14 ms·

Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

322 points by amoopa 4y ago

StayTrue 4y ago
The best e-commerce site would not insert a redirect when arriving via Google search results (which breaks the back button).
- hedora 4y ago
  I can't reproduce this in Firefox with Duck Duck Go or Google. Could you have clicked a (malicious?) Ad Sense ad?
  - StayTrue 4y ago
    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.
- simonlc 4y ago
  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.
  - trakout 4y ago
    NCIX doesn't seem to be shipping to anyone these days
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    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.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  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.
- StayTrue 4y ago
  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.
hedora 4y ago
It is strange that the article refers to McMaster as a B2B site. It works just as well for consumers.
- zeusk 4y ago
  I wouldn't say so, I had to purchase the min qty. of 200 for a screw set I could only find on there that was available in reasonable time. I made use of 4 and have 196 left over
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    It sounds like it worked for you, at least better than all other options that you had.
  - trey-jones 4y ago
    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.
  - hedora 4y ago
    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.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Meh you can't exactly get one deck screw at home Depot.
- sebrindom 4y ago
blamazon 4y ago
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.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  And the file you download is the file you need. You don't have to mess about with zip files containing one file.
- techplex 4y ago
  I've heard you can contact support to get a shipping quote before placing your order.
  - blamazon 4y ago
    Their phone support is excellent, I will say. Still, to call for a ship quote is a bit of a faff that feels intentionally anachronistic.
    - dieselgate 4y ago
      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
      - blamazon 4y ago
        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.
hprotagonist 4y ago
mcmaster, rockauto, digikey, ... don't tell anyone, they'll "modernise" them and fuck it all up.
- blamazon 4y ago
  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.
- mbauman 4y ago
  Digikey's empty search for the entire catalog listing in categories (and then extraordinary filtering tools within categories) is absolute perfection.
- millzlane 4y ago
  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.
taeric 4y ago
I don't know. Fangamer and a few other small inventory sites work remarkably well for me, as well.
kensai 4y ago
Does it offer a "I will know it when I see it" function? Sometimes I have in mind a specific tool or accessory, but not its specs necessarily.
- kaizo34 4y ago
  What would a function like that look like?
- projektfu 4y ago
  Naming things can be very hard. For this, it helps to have the paper catalog to flip through.
  - jcrawfordor 4y ago
    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.
    - jamincan 4y ago
      You can ask Uline to have a note added to all your orders not to pack a catalogue.
    - hedora 4y ago
      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: https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-de... Their working conditions are unbelievably sexist / restrictive (similar articles are available from journalists, if you don't trust glass door): https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Uline-RVW7264724.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Uline-RVW7... E.g.: > 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.
exhaze 4y ago
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…
- mbauman 4y ago
  > Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO If you own the category, however, folks will go directly to you instead of Google. I'm not googling for a 8-32 button head sheet metal screw.
  - exhaze 4y ago
    Totally agree. But then it’s more like brand-driven marketing - people literally typing your URL into their browser. Brands take a long time to build. New companies don’t have a brand so they kinda have to go at it along the SEO route, especially in the early days.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  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.
- chefandy 4y ago
ericwood 4y ago
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.
- OneLeggedCat 4y ago
  > makes opening in a new tab impossible 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.
  - lh7777 4y ago
    Another option in Firefox: right clicking and selecting Open in new tab works on most (but not all) links in McMaster.
  - wl 4y ago
    > They absolutely hate the idea that you might want to look at several items at once. B&H's bot detection will trigger on this from time to time.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  What is it that doesn’t work? I started at the home page and could middle click on both images and blue text, down to individual items. (Using Chrome from Linux.)
  - ericwood 4y ago
    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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thedangler 4y ago
I'm confused about medusajs. It has an API but yet I can't find anything about other SDK's. Are you locked into only using JS?
- olivermrbl 4y ago
  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. Re SDKs, there's an official JS SDK and a community-led Flutter SDK - that I know of. The former can be found in the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa/tree/master/packages/medusa-js https://github.com/medusajs/medusa/tree/master/packages/medu... Disclaimer, I am co-author of the project.
  - thedangler 4y ago
    Thank you. I'm actually going to be building a B2B app for a client soon and this will help a lot.
    - olivermrbl 4y ago
      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.
trey-jones 4y ago
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.
- roflyear 4y ago
  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.
mauvehaus 4y ago
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).
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  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.
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    You shouldn't hate to mention it. I'm somewhat anti-GPT (or maybe anti-AI in general) but this would actually be a really good use case.
MobileVet 4y ago
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.
- morelisp 4y ago
  You may enjoy Amazon Random Shopper. https://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-consumerism https://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized...
  - MobileVet 4y ago
    Brilliant
- tbran 4y ago
  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!
jeffreyrogers 4y ago
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.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  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.
ckemere 4y ago
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.
gumby 4y ago
Unmentioned is the origin of much of this value: > 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).
- analog31 4y ago
  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.
- hammock 4y ago
  >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
ckemere 4y ago
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...
intrepidhero 4y ago
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. See also digikey, parts-tree and rock auto.
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  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."
- chrisjc 4y ago
  > rock solid taxonomy > On Amazon 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
  - function_seven 4y ago
    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.
- RajT88 4y ago
  The people listing the products are not trying to game the system with McMaster.
juddlyon 4y ago
One advantage is that they keep the same design for many years so each time you use it you get better/faster. You know what to expect.
avmich 4y ago
The site doesn't work without JavaScript - no graceful degradation. For this reason alone I wouldn't consider it among the best. With JavaScript it's rather good though.
mitthrowaway2 4y ago
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.
bombcar 4y ago
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.
ipython 4y ago
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.
giantg2 4y ago
I have a gripe about McMaster. 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.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  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.
0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
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.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
  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"
the_other 4y ago
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. I couldn't find the screws I wanted, tho'.
password4321 4y ago
Talk about free advertising! Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 (1402 points | 2022-09-25 | 494 comments) iancmceachern > 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.
analognoise 4y ago
I wish I could take a "Mechanical engineering with CAD and McMaster Carr" class. So speaking of - this is probably the best place on the internet to ask - does anyone know of something like that?
- steve76 4y ago
danuker 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jameshart 4y ago
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?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > 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.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    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.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      This somewhat misses the point that a substantial fraction of HN commenters/users spend their working hours building UX stuff.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    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.
skilled 4y ago
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.
- beachy 4y ago
  > 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.
imiric 4y ago
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. I love everything else about the site, though.
steve76 4y ago
seltzered_ 4y ago
Other discussion mentioned in article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978
DrewADesign 4y ago
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.
mihaic 4y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  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.
  - mihaic 4y ago
    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.
tobinfekkes 4y ago
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.
swah 4y ago
Went to the side again and it accepted both 'a' and '-2' as quantities... illusion broken.
rkagerer 4y ago
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).
annoyingnoob 4y ago
McMaster is the easiest web site to order from hands down. There is no friction.
shadeslayer_ 4y ago
Funny thing is that the site doesn't even work right now. Kiss of death and all that..
dieselgate 4y ago
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}"
xal 4y ago
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.
newbieuser 4y ago
site owners: no more effort is needed for this site. that's enough, don't bother anymore. hn: the most amazing site in the world!!
octagons 4y ago
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.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
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".
bze12 4y ago
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. https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr
10xDev 4y ago
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.

322 points by amoopa 4y ago

The best e-commerce site would not insert a redirect when arriving via Google search results (which breaks the back button).

hedora 4y ago
I can't reproduce this in Firefox with Duck Duck Go or Google. Could you have clicked a (malicious?) Ad Sense ad?
- StayTrue 4y ago
  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.
simonlc 4y ago
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.
- trakout 4y ago
  NCIX doesn't seem to be shipping to anyone these days
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  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.
sokoloff 4y ago
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.
StayTrue 4y ago
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.

hedora 4y ago

It is strange that the article refers to McMaster as a B2B site. It works just as well for consumers.

zeusk 4y ago
I wouldn't say so, I had to purchase the min qty. of 200 for a screw set I could only find on there that was available in reasonable time. I made use of 4 and have 196 left over
- sokoloff 4y ago
  It sounds like it worked for you, at least better than all other options that you had.
- trey-jones 4y ago
  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.
- hedora 4y ago
  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.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Meh you can't exactly get one deck screw at home Depot.
sebrindom 4y ago

blamazon 4y ago

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.

Oxidation 4y ago
And the file you download is the file you need. You don't have to mess about with zip files containing one file.
techplex 4y ago
I've heard you can contact support to get a shipping quote before placing your order.
- blamazon 4y ago
  Their phone support is excellent, I will say. Still, to call for a ship quote is a bit of a faff that feels intentionally anachronistic.
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    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
    - blamazon 4y ago
      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.

hprotagonist 4y ago

mcmaster, rockauto, digikey, ... don't tell anyone, they'll "modernise" them and fuck it all up.

blamazon 4y ago
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.
mbauman 4y ago
Digikey's empty search for the entire catalog listing in categories (and then extraordinary filtering tools within categories) is absolute perfection.
millzlane 4y ago
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.

taeric 4y ago

I don't know. Fangamer and a few other small inventory sites work remarkably well for me, as well.

kensai 4y ago

Does it offer a "I will know it when I see it" function? Sometimes I have in mind a specific tool or accessory, but not its specs necessarily.

kaizo34 4y ago
What would a function like that look like?
projektfu 4y ago
Naming things can be very hard. For this, it helps to have the paper catalog to flip through.
- jcrawfordor 4y ago
  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.
  - jamincan 4y ago
    You can ask Uline to have a note added to all your orders not to pack a catalogue.
  - hedora 4y ago
    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: https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-de... Their working conditions are unbelievably sexist / restrictive (similar articles are available from journalists, if you don't trust glass door): https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Uline-RVW7264724.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Uline-RVW7... E.g.: > 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.

exhaze 4y ago

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…

mbauman 4y ago
> Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO If you own the category, however, folks will go directly to you instead of Google. I'm not googling for a 8-32 button head sheet metal screw.
- exhaze 4y ago
  Totally agree. But then it’s more like brand-driven marketing - people literally typing your URL into their browser. Brands take a long time to build. New companies don’t have a brand so they kinda have to go at it along the SEO route, especially in the early days.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
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.
chefandy 4y ago

ericwood 4y ago

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.

OneLeggedCat 4y ago
> makes opening in a new tab impossible 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.
- lh7777 4y ago
  Another option in Firefox: right clicking and selecting Open in new tab works on most (but not all) links in McMaster.
- wl 4y ago
  > They absolutely hate the idea that you might want to look at several items at once. B&H's bot detection will trigger on this from time to time.
zmgsabst 4y ago
What is it that doesn’t work? I started at the home page and could middle click on both images and blue text, down to individual items. (Using Chrome from Linux.)
- ericwood 4y ago
  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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thedangler 4y ago

I'm confused about medusajs. It has an API but yet I can't find anything about other SDK's. Are you locked into only using JS?

olivermrbl 4y ago
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. Re SDKs, there's an official JS SDK and a community-led Flutter SDK - that I know of. The former can be found in the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/medusajs/medusa/tree/master/packages/medusa-js https://github.com/medusajs/medusa/tree/master/packages/medu... Disclaimer, I am co-author of the project.
- thedangler 4y ago
  Thank you. I'm actually going to be building a B2B app for a client soon and this will help a lot.
  - olivermrbl 4y ago
    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.

trey-jones 4y ago

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.

roflyear 4y ago
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.

mauvehaus 4y ago

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).

VBprogrammer 4y ago
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.
- BenjiWiebe 4y ago
  You shouldn't hate to mention it. I'm somewhat anti-GPT (or maybe anti-AI in general) but this would actually be a really good use case.

MobileVet 4y ago

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.

morelisp 4y ago
You may enjoy Amazon Random Shopper. https://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-consumerism https://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized...
- MobileVet 4y ago
  Brilliant
tbran 4y ago
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!

jeffreyrogers 4y ago

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.

dev_tty01 4y ago
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.

ckemere 4y ago

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.

gumby 4y ago

Unmentioned is the origin of much of this value: > 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).

analog31 4y ago
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.
hammock 4y ago
>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

ckemere 4y ago

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...

intrepidhero 4y ago

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. See also digikey, parts-tree and rock auto.

systems_glitch 4y ago
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."
chrisjc 4y ago
> rock solid taxonomy > On Amazon 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
- function_seven 4y ago
  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.
RajT88 4y ago
The people listing the products are not trying to game the system with McMaster.

juddlyon 4y ago

One advantage is that they keep the same design for many years so each time you use it you get better/faster. You know what to expect.

avmich 4y ago

The site doesn't work without JavaScript - no graceful degradation. For this reason alone I wouldn't consider it among the best. With JavaScript it's rather good though.

mitthrowaway2 4y ago

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.

bombcar 4y ago

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.

ipython 4y ago

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.

giantg2 4y ago

I have a gripe about McMaster. 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.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
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.

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago

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.

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
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"

the_other 4y ago

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. I couldn't find the screws I wanted, tho'.

password4321 4y ago

Talk about free advertising! Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 (1402 points | 2022-09-25 | 494 comments) iancmceachern > 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.

analognoise 4y ago

I wish I could take a "Mechanical engineering with CAD and McMaster Carr" class. So speaking of - this is probably the best place on the internet to ask - does anyone know of something like that?

steve76 4y ago

danuker 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
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jameshart 4y ago

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?

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> 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.
- jameshart 4y ago
  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.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    This somewhat misses the point that a substantial fraction of HN commenters/users spend their working hours building UX stuff.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  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.

skilled 4y ago

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.

beachy 4y ago
> 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.

imiric 4y ago

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. I love everything else about the site, though.

steve76 4y ago

seltzered_ 4y ago

Other discussion mentioned in article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978

DrewADesign 4y ago

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.

mihaic 4y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
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.
- mihaic 4y ago
  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.

tobinfekkes 4y ago

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.

swah 4y ago

Went to the side again and it accepted both 'a' and '-2' as quantities... illusion broken.

rkagerer 4y ago

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).

annoyingnoob 4y ago

McMaster is the easiest web site to order from hands down. There is no friction.

shadeslayer_ 4y ago

Funny thing is that the site doesn't even work right now. Kiss of death and all that..

dieselgate 4y ago

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}"

xal 4y ago

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.

newbieuser 4y ago

site owners: no more effort is needed for this site. that's enough, don't bother anymore. hn: the most amazing site in the world!!

octagons 4y ago

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.

SkyPuncher 4y ago

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".

bze12 4y ago

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. https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr

10xDev 4y ago

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.