have found it easy to accidentally buy a 1/2"-blank part instead of 1/2"-1/2"
One thing people overlook with McMaster is that the parts mostly stick around. If you found it there once, it'll be there again later, and the same part number.
How many times have I found something on Amazon, bought it, loved it, and go to buy another and it's just entirely gone, not even a suggestion of what a replacement might be.
As soon as the homepage rendered, I felt my whole upper body relax slightly. What a remarkable experience from a web site. It was clear, the contrast felt right, the meaning and organisation were plain and comfortable. Nothing interrupted me, nothing shouted at me.
Just… astounded that the starting point for a discussion of e-commerce usability would ever be ‘let’s go gather some learnings from “a B2B site that recently made the top of HackerNews as the best e-commerce site”’
Are HN users even representative customers of McMaster Carr? Let alone of any other e-commerce site?
> Are HN users even representative customers of McMaster Carr? Let alone of any other e-commerce site?
Why wouldn't they be? Yes, most HN users have some expertise or occupation in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, but other than that, HN has a diverse userbase from all around the world and great many walks of life.
They wouldn't be because HN is a self-selected sample of people who tend to have tech experience, which tends to lend itself to certain ways of thinking.
If an ecommerce site depended entirely on looking through their catalog with SQL commands, I'd imagine most of the HN community would be able to navigate it (although possibly unhappy with it). I'd imagine most of the general population would not be.
> If an ecommerce site depended entirely on looking through their catalog with SQL commands, I'd imagine most of the HN community would be able to navigate it (although possibly unhappy with it).
I would love it, and I would switch to that site immediately.
Every time I have to shop for something on-line these days I'm thinking about making a scrapper populating an SQLite database with that site's catalog, because e-commerce UX is insanely bad, and even a simple SQL database browser would be an order of magnitude of improvement.
Sure, some HN users are going to be McMaster Carr users. Some HN users are probably Boeing customers as well, but I wouldn’t trust HN’s collective assessment of the procurement UX for a 787. The users who McMaster Carr is targeting peripherally intersect with the HN community. And it also happens to be a community that contains people who are more likely than the average population to enjoy browsing a parts catalog for fun.
I just don’t know how much you can conclude generally about effective e-commerce design from that sample point.
Sure, when you are a supplier of tools this is a great example. However, to point this as a shining example for all eCommerce sites is simply misunderstanding the difference in target audiences and products. For example, a person may visit a site looking for a gift. To such a customer it helps to have images and bold titles tell them why a product is worth their attention and money. Apple goes as far to lay out its specs in a long presentation with animated 3D models because their customer may not even understand what all the specs mean or just find it tedious and move on to see what Google has. One size does not fit all.
Once you get the basics out of the way (e.g. clean interface) I personally find one of the biggest usability impacts comes from the fact the system know their products, and lets you filter by various properties (dimensions, material, etc) which are detailed and appropriate for the category.
I wish Amazon did the same and offered more useful and accurate filtering. +/- operators would also be great (I know you can google site:amazon.ca +headset -bluetooth but it doesn't always work well).
I always see McMaster-Carr praised on HN, but almost never does it seem to be acknowledged as website that can only exist for engineers.
Generalizing anything from it onto the general internet population seems like thinking about education starting from a great calculus course: some useful lessons can be learned, but you do need to acknowledge that the average problem is very different.
And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.
I disagree. Yes, the specific website is for engineers and manufacturing businesses, but everything discussed here and in the article applies just as much to any e-commerce store. The core idea is: the store doesn't waste your time.
> And in the end we're left with: make a fast website, clean UI, intuitive flows.
That is what almost all e-commerce platforms fail at, on top of abusive, adversarial design.
The difference is that on many consumers stores you have a much higher percent of impulse shopping, that actually increases revenue with some amount of time wasting. PMs can use that as justification to add all sorts of frustrating patterns that actually lose money in the long-run.
Not addressing this as well seems to me to only give half the picture, that was what I was trying to say.
It's probably been discussed already, and I'm sure I'll get counterarguments about it, but I think having color images of their products wouldn't be a distraction.
Sure, most of their products are black or metal, and grayscale works just as well in those cases, but in others, I'd like to use the millions of colors of my display to get a better sense of what I'm buying.
One of the nice things about McMaster in my mind is the way their website is organized very much like their paper catalog. It's not as good as the paper catalog for casual browsing, but it does mean that when you're not quite sure what you actually need you can "flip through" the website and have a decent chance of spotting something like it.
Unfortunately McMaster is a little stingy with their paper catalog, I think you have to hit a certain $$$ amount on orders before they send you one. I think that's fair, it's a pretty hefty book and presumably costs them a meaningful amount of money per copy. I'm always surprised with U-Line which now sends me two of each edition of their catalog when I hardly ever order from them... I think they might be losing money on me as a customer at this point.
I can't ethically purchase anything from U Line any more. Does anyone know of an alternative supplier?
The U Line family has historically come out against things ranging from flouridation to Martin Luther King and currently supports election deniers / anti Semites. They are the number one donor to the Republican party:
> Uline is privately owned and therefore does not have any stockholders to answer to. The dress code is business professional, which means guys have to wear ties. That in and of itself is not unheard of, what is unheard of is that women have to wear knee length skirts and panty hoes during the winter months and only around Memorial day can they stop wearing panty hoes. Hey Uline this is 2015 not 1950! This dress code is a directive from Liz the owner. Yes, women can wear pant suits but of course they have to match. I'm trying to drive home that this place is run like a cult and it will destroy you if you stay there long enough.
I'm in the same boat, in fact I chuckled that the most recent U-Line catalog has a bit of a political rant from the founder in the back cover, something about social justice warriors. Most of what I get from U-Line I buy from a local business instead these days just for convenience and because I need relatively small quantities but... to be honest I think U-Line is their wholesale supplier. I'm on the hunt for a different way to get a wide variety of packing materials in relatively small quantities.
At some point deep learning will probably get to the point where you point a cell phone camera at the doodad, then prompt "wrench for this" or "missing piece", etc.
Medusa is a headless API, so you are free to consume it from wherever you want whether it be a React-based storefront, a C# backend, or something third - there's really no limitations.
But the source code of the open-source project is written in Node.js, so if you looking to contribute, you are forced to write JS.
Don't hesitate to reach out. We are amid extending our B2B capabilities, so it would be super interesting to learn about your client's requirements. And your own.
Everything you need and highlight here can be done on a basic Shopify plan and via the liquid templating engine. It would run super fast, edge deployed globally.
The problem is that no one wants this, so we don't even have templates like this anymore. We used to ~10-15y ago and those would still work perfectly.
I hate how you can't command click on a link to open a page in a new tab. I do this all the time when comparing products on other sites since it makes it easy to switch back and forth between two similar products. This workflow is completely broken on McMaster's site.
I agree that's a nuisance. One of the few problems on that site. On the Mac I use the StopTheMadness extension to kill that click hijacking. McMaster's site works fine now.
Would be nice if it had better support for metric. Or even just to set everything to fractional inches. When I'm just looking for a metal bar, I hate having to work out how much bigger 13/64" is than 0.200", and how much bigger that is than 5 mm.
Yet another tech-focused writer speaking with misguided authority on design, assuming their usage requirements mirror everyone else's when their perspective is pretty unique.
That's not to say that the The McMaster site is in any way bad. It is visually simple, relatively free from distractions, and straightforward, and served its target demographic well. It frustrates me to no end when marketers (not designers, generally) insist on shoving crap in people's faces because metrics show the hard sell works.
That said, their design was made for a specific type of shopper and is not remotely generalizable to everyone else.
People used to looking at screens of code all day, and those who know e-commerce platforms inside and out might not miss the abject lack of visual hierarchy and very obvious visual cues. The overwhelming majority of users would.
Also, if the color schema impedes usability, the problem is the design, not color. Having all of the images in grayscale is great for selling machine parts or technical equipment... And pretty much nothing else. Color is an incredibly important part of how most people choose products. Removing it creates a ton of work for the majority of users who need it. Trying to find one particular type of soap you forgot the name of but it has that green stripe across the label... Forget it. Also, I'm really not sure why so many people have such a hard time acknowledging that branding is an important and legitimate way for companies to communicate about the things they sell, and an important part of how most shoppers orient themselves in marketplaces.
Many people shop without knowing exactly what they need, and displays/carousels/suggestions help people figure it out. That's why they're there.
If visual flourish or whimsy impede usability, that's also a problem with the design and not a problem with visual flourish.
Most people shop at grocery stores instead of discount clubs, and discount clubs instead of restaurant supply warehouses. Why? Most of the products are equivalent or better the further up you go, dramatically cheaper, and presented in a progressively less gussied-up and more information-focused buying experience. Most people in the US have the storage space, too. One big reason is the look and feel. It's just a more pleasant overall experience. Seeing the colorful packages on the shelves, having a more intimate space to shop in with music playing rather than a utilitarian corrugated metal box. Perusing magazines during checkout. That's why Piggly Wiggly easily snatched the market out of the hands of traditional counter service provisioners and small single-product vendors. As a chef, it is the opposite of what I need. Purveyors sold me goods using an interface even more straightforward than McMaster: a printed text list with a place where I could indicate the quantity I needed. Anything more complicated would have been an impediment. Regular shoppers probably wouldn't even consider it.
So this article should be retitled to express why it has the best UX for information-only shoppers who know exactly what they want that are very used to looking at content without dead-obvious visual hierarchy and don't care how anything looks as long as their bullet pointed requirements get met. Like it or not, that doesn't describe the overwhelming majority of shoppers.
It also doesn't ship world wide, even to Canada I made an order, with no way to see what shipping was and got an email saying they only ship to commercial or schools. That's a terrible e-commerce experience. Sites like NCIX were way better than this.
10+ years ago they used to ship to individuals in Canada, but I vaguely remember some negative word-of-mouth discussions about them when individuals got burned by "customs fees" which was actually companies like UPS ripping off people by charging unreasonable fees to do customs clearance paperwork. Mcmaster probably didn't want to deal with that.
If they do think you're a business (maybe this means someone at your business has ordered before), they will not only ship to you but instantly let you use net-30 payment terms automatically. I had one experience of ordering some parts to a university in Japan when I was a student, and the parts were shipped the same day, along with an invoice. I didn't even have to create a login. [0]
[0] I wouldn't be surprised if this is no longer true due to know-your-customer legislation.
I'll accept the downvotes and say it's not a universal problem. Upon more research it seems if you do not send a Referrer header, McMaster inserts a history entry using the history API. I can make it work/fail by tweaking network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy. It's interesting that McMaster is the only site I use in 2022 that has a problem with it.
Not sure what's going on. I can reproduce in Firefox with DDG and Google.
Edit: it only happens for me in Firefox with particularly locked down settings. It turns out McMaster is not actually inserting a 3XX redirect, it is happening via the history API.
As I updated elsewhere: upon more research it seems if you do not send a Referrer header, McMaster inserts a history entry using the history API. I can make it work/fail by tweaking Firefox network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy. It's interesting that McMaster is the only site I use in 2022 that has a problem with it.
What search term did you use? I just tried "mcmaster 4-40 screw", clicked on the first link, clicked on the back button, and was back at the Google SERP.
> McMaster-Carr shoppers don’t encounter distractions; you can see proof of this on the homepage which jumps right into the action:
The web site is based on the paper catalogue (book), from layout, visual interface, and organization. The paper version was excellent and useful. Instead of trying all sorts of "fun" (for the designer) web capabilities, they focused on ohw the web could augment what they were already successfully doing. No redesign for design's sake.
Some of the best paper catalogues like McMaster and Sigma had excellent, customer-centered design, which led to long term loyalty. Easy to find what you needed, and useful as references, not just as a place to buy. They have retained that philosophy into the web world.
Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers', with the obvious result of reduced loyalty and the need to shore that up with rewards (prime, discounts, advertising).