Mechanical Engineer and product designer here. I've been using mcmaster daily for 20 years to do my job. It is definitely the standard by which all others are judged. I'll gladly pay 2, 3, 5, even 10x the price to get it from McMaster. The service, the CAD models, I have what I need the next day. As an example of the level of their service, you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and they'll go through it, figure out what's what, and refund you for it. They make it so easy, you just have to do the engineering. Thank you McMaster-Carr.
Alas, for some reason they only cater to the US market and have no presence in the EU, for example. So while it is possible to order from them, it's rather inconvenient as you need to deal with customs/taxes.
Digi-Key got this right: you can order DDP, which makes things quick & simple.
Incidentally, I am amazed that they don't have a meaningful competitor in the EU. It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
> It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
I'm so glad we can order from mcmaster here in canada, even though shipping is two days and usually min 30 USD even for tiny orders. All local industrial suppliers are truly stuck in the 80s. They have a paper catalog, without prices (if you're lucky you can get a PDF too). If you want prices, you have to call a salesperson, or send an email with an item list and wait a day or two to get a quote back. Then you get your quote, and some items are in stock, some others in stock "nearby" (next day delivery), others are backorder (1-X weeks). Then you have a lengthy phone or email back and forth to try and figure out what's in stock as a replacement.
So yeah, McMaster whenever possible and I'll gladly (have my employer) pay more for it. Shout-out to Misumi, too, however. I do mostly prototyping and I use so much of their customizable items, like rotary shafts. Much cheaper and faster than doing a drawing, sending it out to 3-8 local shops to try to find one that is quiet enough jobwise to take on a tiny one-off project and waiting 4 weeks for it, at a high price.
We hade a competitor in Europe. It was called Zoro. Maybe not THAT clean but overall they also had a good website and great prices. But they folded some years ago.
DDP is probably the only good solution here for most EU customers, but frankly the hassle and expense of doing business in the EU is what keeps most US e-commerce companies from entering the market.
I often use Conrad for its huge collection of small parts (mechanical as well as semiconductors) most of which can be ordered individually, with an interface with lots of filters and easy access to manuals and data sheets. Sometimes their categorization is a bit off, and they don't have CAD files, but it's decent enough.
Maybe because the site is hard-coded for the US imperial system?
Quoting the article: «Bolts are commonly specified by their thread size (e.g. 1/4"-20), and their length. I'm looking for a 1/4"-20 x 1" bolt, meaning that the bolt's diameter is 1/4" and its length is 1", so I select these filters.»
A friend of mine worked there right after college. I happened to buy some girl scout cookies through her, and joked with her that you can get everything from McMaster. When she brought me the cookies, she brought me a fake McMaster invoice for them too.
I've heard some mixed reviews about what it's like to work there, but I completely agree: as a customer, despite the (sometimes very high) prices, I was always incredibly happy with McMaster.
mcmcaster carr is also extremely popular in the hobby drone building market for buying bolts/nuts/fasteners/standoffs to attach circuit boards (ESCs, flight controllers, etc) to carbon fiber plate, and for attaching cnc cut carbon fiber plate piece together to build the whole frame of a small UAV.
people in the film/tv/production industry also use them to buy various fasteners and hardware for rigging lights, microphones, building complex camera systems onto gimbal platforms, etc.
Lucky. When I was in Engineering school, the Mechanical Engineering department had one catalog. We couldn't get any more - something about limited numbers printed (though, I'll confess I never tried to get my own). It was passed around among the students in Machine Design as if it were some sacred scroll.
I'm sure they have internal horror stories of the practice, but they do it.
When we sold an old company to a PE group, all the McMaster loose stuff in the warehouse went back to them stacked in boxes on a pallet for them to work through. I wouldn't be surprised to learn our CM did the same thing after the sale.
Oh how I wish Mcmaster would open an EU branch... I don't even mind if they charge us more, but PLEASE for the love of all engineers in Europe, just open a branch here.
Not at all. My rate is very high, so saving a day of my time saves them way more. The burn rate on some of these projects is hundreds of thousands, millions a day. Saving time when your on the critical path (as mechanical design typically is) is worth that much. Once the design is finished there is a whole army of manufacturing engineers and sourcing folks that can drive the cost down. That's not the niche that mcmaster fills.
Honestly, not really. They want the project done sooner, and McMaster is a means to that end. The supply chain team can find a better longer term vendor later.
For production quantities, sure, nobody in their right mind would source from McMaster Carr (or Grainger, or any similar company,) but for their niche, they have a solid value proposition: they’ll get you small quantities of anything they carry incredibly quickly. For maintenance and repair (their primary market) or prototyping, that can be incredibly valuable.
It depends on what you need. For basic metric nuts and bolts it seems to be the same price as a local hardware store but I don’t have to leave my office to buy the stuff.
This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast.
Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc...
McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest.
> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed.
In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies!
The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling.
However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling.
It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
One benefit McMaster gets is that they have so much stuff that they tend to be the first place you think of when you need some random item. A couple years back I had to build a prototype machine that would inspect wells and I needed 4" diameter clear PVC pipe. Went to McMaster, and of course it was there :-)
I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.
My experience around their shipping was the opposite— surprise outrageous fee to get fedex to deliver a few feet of PVC. This was back before they showed you shipping prices up front.
Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together.
[0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.
Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.
I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce
Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
>On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
McMaster-Carr is an incredible example of how an existing physical-product distributor with a vaunted historical operations department, when faced with moving into the e-commerce world, could choose one of two paths:
- Build an online presence cheaply because you can rely on your historical offline operations to paper over any shortcomings in the online system.
- Build an online presence with the same ethos, standards, creativity, and long-term continued investment with which you built your offline operations to be your competitive advantage in the first place.
There aren't many legacy organizations that successfully digitized with that second path in mind, at least not at first - McMaster, B&H Photo, and Sweetwater come to mind as notable exceptions. It's a useful thought experiment, I think, even for those working on startups and green-field projects.
Having worked in the industrial supply marketspace and website and technology development. Familiar with the McMaster catalog and mirrored website. I would not agree with the assessment of it as incredible. While McMaster is a leader in the distribution of industrial supplies, the website is an almost exact duplicate of it's print catalog and not all that user friendly for b2b buyers.
Funny you should mention Sweetwater because they're also near the head of the table in my mental pantheon of e-commerce greats.
Their website is honestly just above average. Page-load times are fair to middling, the pages are very busy, vendor-supplied copy takes up much of the item page, and categories are difficult, perhaps just an artifact of the industry they're in. But if you dig deep, there is a lot of detail beneath, and the related-items suggestions are usually at least relevant if not spot-on, which is more than I can say for many sites.
But where they shine is the integration of humans into the process.
Back in 2015, I thought I might pick up a digital piano/keyboard sort of thing. I wasn't having a great time making sense of the lingo, so I gave them a call, and within seconds (I think I might've pushed one button in an IVR system), I was talking to real person who knew everything there is to know about keyboards. We talked for probably ten minutes about what I wanted to do, my budget, the ergonomic and acoustic constraints of my workspace, etc. He explained some terms to help me understand how the offerings differed and how those would impact my playing, and ultimately steered me to one of the models that was already on my short-list. We also talked about companion software, but I elected not to take that step at the time.
I went from hesitant to confident, and completed the purchase minutes later. The cool thing is, that confidence followed me through delivery, unpacking, setup, and my first plinking across the octaves -- I never felt alone like I was just gonna have to figure this out for myself, I _knew_ that this was the right instrument for my needs, and set out through basic finger exercises with the determination of one who's divinely inspired.
Then something even cooler happened: A week after delivery, that same sales engineer emailed me, just checking in. To make sure I got everything set up and was comfortable with it, to see if I could use any further help. As it happens, I was fine, but if something along the line had derailed me, this absolutely would've made a difference in getting me back on track. An expert whose entire job is to make sure I have a good experience with their stuff.
Now, I've had other e-commerce sites email me and follow up, sometimes with phone calls, but it's not the same. In some cases it feels like outright harassment (lookin' at you, Global Industrial). Often it's just a ploy for reviews or further business.
With Sweetwater, it's different somehow. Yeah I'm sure their goal is to keep me as a customer so I'll spend more money with them in the future, sure, and I'm fine with that. But they don't lead with the money, they lead with the caring. And that makes all the difference in the world.
With McMaster it's almost precisely the opposite, I've never spoken to a human there and I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. They're like the supremely efficient robot that just produces the parts I need, immediately and without fail. There's no need for warm-fuzzies in this process, and they seem to understand that as well.
I sort of head up all "tech stuff" at my mid-sized church, including sound. (I also have played piano and bass, at times.) I had to talk my pastor into starting to use Sweetwater about 20 years ago. He was stuck on using some hole-in-the-wall shop in LA on Sunset. (Which I eventually visited, and, sure enough, every who's who has a signed headshot on their wall). But Sweetwater is in our back yard, and we've made the trip a couple of times, and there's just no comparison. Sweetwater's presence, with the rooms and the demos and the videos and every thing is just unbelievable. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was about salesmen. We've had the same one for 20 years, and he's always kept a close tab on us, and helped out whenever we've needed advice. It must be a great place to work to keep a salesman that long. They advertised hiring for programmers, and I'd LOVE to give them a shot, but I'd have to move, and I'm not ready for that. Kent? Love ya, man.
MechE here as well. An alternative to McMaster is Misumi. Misumi is nice because you can order parts that are made to order (imagine a rod with the specific thread and length). No next day shipping like McMaster but being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number is huge (so you don’t need drawings or anything). They’ll ship you a couple books like the signature yellow book from McMaster. They’ll even host a seminar explaining why “good engineers design, great engineers integrate” (really only true for the industry and not consumer tech).
Misumi is awesome. It's basically Japan's answer to McMaster-carr.
10 years ago I would have said Misumi's website was better than MMC. Unfortunately Misumi has gotten a bit less usable over the past decade, while McMaster has improved. Misumi's paper catalogue is incredible though and I surprise myself to say I would rather browse it than either their or McMaster's website.
Top quality configurable / customizable parts is certainly the way of the future, and it's amazing that Misumi has the whole process figured out. You can get a custom precision leadscrew of the length you want with the ends turned down to the diameter you want and the retaining ring grooves you want, and buy just one piece for a reasonable price. Any ordinary machine shop would reject the order unless you bought fifty or more.
I think the most annoying thing about both sites is its weird ass names. Like it’s obvious that McMaster call certain things a certain way so that it’s less searchable elsewhere. Misumi takes this to a whole new level.
I've used Misumi on projects before. I've ordered all kinds of custom stuff including drive shafts and tons of different brackets. Everything comes neatly labeled and bagged. The best part IMO is the custom aluminum extrustion (8020 clone). You can order everything cut to length, with holes drilled, holes tapped, etc. The lead time sucks though. I'm green with envy over all my friends back home that get to use McmasterCarr.
Mil spec part numbers for things like screws are great! We needed a very long screw in a specific style and material that no one stocked. We pulled up the mil spec datasheet for that style of screw, made up the part number based on our needs, and sent it to our fastener vendor. We get back exactly what we designed for without having to spend time designing our own special purpose screw. The vendor already has the spec so we can just point to exactly what we want and none of us have to spend time going back and forth to find a compromise.
And Misumi works well in Europe, which helps a lot. They also have quite often great prices.
Now the catalog is not as far reaching as Mcmaster. We don't have a Mcmaster in Europe :(
> being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number
How does that work? I have been searching the internet for stainless steel M8 x 20 set screws with a torx socket, maybe uncommon but straightforward. I have yet to find these anywhere outside of having them manufactured in china by truckload - I need maybe 100.
These are just standard parts though. Misumi's real configuration flexibility comes from parts that are parametrically defined. For example you can basically design a shaft by specing the material, coating, diameter, length, tolerances, and additional parametric features (external threading, tapped holes, flats, grooves, etc).
McMaster is a great choice when you can value your time.
There is no comparison shipping. You need an industrial tricycle that gets the job done? Great. Add an industrial tricycle to your cart. Unless there is a meaningful difference between models, there will be only one choice. It will be curated and it will do what you generally expect it to do.
You'll pay more than you can get it for elsewhere, but it will do the job and it will arrive on time.
That's McMaster's value proposition. It is often a very good one.
It’s arguably similar to the value proposition Apple brings to a lot of their customers. Time is money, and having things just work the way they’re supposed to seems to get rarer and rarer. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I dunno.
I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.
On the other hand, I take one look at this mostly-prefabricated building and I'm like "...I could use one of those." https://www.mcmaster.com/6704T998/
It has come up when we've played the "McMaster Game" at our office, in which we attempt to guess random things that McMaster might or might not have.
Interesting things they have had in the past include basketball hoops (in a kit, ready to go, for all your "our institution needs a basketball court... today" needs) and a urinal.
But yes, there are real uses for industrial tricycles -- need to move some stuff (or a person) pretty far pretty quickly inside a warehouse? Industrial tricycle.
We use these in military aviation across the world. Stupidly useful when you’ve got 100+ lbs of tools to run out to a down aircraft that needs fixed to make a mission.
The best tool for moving a person and up to about 300kg of stuff at 2-20km/h over nice surfaces.
Never need to charge/fuel it. A coaster brake model out of the weather can go years without any maintenance. Will work for decades with $50 worth of parts. Some models fit anywhere wheelchair accessible. Cheap enough that you don't need keys. Stores anywhere.
In an industrial setting they are extremely useful.
There is! IIRC, the first item McM ever sold through its website was an industrial tricycle (I think it was to an engineer at CERN, which has very long tunnels).
It may be hard to find but there is a very good episode of 99% Invisible (are there bad ones?) that goes in depth on industrial tricycles. Only thing I can say to help you find it is that I think it was a 2015 episode, sorry.
Basically they are used to transport parts around large warehouses or factories.
I used to work for an auto supplier and saw the McMaster site and catalog nearly every day. The thing that was always fascinating about their site was they basically translated their Catalog 1:1 to the web and added some interactivity to it. It's similar to what IKEA did with the early versions of its website. As a result, McMaster's site is hyper-focused on presenting information in the densest and cleanest way possible because it's using techniques from print. It's not trying to upsell or advertise or offer support or this or that. It's pretty much the gold standard catalog-to-site port and one of the best ecommerce experiences out there.
That said, the way they've done things won't work for many ecommerce platforms. They're established, they have a massive catalog of highly-customizable parts, they sell in bulk, and they're (mostly) B2B. Those factors really lend themselves well to a simple, catalog-like experience. A new name selling to customers that only has 15 products isn't likely to benefit as much, although there are still things they could likely learn.
This doesn't go into the actual mechanics of finalizing your order, which is incredibly well done. I've only actually ordered from McMaster 3 times and don't have a need for anything right now so I might be getting details wrong, but basically, the "items in your cart" page has a shipping address and payment method pre-filled, and you just hit "order" and that's it. What's in stock, what ships when, etc. is all clearly labeled in each line item. There are number entry boxes to adjust quantities. You can put in your own part numbers, of course, and the items in the shipment will be labeled with that (or at least a reference to the line item on your invoice). First time I bought from them, I was blown away how clean and easy it was. You hear "industrial supply" and think the ordering process is going to end with "ok, now call us for a quote", but it's smoother than Amazon. Well done.
I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed. It's wonderful. I also appreciate that their search term tokenizer understands that you're looking for a thread size ('1/4"-20') and doesn't strip the non-alphanumeric characters like most would. (Amazon has gotten better at this over the years. I wanted to say "look at those idiots, giving you any screw that has the number 1, 4, or 20 in the description", but they bring up the parameterization as well.)
Finally, McMaster has a reputation for being pricey, but sometimes you just pay the same price that everyone pays for something. For example, say you want a set of Mitutoyo 4" digital calipers. On Amazon, which is rife with counterfeit knockoffs, you'll pay $136.94. On McMaster, you'll pay $129.19 (plus shipping, yeah I know). And it won't be counterfeit! As always, shop around, but they are not trying to screw you on price, or by subbing in counterfeit trash to make a few bucks. Truly a marvel of online shopping. I wish they sold everything.
> I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed.
This is something I wish more e-commerce sites would grok. I go to Lowes and type in
1/2" 10-32 stainless bolt
in the search box. Now I get a search result page, with filter parameters on the left side. Great. There's a checkbox that says "Stainless steel". Oh oh! What do I do now? Aren't the results already all stainless steel? I specified it in the goddamn search. If I select the checkbox, will I be filtering out things I want? Can I click the checkbox and remove "stainless" word from my search query and get more things I want? (hint: not usually). Why do I have different choices for screw thickness and thread pitch when I specified them, too? Come on, e-commerce developer-wizards, get your shit together!
Same for you, Amazon! "64GB sd card" and then Amazon's filter lets me further drill down... by capacity. DUHH, I specified the capacity! How can Amazon operate for almost 30 years and still not have this one figured out?
Amazon is shockingly bad at parametric searches. Products are routinely miscategorized, often ridiculously so, and frequently have missing or woefully inaccurate parameters (like treating a bundle of four 16 GB SD cards as "64 GB").
Even when Amazon's product parameters are correct, their filters are frequently outdated -- for example, their category for "internal hard drives" has a single filter for "4 TB & Above", even though capacities as high as 20 TB are available. They also have a filter for 1500 RPM (not 15k!) drives, which I'm pretty sure have been out of production for longer than Amazon has sold hard disks.
Ecommerce filtering for electronics generally is terrible. I even made a hobby website for used electronics, specifically inspired by the precise parametric search we expect from McMaster and Digikey etc
I disagree with one thing: I usually go to Mcmaster to browse. I often have a problem, and I know that it must be a relatively common problem with an elegant solution, but I'm not experienced enough in that area to know what the solution is. Browse through the catalogue for a while and sure enough, there's a widget that's specifically designed to solve your problem. The design of the website makes it really easy to do that. Everything is well curated, labelled, described, tagged, and hierarchical.
There's also something weird with the way they programmed the site itself, which prevents you from opening certain links in a separate browser tab. it's really annoying when I'm not sure exactly what I need and I want to read all 10 product descriptions or whatever. I end up having to copy and paste the product URL and work backwards, rather than going all through the parts-filtering flow 10 times over from the beginning.
This drove me nuts for a while until I figured out the workaround:
Expand down to a specific item. Click the item number to open the "last choice for quantity and stuff before adding to cart" dropdown. In this, rightclick "Item Detail" and open in new tab.
Now in the new tab, head to the top right, "view catalog page", and you're back to the category.
On the point of hierarchy they are messing up their categories:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/
Hovering over the links in that category, you get links such as:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/foam
But clicking "foam" takes you to: mcmaster.com/foam/ and there's no link back to raw-materials. This is a mistake. They've booted you out of the hierarchy and neglect to offer breadcrumbs or equivalent category navigation.
Clicking "browse catalogue" menu fails to identify what category you're currently in.
If I'm in mcmaster.com/fabricating/ and click "drills", why am I taken to a page called "hand drills"? The naming is a mess. Why am I seeing screwdrivers on that page?
Pardon the pun, but if I drill down to the hammer drill product page, the URL is:
The issue is that their products don't fit into a neat hierarchy. Yes foams can be raw materials, but they can also be packing material, or insulation, or liners, or safety equipment. Similarly, polyurethane foam and stainless steel are both raw materials but no one thinks of them as the same thing, nor is there often a need to navigate easily between the two.
As for the urls, just having it be the part number is super convenient. There tend to be many different names for things and it's so easy to miscommunicate. Part numbers avoid ambiguity - it doesn't matter who made it or what you call it, if it has the right number it works. You can have an intern who doesn't know the difference between nut and a bolt but as long as they have that number they know exactly the url they need to go to.
It might not be a great set up for all ecommerce sites, but it's ideal for any site selling hardware.
Eek I'm going to go against the grain here a little. That site is useful when you already know what you are looking for. For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
Obviously it's been made for exactly that purpose and does it well but for general e-commerce it's bad. The retailers are looking to send you to an area of their website with "stuff" you are interested in. For example you like toys because you're a parent who's buying your kids stuff for x-mas. The site wants to know that sort of thing and send you to the toys for x-mas section.
What Mcmaster.com looks like to me is an old fashioned mail order company that's converted their old mail order catalogue straight to a website, perfection.
Also note with Bezos tinkering with every pixel on the website is very old news, this doesn't happen anymore.
This is why I love building B2B software. You get to help people do their jobs, rather than trying to sell them things. The site in the OP is a fantastic example of building a tool to help someone be successful at their job.
To be fair, "searching for a present for my kid" is a legitimate job in the jobs-to-be-done sense... it's just a lot fuzzier than a "business job" which has external constraints.
Yeah the title is clickbait. McMaster is regularly praised in engineering forums, which is great. Clearly they nailed the UX for their users. There are some good lessons to learn from it, but it's not some sort of golden standard for e-commerce as a whole.
The main praise is usually search/filter, but that really comes down to this quote from the article:
> McMaster is able to provide such intuitive searching and filtering because everything that they sell is highly legible – it's all defined by quantitative specs.
Most products don't lend themselves so well to filtering.
An awful lot of products _would_ lend themselves to filtering, but the folks putting the sites together don't bother coming up with good parameters, or when they do, they don't populate them on all the relevant products.
This vexes me constantly on HomeDepot.com, for instance. I was looking for a set of sockets, either 1/4" or 3/8" drive, metric 6-point, deep, impact. I was shopping for sockets at the Depot because I was already buying some other things, and I honestly like Milwaukee's offerings in this space, so let's take a look.
Search for "metric deep socket", so far so good. Gets me into the category so parametric filters appear. Filter by "6-point" and all the sets disappear -- that parameter only applies to sockets sold individually, despite most sets consisting exclusively of 6-point or 12-point, rarely a mix, and they even indicate this in their item titles. The data is there, but you can't filter by it, because the site sucks.
Just the first example to mind because it happened two days ago.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible
Maybe that's the core issue. How are people expecting to interact with the site?
I think when you're selling with an obvious B2B focus, the "value subtract" nature of a lot of consumer-targeting selling practices become clear.
There's no point trying to jump a B2B customer through a bunch of cross-sells and (poorly) related products, because there's a fair chance he doesn't even have the purchasing authority to add any of them.
If your search or filtering sucks, time is money, and they're going to go somewhere that respects that.
Maybe what retailers should be looking at is ways to break up the "browse" from the "focused buy" experience.
Instead of getting me in-cart for the browsing experience, build some external content. Instead of "here's a category of 3000 toys, start clicking", write up some high quality articles about different products, target markets, etc. with deep product links. Since you're curating the content, you have a chance to "conveniently" sort the products to promote what you want or whoever gives you a kickback for browsing customers, while not frustrating the "focused buy" customer with a deluge of EKTIBAQNN brand USB cable/fire-starters.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
No one is going on McMaster just looking for something interesting to buy. And frankly if you're not amazon, odds are people are trying to buy something specific from you as well.
Besides the handy website, their many-thousand page phsyical catalog is great. We have a copy at work and it's easy to spend a long time flipping through, learning about all of the different things they have, and why they are useful.
My homebrew keg was leaking CO2, and the brewing supply company only sells the same crappy (= non-silicone) o-rings that had just failed. They wanted something dumb like $25 for a replacement part.
Enter McMaster-Carr. For significantly less money than fixing one bad o-ring, I have a pile of replacement sets for every seal in the system.
Another vote for McMaster-Carr. It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all. I don't know of any other websites that meet that relatively simple standard.
Perhaps part of why their website is so good is because they deliver the goods. They follow through. Ever need a 4x8 sheet of copper? It gets delivered to your front door. Sooner than you expect, and at a very fair price.
Yeah. It's kind of like how in chess, many learners study openings and gambits and obscure checkmates, when the low hanging fruit is just learning to spot and avoid blunders.
MMC is mostly about not making the mistakes everybody else makes, which puts it near the top even before you consider what they do well.
I think everyone knows what the "mistakes" are, it's just that its en vogue to "hate your customers" the way amazon and similar companies do, racing to the bottom to squeeze money out of them with dark patterns instead of just charging more for good service
McMaster's pricing and structure also self-selects for the right kind of customer -- customers who are willing to pay a reasonable premium for quality, speed, and customer service.
> It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all.
Sad to say, comparing them to most other sites where you try (or attempt to try -- yes, often it is that bad) makes a case for saying, yes indeed, they are great!
I like buying auto parts from RockAuto. Their website is dead simple to use. They have nice features like good/better/best, showing the most popular item of that category for that car, an icon for OEM parts, and another icon that shows items in the same warehouse as the item in your cart. So when you can't decide between a dozen brands of sparkplugs, you can pick one that is both OEM and is in the same warehouse as the air filter you needed so you only have to pay for one shipping cost.
I used to. Then I bought a part that didn't fit (a switch that obviously didn't have the right number of terminals), and the return process turned me off.
I still check them though as they often have good enough parts for a lot less than OEM prices. Though I also still go to the OEM when I get tired of third party parts that don't work (after the switch issue above I went to my local auto parts store - the switch fits but doesn't work, I'll see what the OEM part does. Rock auto was $8, local store $20, deal $140 - but I trust the dealer switch will work for another 20 years)
I find that to be the case for many "industrial" (for the lack of better word) online stores. E.g. for plastic containers, https://www.usplastic.com/ is similar.
I’d like to add RockAuto as a peer to McMaster. It’s auto parts, and somehow uglier than McMaster, but damn if it isn’t the fastest no nonsense website I’ve seen for parts.
I can drill down to a specific part for a specific car in seconds, and see pics of the product, part numbers, specs. It’s lovely.
Rockauto is one of my favorite things in the world. The site is a perfect case study in how to make a UX that's ugly as sin but has evolved to be a million times more usable than anything the "minimal sleek modern UX" crowd could ever come up with.
You always roll the dice with aftermaket parts of course, but my experience has been that they usually don't sell utter crap like you'll find on Amazon and eBay. They make some effort to verify that the parts are not bottom-of-the-barrel because they don't want to deal with returns and after all, they are car people themselves.
My favorite thing that I like to tell people that have not heard of RockAuto yet: I can buy a full of wiper blades for my two cars for about the same price as ONE mid-quality wiper blade at Walmart.
"People visit McMaster-Carr with high intent to buy a specific part, that's it."
Mcmaster is great, but it's important to point out there's no brand or product selection decisions. You pick your criteria and get exactly one option. It lends itself to a very different experience.
How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
> How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
This would be great for many things! I'm sure there are plenty of people who just want a good quality, reasonably priced -whatever- and would be fine with this model. Actually, that seems like it's basically just the business model for Kirkland.
If there was a retailer who just sold one carefully-chosen thing in each category, I think they'd do pretty well. They wouldn't be able to capitalize on market segmentation, fashion trends, etc. which would hurt their profitability, but they'd also benefit from being the "default" choice for many people.
You never have to worry about it being junk, though. When I order fasteners, metal parts to be machined/used in fabrication, or just misc. supplies from McMaster-Carr, I know whatever supplier they are using will be high quality and the part won't be a counterfeit. It also seems that they tend to stick with US manufacturers if possible.
I agree. Amazon over-indexed on being the world's biggest store and chose to do zero curation. I'm thinking they thought reviews would solve for bringing quality to the top before learning how badly gamed they'd become. Now about half of what I get on Amazon has to go right back. So much junk.
Wouldn't that be exactly the same, just with more filters?
When I am on Amazon, trying to find something, I always feel like I have to fight the site, rather than being helped by it. Paid ads, very poor categorization/property-search, deceptive UX, fake reviews, "amazon picks" etc etc etc. And when I find the right product, I might receive a fake.
I think what people enjoy and celebrate about McMaster-Carr is that it is exactly the opposite of that.
It might not work, and it doesn't have to. McMaster isn't designed to be a highly competitive retail marketplace for the average consumer or the average consumer product.
It's for people building things that already have a good idea of what they need. For the most part, if you need an 18mm long 1/4-20 flange head hex-socket grade-8 bolt in a black oxide finish, you don't care about having a ton of options from different manufacturers, because there should not be a meaningful difference between any of them.
This is basically Costco, Trader Joe's, or IKEA -- all well-loved business. Small selection but their customers like what's on offer and don't have to comparison shop. Turns out that people really like soviet store style businesses and "huge selection" doesn't really live up to the marketing hype.
This is almost exactly the problem Thread is solving for clothing (I worked there for >7 years).
Big retailers will have 100 different white t-shirts to choose from. Thread will (roughly) tell you which white t-shirt to buy.
The tricky bit is that fashion is _so_ personal, so what you have to do is actually have all 100 (or in many cases _far_ more), with all the necessary data to be able to differentiate, and then understand "style" in such a way that you can confidently recommend specifics. I'm biased, but I think Thread has become really very good at this.
The counterpoint to this is that a site like Amazon can still succeed to dominate the industry despite being a horrendous mess with nonfunctional search, a horrendous counterfeiting problem, and widespread review fraud. Does take the wind out of the sails of IA/UX purists somewhat.
Amazon does not dominate the market that McMaster-Carr exists in. It's not even in the running. If you attempted to use Amazon for the type of project McMaster-Carr exists to support, you're going to get laughed at at best. MMC/Misumi/Grainger/etc. own industrial/mechanical, Digikey/Mouser/Arrow/etc. own electronics, RockAuto owns automotive aftermarket, etc. It's actually incredible how little fight Amazon has put up in these markets.
I feel like the part everyone is ignoring is that McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection. The features people are raving about in this article and thread only make sense in the context of selling bolts for industrial use, and could never be implemented at a place like Amazon.
I don't love McMaster due to their insane over packaging and environmental issues, but this
> McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection.
is not the case. They sell virtually anything anyone in an industrial environment could possibly be interested in. See other comments about "industrial trikes" and feel free to choose some arbitrary thing and try to find it there.
This is the frustrating thing for me, they are objectively very good at what they do, but in a completely unsustainable way.
Never mind industrial uses. It’s nearly impossible to find the right sized bolt or screw for a basic residential task on Amazon. For example, to replace a furniture screw that was lost during a move.
Amazon succeeds because they can get a tube of toothpaste, an onion, a washing machine, an extension cord, a can of paint and an iPad at your doorstep in under a day. Sure their search interface might not be the best but no one really cares. They are a logistics company, and don’t go too deep into any one niche.
I've never emailed them but I have called them on a few occasions. Somehow they pick up before it even rings once. And it's a real person, not a phone tree. Pretty remarkable.
They are really fast to get back to you and will tell you what stuff is which can be helpful in certain situations where the material or vendor might matter.
It's a lot less common than you think, especially by email. In my spare time, I work on motorcycles, and I often have to source specific parts or - in rare cases - reach out to a local machine shop. I've given up on email, a phone call is often the only way to get a response.
When you work in the tech industry, you get accustomed to everything being done by text, but the rest of the world isn't so convinced :)
I agree so much. It's what every single mail order company should have done. Freaking parametric search eaverywhere and uniform engraving style pictures so that your eye quickly catches the difference between the screw types.
McMaster is like the backend of an auto parts store. You tell the clerk what you need and they might ask if you want the cheap or premium version, then you pay and leave. You don't want to walk the aisles looking at stuff because you've got a dead alternator that needs to be replaced by Monday morning. Shopping at Amazon is like going to a massive department store. They've got everything but they lay out the store in a way that almost forces you to browse. You aren't in a rush because you are just looking at kitchen gadgets and might also be interested in buying a new pillow.
At some point several years ago, Amazon actually tried to compete with Mcmaster and others selling in this niche. They had a sub-site or something like that, I think it was called "Amazon Pro" and it focused on nothing but the sorts of parts and fittings that Mcmaster sells. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as Mcmaster, and it sank (AFAICT) without a trace.
I referenced Small Parts in another post. They weren't really a McMaster knockoff. They specialized in physically small items while McMaster carried everything industrial.
I still have an 8"x10"x0.062" 6061 aluminum sheet I bought from Small Parts probably 15+ years ago, still in the plastic wrap. Don't even remember what I wanted it for :-)
I really wish DigiKey would fire their web team and have McMaster's web team run their site.
DigiKey's website has gone downhill so dramatically the past five years or so... it's astonishing. Random failures, login attempts just redirect back to their homepage, horizontal scrollables inside of vertical scrollables (?!?!!), and that new filtering scheme that has javascript that grays-out/disables options randomly in response to you moving your mouse the wrong way. WTF.
Please DigiKey, learn from McMaster. Your website is junk, kill it with fire and start over. I love everything else about Digikey.
most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
I wish digikey was as good as McMaster. With digikey I often have to parse through a huge table with many pages to figure out what the difference is between a bunch of search results. On McMaster you can clearly see search results categorized in sub tables and densely arranged to make clear what the options are.
Are there any electronics websites that actually organized like McMaster?
Electronics are a different market than the one that McMaster serves. Frequently at Digikey, you need an exact part number from a specific manufacturer. Or, if you're buying parts at scale, you might be quite price-sensitive.
At McMaster, there would be one 555 timer, one utility op-amp that implements the LM741 spec, one low-noise op-amp, one 5V regulator, etc. They would all perform at or somewhat above average, but you wouldn't know precisely what you were getting.
There probably is room for a McMaster-like Digikey (or a simplified Digikey storefront for those who aren't picky about details), but it is unclear how large its market opportunity might be. It might look kinda like SparkFun.
A lot of the time, details in electronics really do matter. I think I've ordered almost every variation of the LM35 temperature sensor over my career. Sometimes you care more about price, sometimes you care more about accuracy. McMaster would probably only stock one of the grades, not sure which.
I was thinking the same. Digikey, Mouser, etc. are great, but their websites don’t give me the same confidence that McMaster does. There’s always a fear in the back of my mind when browsing these electronics sites, wondering if the part I’m looking for slipped through the cracks of my filters.
When filtering McMaster on the other hand, I have absolute confidence that I will find the part I’m looking for, assuming it is stocked. It’s really intuitive and robust. I’m sure much of this can be chalked up to the fact that McMaster has a much smaller and more specific catalog, but still.
EVERY online retailer should take notes on how McMaster is able to create psychological safety when browsing. It’s a real peace of mind, as strange as that may sound.
digikey, mouser, and arrow are the big ones that I'm aware of. All of their UX is really bad compared to McMaster though.
I love when a field value table has redundant values for 20mm, 2cm, 2.0cm, 20mm with a trailing space, etc. A lot of the value-add here from McMaster comes from pure data cleanup and categorization and cleaning up the categories and fields. That gets way harder to do on something the size of mouser or digikey though, they have a LOT of product types in the catalog, and tens of millions of products in their warehouses. Just cataloging it all is a massive amount of work.
I'd actually be curious what the data structure of the McMaster catalog is to support that. It's a cool website, it makes it seem so effortless to search for parts.
I was also intimidated by the huge table and hundreds of columns the first time I use Digi-Key, but only later realized how handy it is to have all the parameters listed together. It makes comparison subtle difference of each parts so much easier.
The filter above will also tell you existing enum values within the current showing list, so you will instantly get an idea you are comparing.
Again, both have their advantages, but I recommend give it a try. Finding parts isn't any harder this way.
also, the reason why they're all good is because they're not trying to sell you anything. they're for people who are at work, know what they need, know they have options on where to buy. therefore it's streamlined as much as possible to make life at work easy (which becomes their differentiator, along with easy billing terms and fast shipping), rather than market things to people who aren't even making decisions on what to buy...
"Functional websites" is not what we are discussing here, but amazing websites.
I've seen a carparts store online and it had something really similar, a few words like "oil filter 2017 ford mustang" and you were literally looking at the part in the dropdown list, exactly what you want.
What do most sites do wrong?
1) Not loading the search data into RAM on the server so it is really fast - most companies could do this with their level of stock and only need a couple of GB per web server
2) Requiring a postback to start filtering
3) Not allowing the ordering of search terms to be changed e.g. "Ford Mustang Oil Filter" should match the same as "Oil Filter Ford Mustang"
4) Not having images for all results
5) Not being able to zoom in on images to check something is what you think it is
6) Using a stock image which doesn't necessarily match the item
For companies whose primary interface with the public is searching for stuff, most e-commerce sites I use are shamefully bad at both performance and usability.
Wow, Jameco -- I haven't thought about them for a long time. When I was a kid I used to get those paper catalogs full of electronics parts and browse through them, wishing I had both
1) the money to order whatever I wanted from them
and 2) the knowledge to make cool things with all of those parts.
One of these days I'm going to find some time and do a few electronics projects. I've always been interested, and I did a fair amount of simple experimentation as a kid, but as an adult life has kept me busy with other pursuits.
RS, on the other hand, are so-so. The new JavaScript stuff looks shinier but still they don't surface out-of-stock status in the search which is infuriating when do many things are on long lead times.
I often hear about McMaster from US sources and how great it is (though you pay for convenience), but are there equivalents in Europe? France in my case.
Small note on the part about the price range UI controls: the author criticizes Amazon for using min, max number inputs rather than a slider control.
2 arguments against a slider:
1. Potentially it is much harder to make an accessible slider control.
2. Sliders break down when you have a distribution skewed away from normal. For instance, if 90% of results are in the range $0-$50, but then a few results are over $1000, how do you calibrate the slider? A naïve approach would render it almost unusable if you want to limit to products between $20 - $30. Otherwise you need some sort of logarithmic scale. I've not seen examples of this being done well.
Agree with you here. I thought the article made some good points but I've also been bitten by the "naive" [mix, max] slider you describe - I did yearn for some good old text boxes back then!
What a beautiful, functional, perfect e-commerce site. After so much frustration looking for parts and tools at big box store web sites, this is fresh like a sea breeze. Sold, 100%.
In fact, I was just browsing Home Depot for some tool hooks, but I think I'll buy them from this place instead.
The website design itself is very similar to how other ecommerce sites used to be 20 years ago, at least in my part of the world. Unfortunately we seem to have lost a lot of the simplicity over the years.
McMaster is the golden example of only trying to sell people what they need.
No upselling, no "popularity" filtering, no cheap imports that under-perform. You don't reviews to select between items because if you know what you need, you just buy that.
Of course this requires some expertise. You need to know what you need. And that's where the value of a physical trade shop comes in, where you can go, talk, even show the problem to somebody who might have seen your problem before.
I was very confused when Ben Krasnow pronounced McMaster with a "mick" at the beginning. For 10+ years of my English education nobody bothered to explain that Mc is "mack", but sometimes it's pronounced "mick".
I was aware something is going on when Tyler McVicker introduced himself with "mick".
English teachers usually have a typical repertoire of their pet details like schwa and so on, but seems there's a blind spot here.
I expect pronunciation largely boils down to regional and personal preferences.
The "Mac" prefix means "son of" and "Mc" is an abbreviation of that. The "a" is schwa and where I grew up, is pronounced with a short I, as "mick". But I have heard others pronounce it "mack". The McDonalds ads on TV and radio seem to try to split the difference by pronouncing it "meck".
It's also possible that some people go out of their way to say "mack" in an attempt to acknowledge and avoid the "mick" slur that was sometimes used in England and in the US against Irish and Scottish immigrants.
I love having a Grainger within walking distance of my workplace because it means I can order some bearings (or whatever) and go pick them up on my lunch break. Grainger's prices are nothing amazing but sometimes the total purchase price ends up being less than all other options when you don't have to pay for shipping.
That Amazon sucks at finding what you‘re looking for is perhaps not a bug, but a feature. Many here on HN have the engineer‘s mindset where shopping for an item is just solving a problem. But perhaps, for most people, online shopping is something different altogether. Perhaps the a sizable majority of people actually enjoy „hunting“ for a good deal. They, perhaps, enjoy getting „inspirations“ along the way. So Amazon, through testing, might find that making search very fuzzy and even customer reviews not very reliable to actually boost sales.
In an ideal world, I‘d like Amazon to filter fake reviews, weigh the rating of products with hundreds of reviews higher than those with just a handful of reviews, and give me filters to exclude words, search by strings, block particular brands, sort not only by price but by price per unit, and so on. I used to think that Amazon was just lazy in not implementing these things. But I now suspect that the real reason is that they‘ve found that most people do not want to shop like that. For them, shopping perhaps is much less about mere „procurement“ than about gamification, the thrill of the hunt, and entertainment.
I believe it's not about customer enjoyment, it's about profits. If a customer spends more time on the website, they might buy more stuff they don't even need.
It's the same reason why you have to waltz to the back of every supermarket to buy essential items, walk back to the front, and look at individually packaged, overpriced snacks for several minutes while waiting in line at the register.
Allow me to correct: "Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used" that only those of you in the US, or possibly North America, will be able to use in any practical sense, which is I'd guess at most about 60-70% of HN's readership.
I got pretty excited looking at this site because I'm refurbishing my home at the moment, and doing most of the work myself, so new suppliers of materials and tools always catch my eye. I'm not sure Screwfix et al really cut it next to this but then, of course, I noticed all the prices are in dollars and all the measurements are of the somewhat ironically named imperial variety.
Is there anything like this for the UK market? I've noticed that CPC and their various subsidiaries (Farnell, for example) can be pretty good, depending on what you need. But you seem to need a set that includes Screwfix, Toolstation, CPC, Farnell, RS, and a bunch of tool vendors (like SGS and Toolden) to really cover it off. I ended up buying specialist drillbits from a niche supplier that I can't even remember the name of now.
This is a great example of doing one niche incredibly well. Another example I've seen of doing this well is motorcycle parts[1]. You select your motorcycle, it presents you with a set of schematics of the bike split by function - for example you pick the Cam chain tensioner. You pick the schematic for the part you want and it'll show you the schematic with every part numbered, and a numbered list beside it with the name of the part, the part number, the price and a "buy" button. So simple, works absolutely perfectly.
It sort of reminds me of a video game UI for an RPG or something. Game UIs usually do a great job of organizing and simplifying complex hierarchical information and making it quick and intuitive to find what you need. A lot of the web tech I've built over the years has been inspired by well designed games.
Yes completely agree. I was going to post the same thing and did a quick CTRL+F to see if anyone else felt similarly. I don't even play video games that often but this immediately made me think "Wow this really feels like a video game somehow"
mcmaster is great, i had ordered a small part from once and wanted a catalog, asked them what the order minimum was for a catalog and they emailed me back basically saying "a catalog is on its way" no asking if i actually wanted a catalog or what my address was, they just sent the 20lb book over
The first thing I tried is, does middle-click open a new tab properly? Turns out it does, which already puts this site above average compared to a lot of online shops I use, simply for not breaking a standard browser feature!
Ways I've seen it done wrong include middle-click/Control+click not working at all, because the links are some kind of onclick="javascript:" monstrosity, or the link working but some script in the background also redirecting the page on the tab I originally clicked on.
(I can understand some kind of "flow control" during the checkout process to stop you from double-submitting the "place order" request. But not when I'm browsing the products, and sometimes want two tabs open side by side to compare things.)
Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
/s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
But the whole point is that the UX of the website is perfect. It has nothing to do with what the webapage is built on.
It could be built on PHP, it could be Java, it could be node, it could ASP.NET but if it's fast and with perfect UX like Mcmaster.com, what's the difference?
It is definitely possible to build such a website using all the mentioned languages, they have happened to have chosen ASP.NET and have done it well, but I wouldn't blindly throw everything else under the bus with such a comment.
And they aren't clear of "fancy web shenanigans" as well, they use socket.io and their website is unusable without Javascript so there's a lot of going on and this isn't your typical static website anyway.
So I think your sarcasm is a bit out of place in this instance.
And yes, I'm biased as I've been node.JS developer for a long time but I don't agree that the languages are the ones building shitty UX webpages that are slow... it's the developers that do that.
> Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
Ah yes, the oh-look-a-shiny-thing development paradigm.
It's pretty good. On at least two occasions I've had to look in multiple categories for stuff that I wanted.
Sometimes they sell a bolt, but sometimes they don't carry the companion nut (when dealing with specific stuff like alloy or specialty breakaway nuts, etc).
My one complaint about their website (they don't give you an estimate of shipping costs in advance, so you just have to hope they're reasonable) has supposedly been fixed since the last time I ordered from them
I don’t always see it but sometimes on their home page there is an element that shows a few random products with their nice line drawings they do for the product. This just feels like it would be a really cool thing to put up on an e-reader as a kind of digital photo frame. Just random nice line art of McMaster products, hopefully just reusing the existing web element they display on their home page. If anyone works this up please let me know!
McMaster in general for all things high quality if I need to make something. Calipers, verniers. Tap sets. Electrically conductive TPU filament. Amazon is for crap.
OMG I frikkin hate McMaster's navigation and comparison options. Their standardization is even quite sloppy, i.e. some screw vendors apparently include the head height in the length spec, and you don't find this out until your box of #2-56's show up for your precision fixture and are ~1mm too short.
I always tolerated McMaster's crappy UX as just a symptom of how MEs are willing to tolerate more shaggery than CS types.
IOW the "principle of least surprise" is not even expected to be observed in the ME world. We're talking about a product category -- machine screws -- that has been full standardized for over 100 years. And when McMaster still manages to crap the bed, the rebuttal is "why didn't you load up the CAD model and verify things yourself?"
They are very smart. And weird. During my final round with the CTO I was waiting for him in his office on a couch. The couch was in a living room-like area of the office. After a few minutes of waiting I turned around. The CTO was sitting there staring at me; I've no idea for how lone. I stared back, then said "hi, I'm moeymo1. Are you Mr. X?" We started the interview.
They are conservative because the owners "like getting their dividend check and eating caviar" I was told. Apparently they tried to expand internationally in the 1970s when an employee wanted to move home and start a warehouse there. It turns out "home" was Iran, and the warehouse and its contents were seized after the revolution. That apparently put them off international expansion for a very long time.
They can pay big bonuses like financial firms. I didn't take the offer because they were too odd. Years later I ran into a woman that used to work there. Apparently they are super, um, not nice to women, at the exec level. She left for Grainger.
I had a question about a bracket and its datasheet. The secretary put me on hold for 45s, and someone with a Japanese accent answered and said he was the lead engineer of that line(?!?!)
Like within 1m total, I had the authoritative answer down to the .002 deg, and the head engineer answering me.
So, I buy Misumi.
I also find McMaster is also in that top list of "Just buy from them and not worry!"
Wherever possible, I vastly prefer to buy online from a company who actually:
A) Understands what they’re selling
Really, there is no B, except for another feature that’s made it easier to buy from retail sites: Apple Pay.
Apple Pay on websites has made it much easier to buy from companies where I won’t drop by often enough to warrant creating an account. One-click checkout without the Amazonian death by a thousand cuts.
McMaster is the greatest retail website to ever exist, albeit in a bit of a niche.
I used to absolutely LOATHE tracking down a specific bolt, nut, fitting, coupler, etc... but McMaster completely changed that. If I need something specific, I'm going to McMaster first every single time, and I'm almost always ordering from them. If it's something really expensive I might cross shop elsewhere, but McMaster is easily the most pleasant platform out there, and I like knowing I can just immediately ship stuff back if it doesn't work for me (no authorizations, just return it).
You pay a little premium, but it beats driving to 50 different local stores to find out no one has what you need, or ordering from another online retailer and not really being confident when your order will show up.
I'm a hobby guy when it comes to this stuff, but if I owned a business I'd be drinking the kool-aid even more. Time is money, and McMaster is reliable and fast as hell.
I normally browse HN incognito on my phone but had to go to my desktop and login to say this: I fucking love MMC and their website. I got into woodworking during the pandemic and eventually built a loft bed for my son. I needed some very specific sizes of furniture bolts in small quantities and Amazon just didn't have what I needed. McMaster-Carr to the rescue!
I agree that they aren't the cheapest, but the quality is unimpeachable and the shipping is fast and reasonable even for small (i.e. retail) orders. I also love how everything in the catalog includes a brief but concise description of what it is used for.
Also, at the risk of perpetuating (largely accurate) stereotypes about gender psychology, it's clear that the website is designed around the typical male shopper: I am shopping to fulfill a very specific need and I want to acquire the solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I think the stereotypical female experience is wanting to see the breadth of items available, and maybe "oh wouldn't this go nicely with that thing you bought?" I really don't think the stereotype is true, though. I LOVE browsing McMaster with no specific items in mind, and would not at be mad about "you just bought 1/4-20 18-8 stainless steel screws. here are nuts."
All in all, I'd say to be careful with stereotypes. I'm sure women love the McMaster-Carr shopping experience.
I am lucky enough to live in the same town as a McMaster Carr warehouse. If you are close enough you can pick up your own order a few hours after it's in... I highly recommend checking it out if you can! So much automation... Conveyer belts... :)
McMaster is defintely amazing. Now I wish that Digikey and Mouser got their shit together when it comes to providing models and footprint files without me having to scour the internet for them, without having to login to various sites.
I guess it's a pretty complicated problem. There are so many suppliers, standards, file formats and competing interests. But it does seem like it's a market ripe for disruption... somehow.
I’ve posted this on HN before, but I’ll say it again. At my work, an idea is more likely to be prototyped if it can be done with parts available on McMaster. Sometimes I just browse the McMaster catalogue to come up with design ideas.
McMaster doesn't show you shipping and tax before you place your order! How is that legal? Everything else is fantastic though. I adore their catalogs and having the print version is a point of pride.
Because most of their business comes from other businesses that receive quotes and pay net 30. The buyer already has a FedEx account so they just send that and it's billed monthly.
Purchasing from McMaster is a very refreshing experience. Couldn't agree more. Loads quickly, looks the same on any browser I tried it on, I don't feel lost or like I'm wasting my time. However, it raises a quetion for me, how is it that they're able to stay in business and simultaneously respect their customers' time and sanity? If you look at the way other sites are designed, you'd just assume there's no way to make money with a frictionless, no frills, no distractions, no tricks storefront.
You answered your own question - they're able to stay in business because they respect their customers' time and sanity. People may not use McMaster because they land on the homepage and see a “Mega Deal” going on in a product they don’t need. People who visit the site are almost certainly going to buy something. Compare that to other e-commerce sites where people just visit to check specs, compare prices or just landed on the page from the search index.
I get it. Only certain customers get to have their dignity respected. It makes sense I guess, if you're a low value customer you're just not going to get the same treatmeant as valued customers.
Their description of the site and its usefulness is probably correct, but I think people are taking the wrong message from it. Mcmaster.com isn’t good because of its UX. The service would be exactly as useful had it looked exactly like Amazon.com. Its UX is simply secondary to its inventory and logistics.
Simply put - to build a successful business focus on the entire business and not just the website. People can get over an unintuitive UI and slow search. They cannot get over the fact that you don’t carry what they want.
It is clear that it is a site designed for people that just need to order parts for cars. I’ve never spent more than 45 seconds to find the exact part I’m looking for.
I don't fully agree with the slider the author is sugegsting.
If my price range is 21 - 45, I don't want to fiddle with a double tick slider dragging it pixelwise to get to the exact numbers I want. Not everyone has perfect hand and mouse dexterity to move it a couple of pixels. Not some senior citizens.
It's easier and faster for me to enter two numbers or just one number for the max. I don't need to enter a min number. Plus Amazon is already showing some popular ranges. I think
Living in Germany I'm really disappointed there is nothing like Mcmaster here. Misumi is kind of close, but is online-only and doesn't work with private customers.
>It's not the most visually stunning site, but that doesn't matter here - McMaster has chosen function over form.
Why do we tend to pretend this kind of thing isn't beautiful. Most people would agree it is.
Why do we tend to pretend function and form are two different things. Even as a colloquialism it's misleading. No need to throw visual design under the bus, what you enjoy about this site is the product of such design done thoughtfully.
The inverse to this website being the Australian equivalent blackwoods[1] which is the worst website ever.
As you search I’m pretty sure it downloads the entire database of items after each key stroke. No standardised tags on things like bolt sizes ( try quickly find M20 grade 8.8 galv bolts).
My only complaint about McMaster is that their search integration is a bit wonky:
- However they've managed SEO, searches for their part numbers on normal search engines never have the part page as a result
- Searching for part numbers on their page only takes you to the series page for that part number, rather than the "Product Details" page for the part.
Last I checked they don’t deliver to Canada so not the best site I have used as I couldn’t order the parts I needed. They were the only one who had the part I needed so had to get an American friend to buy it and ship it to me afterwards. I really hope they can see Canadians would buy from them if we could.
When you target the general population, it's sadly more profitable to design for exploitable, manipulateable, lowest common denominator. You can only have nice things if your consumer base isn't generally morons and you are therefore somewhat protected from predation by unscrupulous companies.
The world would be a slightly better place if everyone had some form of engineering background. Not necessarily software nor mechanical, just an inkling of making things more efficient, more logical, and more usable.
Part of McMaster is the execution. You order 5 different things, as you realize you need them during a build. They show up tomorrow in one box. There is one shipping charge. Amazon doesn’t even come close.
I tip my hat to them, the most reliable execution I’ve seen from any supplier, always on time, always on target.
I build my own HVAC system for a guest house last summer and I got to be really impressed with supplyhouse.com. You can find all the part you need very easily and they shipped quickly. Some of these specialized store websites are WAY nicer than trying to find something on Amazon on Ebay.
Rock Auto is great, definitely more consumer oriented and delivery is much slower, seems like professional mechanics rely on same day delivery. The biggest difference I see is that McMaster is curated, you want something there is usually one or maybe a couple options and it doesn't usually openly display the manufacturer. Rock Auto shows you all the options.
Aside from their very good and intuitive site, McMaster's delivery speed is excellent. I use them for parts for my 'non profit' old car addiction, orders appear ridiculously fast in stout cardboard boxing. Perfect gold standard ecommerce imo
My absolute favorite part about McMaster-Carr as a 3d printing enthusiast is the 3d models. Countless side projects have been saved with the ability to print a weirdly specific m<x> nut/bolt to validate a build before purchasing them in bulk.
I have fond memories of the Small parts catalog (and e-commerce site). Amazon bought them and then destroyed the ability to search. I've since discovered that the tubing and small screw portion of their company lives on as componentsupply.com.
The illustrations/photos/images are extremely well done. This sort of consistency and “flattening” of the stile is not trivial at all (the author mentioned the absence of color, but the point of view and shading is also consistent).
I know someone who worked there for several years. From what I heard they take very good care of their employees as well and because of that tend to have folks that stick around for ~5 years on average. Unheard of in tech.
I love McMaster-Carr. It’s one of the only places online to reliably get quality titanium fasteners for racing applications. Between all my hobbies I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with them.
I worked as an engineering technician in the facilities management realm for a couple of years and this resource was a godsend for just knowing what materials were commercially available for use.
The only downside to their site is that it does not render correctly on mobile. But they now have an app (at least on iOS) that provides a UI and workflow akin to their website.
I used the YUI framework back in the days for "backoffice" / "admin" pages. It was one of the most productive frameworks. It had a lot of really good abstractions around dom manipulations, data sources and events.
It also had an amazing set of components including an awesome charts library. The data table was state of the art at the time, and could probably beat many of the react tables that are made today. From my point of view it was so much better than most of the alternatives, but it had the negative stigma of a Yahoo ownership.
I didn't know about mcmaster.com, but I took a look at it, and the images was a surprise. The uniformity of the product images is nothing sort of amazing.
Most websites don't care to much about illustrations, even though that's what many people use when buying. Taking your own photos, or doing illustrations is pretty expensive, but it really helps the customers pick the right products.
The grayscale may be a way of insuring that customers aren't overly focused on the illustrations, and instead actually read the product descriptions.
In a better world, we’d have more companies like McMaster selling people what they need and providing a highly valued service, instead of using ads and weaponized psychology to convince them to buy some more junk they don’t need that’s going to end up in a landfill by December.
McMaster has the most environmentally unsustainable shipping practices I've ever experienced. I once ordered a particular kind of 8 foot brass rod. They shipped it, not in a tube, but diagonally oriented in a gigantic rectangular box that was 99% empty.
Completely absurd and I'll never order from them again.
Yes, because its catalog is also a CAD library, so you can put the parts into your design and be sure the parts will fit when they arrive tomorrow. Because every part is neatly categorized, searchable by its properties.
I am infuriated when shopping for clothes, computer parts, etc. because the items are rarely categorized and when they are, it isn't comprehensive so searches tend to miss out on the obvious so I end up browsing a site's entire catalog.
And, they do sell a lot. They're the industry standard. The only problem I've had is that they won't ship to individuals in Canada so I had to think up a fake company name.
The not delivering to Canada was my only complaint. I had to get a US friend to buy it and ship it after to me. I didn’t think of using a fake company to get it shipped.
Ok, but if we're being honest, you can make that sort of claim about anything and it's equally as unhelpful. Things can have value even if you can't perfectly define a metric, and even if others might use different metrics.
The author explained why they think it's great, so rather than waving your hands and denying that greatness could ever be defined, what about a constructive approach? Engage with the elements the author identified. Criticize specific ones, or suggest others. Say something you actually believe!
If you don't know what a great ecommerce website is, what is has, what it does, does reading a piece where someone says some site is a great e-commerce website influence your opinion? Does it shape your view?
If so, how does previous literature about the subject influenced the writer?
So, a great e-commerce website should be measured by it's form or by it's results?
Why non functional and not great websites thrive?
Would Jeff Bezos be fixated on those pixels because he believed that as long as amazon.com kept growing and selling, the site must therefore working great?
Those are all sincere questions, not rhetorical or trolling.
I haven't read the article, and I think the site is great. I've used it many times and it exemplifies what I think a great e-commerce site should be (from a customer perspective). They've built their website so you can find and order what you need with the bare minimum of effort. If I imagine trying to search for some of the things I order on McMaster, except on Amazon, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to.
I came across mcmaster.com like 10-15 years ago and I thought its design and experience was amazing. I didn't understand why other sites weren't like this.
Then I talked to regular people (like my friend who builds high-end magic tricks) who happened to use the site and like me wondered why more sites weren't usable like this.
And then after a few years, I saw that people in the comments here and elsewhere thought the same.
lol, mcmaster carr is probably one of the only specialty e-commerce sites that anyone will randomly bring up in UX discussions or hobby conversations. everyone loves mcmaster carr, like actually everyone, so yeah, lots of people who haven't read this already independently decided that mcmaster carr is great.
even if you're not going to buy there (their prices are high, compared to alternative suppliers, is what I've heard, and there are items and brands they don't carry) it's still a super useful reference of what's possible and what general solutions in that area look like and cost, or even just basic lookup for what types of nuts and bolts you should look for in a project. like it's actually just a really nice pleasant interface for working with hardware in general.
> My point is: no one knows what is a great e-commerce website
I disagree. I know what is a great e-commerce website -- in the sense the article is talking about.
- loads fast
- makes items easy to find quickly
- has a simple, efficient shopping cart mechanism
- gets me in, order placed, and out in the shortest time possible
- is run by a company with great customer service
Yeah, there's probably an item or two I've forgotten from that list, and yeah, other people likely to order from a site might have a slightly different list.
But I have no doubt that I would recognize the same qualities on other websites that I and many (probably most) people would recognize as great -- or at the very minimum, as websites that don't suck.
That website routinely comes up in a lot of crafts and craft-related hobbies (in my case, it was guns, where gunsmithing can involve parts they sell), so it's not exactly a secret. And yes, people do actually like it regardless of the article.
OTOH I don't know of any serious hobbyists (of whatever) who get the majority of their supplies from Amazon. When you ask, people generally say that selection is poor and quality is always highly suspect.
Mechanical Engineer and product designer here. I've been using mcmaster daily for 20 years to do my job. It is definitely the standard by which all others are judged. I'll gladly pay 2, 3, 5, even 10x the price to get it from McMaster. The service, the CAD models, I have what I need the next day. As an example of the level of their service, you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and they'll go through it, figure out what's what, and refund you for it. They make it so easy, you just have to do the engineering. Thank you McMaster-Carr.
Alas, for some reason they only cater to the US market and have no presence in the EU, for example. So while it is possible to order from them, it's rather inconvenient as you need to deal with customs/taxes.
Digi-Key got this right: you can order DDP, which makes things quick & simple.
Incidentally, I am amazed that they don't have a meaningful competitor in the EU. It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
> It seems most companies here are stuck in the 80s and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
I'm so glad we can order from mcmaster here in canada, even though shipping is two days and usually min 30 USD even for tiny orders. All local industrial suppliers are truly stuck in the 80s. They have a paper catalog, without prices (if you're lucky you can get a PDF too). If you want prices, you have to call a salesperson, or send an email with an item list and wait a day or two to get a quote back. Then you get your quote, and some items are in stock, some others in stock "nearby" (next day delivery), others are backorder (1-X weeks). Then you have a lengthy phone or email back and forth to try and figure out what's in stock as a replacement.
So yeah, McMaster whenever possible and I'll gladly (have my employer) pay more for it. Shout-out to Misumi, too, however. I do mostly prototyping and I use so much of their customizable items, like rotary shafts. Much cheaper and faster than doing a drawing, sending it out to 3-8 local shops to try to find one that is quiet enough jobwise to take on a tiny one-off project and waiting 4 weeks for it, at a high price.
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The B2B vacuum of Europe. So many voids to fill, for the ones daring to share product details and, gasp, prices, online.
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We hade a competitor in Europe. It was called Zoro. Maybe not THAT clean but overall they also had a good website and great prices. But they folded some years ago.
In B2B we have Fabory: https://www.fabory.com
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DDP is probably the only good solution here for most EU customers, but frankly the hassle and expense of doing business in the EU is what keeps most US e-commerce companies from entering the market.
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There is misumi but it is not exactly the same market
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I often use Conrad for its huge collection of small parts (mechanical as well as semiconductors) most of which can be ordered individually, with an interface with lots of filters and easy access to manuals and data sheets. Sometimes their categorization is a bit off, and they don't have CAD files, but it's decent enough.
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and Canada, though only to business and school addresses only.
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I used accu.co.uk (in the U.K, not EU) for a project, and they were fantastic. I’m only a hobbyist though. Can someone explain what it is missing?
Maybe because the site is hard-coded for the US imperial system?
Quoting the article: «Bolts are commonly specified by their thread size (e.g. 1/4"-20), and their length. I'm looking for a 1/4"-20 x 1" bolt, meaning that the bolt's diameter is 1/4" and its length is 1", so I select these filters.»
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A friend of mine worked there right after college. I happened to buy some girl scout cookies through her, and joked with her that you can get everything from McMaster. When she brought me the cookies, she brought me a fake McMaster invoice for them too.
I've heard some mixed reviews about what it's like to work there, but I completely agree: as a customer, despite the (sometimes very high) prices, I was always incredibly happy with McMaster.
mcmcaster carr is also extremely popular in the hobby drone building market for buying bolts/nuts/fasteners/standoffs to attach circuit boards (ESCs, flight controllers, etc) to carbon fiber plate, and for attaching cnc cut carbon fiber plate piece together to build the whole frame of a small UAV.
people in the film/tv/production industry also use them to buy various fasteners and hardware for rigging lights, microphones, building complex camera systems onto gimbal platforms, etc.
We had piles of their yellow books laying around the house when I was a grad student. Definitely good toilet-book material.
Lucky. When I was in Engineering school, the Mechanical Engineering department had one catalog. We couldn't get any more - something about limited numbers printed (though, I'll confess I never tried to get my own). It was passed around among the students in Machine Design as if it were some sacred scroll.
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Electrical Engineers traditionally use the Mouser catalog for that.
Really? I always found that the ink came off, then you need a bidet anyway...
> you can send them a box of loose parts, no part numbers, no markings, and they'll go through it, figure out what's what, and refund you for it
That is insane. Mad props to them
I'm sure they have internal horror stories of the practice, but they do it.
When we sold an old company to a PE group, all the McMaster loose stuff in the warehouse went back to them stacked in boxes on a pallet for them to work through. I wouldn't be surprised to learn our CM did the same thing after the sale.
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Oh how I wish Mcmaster would open an EU branch... I don't even mind if they charge us more, but PLEASE for the love of all engineers in Europe, just open a branch here.
Maybe your customers or employer would like you to save 2, 3, 5, 10x the price…
My memories of McMaster from doing my hobbies is that it is outrageously expensive.
Not at all. My rate is very high, so saving a day of my time saves them way more. The burn rate on some of these projects is hundreds of thousands, millions a day. Saving time when your on the critical path (as mechanical design typically is) is worth that much. Once the design is finished there is a whole army of manufacturing engineers and sourcing folks that can drive the cost down. That's not the niche that mcmaster fills.
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Honestly, not really. They want the project done sooner, and McMaster is a means to that end. The supply chain team can find a better longer term vendor later.
For production quantities, sure, nobody in their right mind would source from McMaster Carr (or Grainger, or any similar company,) but for their niche, they have a solid value proposition: they’ll get you small quantities of anything they carry incredibly quickly. For maintenance and repair (their primary market) or prototyping, that can be incredibly valuable.
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Time is money and buying from McMaster has always been faster and easier than any other site. I also have yet to get an incorrect item.
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It depends on what you need. For basic metric nuts and bolts it seems to be the same price as a local hardware store but I don’t have to leave my office to buy the stuff.
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You are, people ignore how much their time costs when they start "saving" money all the time.
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Looks like an opportunity to make something as delightful and lower the prices.
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I even buy home supplies (air filters, cleaning, etc) from them. They're wonderful.
High school shop/engineering teacher held a copy high: "Everything you will ever need, is in this book.".
McMaster is great.
This article is also completely glossing over another reason to use them: Their shipping is somehow insanely fast.
Almost everything is next-day delivery, even for standard shipping. They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed. I believe they have their own agreements with USPS/FedEx/etc...
McMaster is generally not the cheapest, but they're almost always the fastest and the easiest.
Machining/industry runs on McMaster.
> They've somehow got their logistics COMPLETELY nailed.
In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies!
The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling.
However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling.
It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
MSC is sooooooo expensive for tooling though. Or pretty much anything. Unless you're a business who cut a deal with them so you don't pay list price.
I also can't find anything on their website, what a terrible search and catalog functionality they have. Like the opposite of Mcmaster.
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One benefit McMaster gets is that they have so much stuff that they tend to be the first place you think of when you need some random item. A couple years back I had to build a prototype machine that would inspect wells and I needed 4" diameter clear PVC pipe. Went to McMaster, and of course it was there :-)
I'll second that. I ordered an 8-foot-long aluminum bar for $25, which, at the time, was too long to ship with traditional shippers. So, a semi trailer showed up at my door. Shipping cost $8.
My experience around their shipping was the opposite— surprise outrageous fee to get fedex to deliver a few feet of PVC. This was back before they showed you shipping prices up front.
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How can they make money doing that?
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Might I ask what for?
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Indeed, even in rural parts of the country orders placed by 4-6pm still arrive next day[0]. This saves calendar days on projects; its often not till 4 or 5 that the full list of missing fittings/parts/tools comes together.
[0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
And on top of that you don’t even need a business account. Individuals get the same service. I’ve ordered hard to find parts like tiny springs for home projects, just a few bucks. It’s amazing.
Yes. I'm missing an unusual screw from the armrest of my office Ekornes Stressless chair, and the closest Amazon length didn't work. I've seen the Mcmaster website before, but thanks for the reminder! I jumped on it, found the right screw in seconds.
Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.
Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.
They have a distribution center just outside of Trenton that does will-call - I've ordered things at 2pm and picked them up at 4.
You can get same day in some areas. We usually get next day in Reno.
Yup, McMaster-Carr and ULINE are well known for usually being next-day on standard shipping! Saves a lot of headaches and projects.
I didn't write about shipping speed since the Amazon standard is now 2 days or less. Yes their shipping speed is great, but it isn't a striking relative advantage, comparing against the rest of e-commerce
Do they ship to Australia? Any idea if that is also comparable to Amazon delivery speeds?
Probably not. They don’t ship to Canada. Don’t be fooled if you’re able to place an order with a non-US address. I was able to, before getting an email the next day when they realized their mistake.
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> Almost everything is next-day delivery,
Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses?
On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
>On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
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Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
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No, they have next day shipping to the whole US.
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> On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
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It’s nuts. I’ve had mcmaster packages come from far enough away overnight that there were hardly enough minutes for UPS to drive it this far. But definitely not flown judging by the terminals it went through.
Our office is near their head office/distribution facility. If we order before noon, most stuff shows up same day.
I'm ~12 miles from one, and they are as fast as amazon
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McMaster-Carr is an incredible example of how an existing physical-product distributor with a vaunted historical operations department, when faced with moving into the e-commerce world, could choose one of two paths:
- Build an online presence cheaply because you can rely on your historical offline operations to paper over any shortcomings in the online system.
- Build an online presence with the same ethos, standards, creativity, and long-term continued investment with which you built your offline operations to be your competitive advantage in the first place.
There aren't many legacy organizations that successfully digitized with that second path in mind, at least not at first - McMaster, B&H Photo, and Sweetwater come to mind as notable exceptions. It's a useful thought experiment, I think, even for those working on startups and green-field projects.
Having worked in the industrial supply marketspace and website and technology development. Familiar with the McMaster catalog and mirrored website. I would not agree with the assessment of it as incredible. While McMaster is a leader in the distribution of industrial supplies, the website is an almost exact duplicate of it's print catalog and not all that user friendly for b2b buyers.
Funny you should mention Sweetwater because they're also near the head of the table in my mental pantheon of e-commerce greats.
Their website is honestly just above average. Page-load times are fair to middling, the pages are very busy, vendor-supplied copy takes up much of the item page, and categories are difficult, perhaps just an artifact of the industry they're in. But if you dig deep, there is a lot of detail beneath, and the related-items suggestions are usually at least relevant if not spot-on, which is more than I can say for many sites.
But where they shine is the integration of humans into the process.
Back in 2015, I thought I might pick up a digital piano/keyboard sort of thing. I wasn't having a great time making sense of the lingo, so I gave them a call, and within seconds (I think I might've pushed one button in an IVR system), I was talking to real person who knew everything there is to know about keyboards. We talked for probably ten minutes about what I wanted to do, my budget, the ergonomic and acoustic constraints of my workspace, etc. He explained some terms to help me understand how the offerings differed and how those would impact my playing, and ultimately steered me to one of the models that was already on my short-list. We also talked about companion software, but I elected not to take that step at the time.
I went from hesitant to confident, and completed the purchase minutes later. The cool thing is, that confidence followed me through delivery, unpacking, setup, and my first plinking across the octaves -- I never felt alone like I was just gonna have to figure this out for myself, I _knew_ that this was the right instrument for my needs, and set out through basic finger exercises with the determination of one who's divinely inspired.
Then something even cooler happened: A week after delivery, that same sales engineer emailed me, just checking in. To make sure I got everything set up and was comfortable with it, to see if I could use any further help. As it happens, I was fine, but if something along the line had derailed me, this absolutely would've made a difference in getting me back on track. An expert whose entire job is to make sure I have a good experience with their stuff.
Now, I've had other e-commerce sites email me and follow up, sometimes with phone calls, but it's not the same. In some cases it feels like outright harassment (lookin' at you, Global Industrial). Often it's just a ploy for reviews or further business.
With Sweetwater, it's different somehow. Yeah I'm sure their goal is to keep me as a customer so I'll spend more money with them in the future, sure, and I'm fine with that. But they don't lead with the money, they lead with the caring. And that makes all the difference in the world.
With McMaster it's almost precisely the opposite, I've never spoken to a human there and I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. They're like the supremely efficient robot that just produces the parts I need, immediately and without fail. There's no need for warm-fuzzies in this process, and they seem to understand that as well.
I sort of head up all "tech stuff" at my mid-sized church, including sound. (I also have played piano and bass, at times.) I had to talk my pastor into starting to use Sweetwater about 20 years ago. He was stuck on using some hole-in-the-wall shop in LA on Sunset. (Which I eventually visited, and, sure enough, every who's who has a signed headshot on their wall). But Sweetwater is in our back yard, and we've made the trip a couple of times, and there's just no comparison. Sweetwater's presence, with the rooms and the demos and the videos and every thing is just unbelievable. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was about salesmen. We've had the same one for 20 years, and he's always kept a close tab on us, and helped out whenever we've needed advice. It must be a great place to work to keep a salesman that long. They advertised hiring for programmers, and I'd LOVE to give them a shot, but I'd have to move, and I'm not ready for that. Kent? Love ya, man.
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MechE here as well. An alternative to McMaster is Misumi. Misumi is nice because you can order parts that are made to order (imagine a rod with the specific thread and length). No next day shipping like McMaster but being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number is huge (so you don’t need drawings or anything). They’ll ship you a couple books like the signature yellow book from McMaster. They’ll even host a seminar explaining why “good engineers design, great engineers integrate” (really only true for the industry and not consumer tech).
Misumi is awesome. It's basically Japan's answer to McMaster-carr.
10 years ago I would have said Misumi's website was better than MMC. Unfortunately Misumi has gotten a bit less usable over the past decade, while McMaster has improved. Misumi's paper catalogue is incredible though and I surprise myself to say I would rather browse it than either their or McMaster's website.
Top quality configurable / customizable parts is certainly the way of the future, and it's amazing that Misumi has the whole process figured out. You can get a custom precision leadscrew of the length you want with the ends turned down to the diameter you want and the retaining ring grooves you want, and buy just one piece for a reasonable price. Any ordinary machine shop would reject the order unless you bought fifty or more.
I think the most annoying thing about both sites is its weird ass names. Like it’s obvious that McMaster call certain things a certain way so that it’s less searchable elsewhere. Misumi takes this to a whole new level.
I've used Misumi on projects before. I've ordered all kinds of custom stuff including drive shafts and tons of different brackets. Everything comes neatly labeled and bagged. The best part IMO is the custom aluminum extrustion (8020 clone). You can order everything cut to length, with holes drilled, holes tapped, etc. The lead time sucks though. I'm green with envy over all my friends back home that get to use McmasterCarr.
Mil spec part numbers for things like screws are great! We needed a very long screw in a specific style and material that no one stocked. We pulled up the mil spec datasheet for that style of screw, made up the part number based on our needs, and sent it to our fastener vendor. We get back exactly what we designed for without having to spend time designing our own special purpose screw. The vendor already has the spec so we can just point to exactly what we want and none of us have to spend time going back and forth to find a compromise.
And Misumi works well in Europe, which helps a lot. They also have quite often great prices. Now the catalog is not as far reaching as Mcmaster. We don't have a Mcmaster in Europe :(
> being able to buy a custom “off the shelf” part without making a special internal part number
How does that work? I have been searching the internet for stainless steel M8 x 20 set screws with a torx socket, maybe uncommon but straightforward. I have yet to find these anywhere outside of having them manufactured in china by truckload - I need maybe 100.
There you go, package of 10 for $7.57: https://www.mcmaster.com/90910A589/
McMaster has everything (almost)!
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You can only buy parts that are configurable to begin with. If it doesn’t exist in their catalogue, it won’t be configurable unfortunately.
Button head: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/221005020675/?Category...
Cap screw: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/221005020664/?Category...
Flat head: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/221005020686/?Category...
These are just standard parts though. Misumi's real configuration flexibility comes from parts that are parametrically defined. For example you can basically design a shaft by specing the material, coating, diameter, length, tolerances, and additional parametric features (external threading, tapped holes, flats, grooves, etc).
Here's an example: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/110302399810/
Once you've specified the parameters, it generates a price table including quantity discounts.
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I only see coarse thread offered in stainless, but there's a pretty nice selection of M8 x 20 set screws here (though now I realize, none with Torx drive, my bad): https://www.mcmaster.com/set-screws/thread-size~m8/length~20...
Good engineers design. Great engineers integrate. Legendary engineers iterate.
McMaster is a great choice when you can value your time.
There is no comparison shipping. You need an industrial tricycle that gets the job done? Great. Add an industrial tricycle to your cart. Unless there is a meaningful difference between models, there will be only one choice. It will be curated and it will do what you generally expect it to do.
You'll pay more than you can get it for elsewhere, but it will do the job and it will arrive on time.
That's McMaster's value proposition. It is often a very good one.
It’s arguably similar to the value proposition Apple brings to a lot of their customers. Time is money, and having things just work the way they’re supposed to seems to get rarer and rarer. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I dunno.
I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.
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Please tell me there's a story behind an "industrial tricycle?"
It's really a thing they sell. https://www.mcmaster.com/tricycles/ The why, though, no idea. Warehouse schlepping, probably?
On the other hand, I take one look at this mostly-prefabricated building and I'm like "...I could use one of those." https://www.mcmaster.com/6704T998/
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It has come up when we've played the "McMaster Game" at our office, in which we attempt to guess random things that McMaster might or might not have.
Interesting things they have had in the past include basketball hoops (in a kit, ready to go, for all your "our institution needs a basketball court... today" needs) and a urinal.
But yes, there are real uses for industrial tricycles -- need to move some stuff (or a person) pretty far pretty quickly inside a warehouse? Industrial tricycle.
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We use these in military aviation across the world. Stupidly useful when you’ve got 100+ lbs of tools to run out to a down aircraft that needs fixed to make a mission.
Also in shipyards, for similar reasons.
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The best tool for moving a person and up to about 300kg of stuff at 2-20km/h over nice surfaces.
Never need to charge/fuel it. A coaster brake model out of the weather can go years without any maintenance. Will work for decades with $50 worth of parts. Some models fit anywhere wheelchair accessible. Cheap enough that you don't need keys. Stores anywhere.
In an industrial setting they are extremely useful.
Big adult size tricycles with a cargo basket or saddle bags. I’ve seen them used in big factories/plants for maintenance crews.
Something breaks and the maint guy hops on, loads up his toolbox and cycles out across the plant to go fix it.
Almost every large manufacturing facility has vehicles for their maintenance staff. Sometimes they use golf carts. Sometimes they use tricycles.
An automotive assembly plant can easily be 10 million square feet.
There is! IIRC, the first item McM ever sold through its website was an industrial tricycle (I think it was to an engineer at CERN, which has very long tunnels).
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https://www.worksmancycles.com/media/businesscycle8pgcatlog2...
https://www.worksmancycles.com/movers.html
It may be hard to find but there is a very good episode of 99% Invisible (are there bad ones?) that goes in depth on industrial tricycles. Only thing I can say to help you find it is that I think it was a 2015 episode, sorry.
Basically they are used to transport parts around large warehouses or factories.
My company owns one of these. I’ve never seen anyone use it but it’s there.
Based on my research, that is a very fair price for a industrial tricycle; honestly would have expected it to be more.
I used to work for an auto supplier and saw the McMaster site and catalog nearly every day. The thing that was always fascinating about their site was they basically translated their Catalog 1:1 to the web and added some interactivity to it. It's similar to what IKEA did with the early versions of its website. As a result, McMaster's site is hyper-focused on presenting information in the densest and cleanest way possible because it's using techniques from print. It's not trying to upsell or advertise or offer support or this or that. It's pretty much the gold standard catalog-to-site port and one of the best ecommerce experiences out there.
That said, the way they've done things won't work for many ecommerce platforms. They're established, they have a massive catalog of highly-customizable parts, they sell in bulk, and they're (mostly) B2B. Those factors really lend themselves well to a simple, catalog-like experience. A new name selling to customers that only has 15 products isn't likely to benefit as much, although there are still things they could likely learn.
This doesn't go into the actual mechanics of finalizing your order, which is incredibly well done. I've only actually ordered from McMaster 3 times and don't have a need for anything right now so I might be getting details wrong, but basically, the "items in your cart" page has a shipping address and payment method pre-filled, and you just hit "order" and that's it. What's in stock, what ships when, etc. is all clearly labeled in each line item. There are number entry boxes to adjust quantities. You can put in your own part numbers, of course, and the items in the shipment will be labeled with that (or at least a reference to the line item on your invoice). First time I bought from them, I was blown away how clean and easy it was. You hear "industrial supply" and think the ordering process is going to end with "ok, now call us for a quote", but it's smoother than Amazon. Well done.
I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed. It's wonderful. I also appreciate that their search term tokenizer understands that you're looking for a thread size ('1/4"-20') and doesn't strip the non-alphanumeric characters like most would. (Amazon has gotten better at this over the years. I wanted to say "look at those idiots, giving you any screw that has the number 1, 4, or 20 in the description", but they bring up the parameterization as well.)
Finally, McMaster has a reputation for being pricey, but sometimes you just pay the same price that everyone pays for something. For example, say you want a set of Mitutoyo 4" digital calipers. On Amazon, which is rife with counterfeit knockoffs, you'll pay $136.94. On McMaster, you'll pay $129.19 (plus shipping, yeah I know). And it won't be counterfeit! As always, shop around, but they are not trying to screw you on price, or by subbing in counterfeit trash to make a few bucks. Truly a marvel of online shopping. I wish they sold everything.
> I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed.
This is something I wish more e-commerce sites would grok. I go to Lowes and type in
in the search box. Now I get a search result page, with filter parameters on the left side. Great. There's a checkbox that says "Stainless steel". Oh oh! What do I do now? Aren't the results already all stainless steel? I specified it in the goddamn search. If I select the checkbox, will I be filtering out things I want? Can I click the checkbox and remove "stainless" word from my search query and get more things I want? (hint: not usually). Why do I have different choices for screw thickness and thread pitch when I specified them, too? Come on, e-commerce developer-wizards, get your shit together!
Same for you, Amazon! "64GB sd card" and then Amazon's filter lets me further drill down... by capacity. DUHH, I specified the capacity! How can Amazon operate for almost 30 years and still not have this one figured out?
Amazon is shockingly bad at parametric searches. Products are routinely miscategorized, often ridiculously so, and frequently have missing or woefully inaccurate parameters (like treating a bundle of four 16 GB SD cards as "64 GB").
Even when Amazon's product parameters are correct, their filters are frequently outdated -- for example, their category for "internal hard drives" has a single filter for "4 TB & Above", even though capacities as high as 20 TB are available. They also have a filter for 1500 RPM (not 15k!) drives, which I'm pretty sure have been out of production for longer than Amazon has sold hard disks.
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Ecommerce filtering for electronics generally is terrible. I even made a hobby website for used electronics, specifically inspired by the precise parametric search we expect from McMaster and Digikey etc
I disagree with one thing: I usually go to Mcmaster to browse. I often have a problem, and I know that it must be a relatively common problem with an elegant solution, but I'm not experienced enough in that area to know what the solution is. Browse through the catalogue for a while and sure enough, there's a widget that's specifically designed to solve your problem. The design of the website makes it really easy to do that. Everything is well curated, labelled, described, tagged, and hierarchical.
There's also something weird with the way they programmed the site itself, which prevents you from opening certain links in a separate browser tab. it's really annoying when I'm not sure exactly what I need and I want to read all 10 product descriptions or whatever. I end up having to copy and paste the product URL and work backwards, rather than going all through the parts-filtering flow 10 times over from the beginning.
Otherwise the site is flawless in my opinion.
This drove me nuts for a while until I figured out the workaround:
Expand down to a specific item. Click the item number to open the "last choice for quantity and stuff before adding to cart" dropdown. In this, rightclick "Item Detail" and open in new tab.
Now in the new tab, head to the top right, "view catalog page", and you're back to the category.
I agree that it's a weakness, though.
Does opening product detail pages in separate tabs not work for your workflow?
Tangential note: you can open a part number's product detail page via this URL, https://www.mcmaster.com/<part_number>/
And all part numbers will have the form: (4 or 5 integers)(1 capital letter A-Z)(1, 2, or 3 integers)
> hierarchical
On the point of hierarchy they are messing up their categories:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/
Hovering over the links in that category, you get links such as:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/foam
But clicking "foam" takes you to: mcmaster.com/foam/ and there's no link back to raw-materials. This is a mistake. They've booted you out of the hierarchy and neglect to offer breadcrumbs or equivalent category navigation.
Clicking "browse catalogue" menu fails to identify what category you're currently in.
If I'm in mcmaster.com/fabricating/ and click "drills", why am I taken to a page called "hand drills"? The naming is a mess. Why am I seeing screwdrivers on that page?
Pardon the pun, but if I drill down to the hammer drill product page, the URL is:
mcmaster.com/29835A69/
What? That's ridiculous. The URL should be:
mcmaster.com/fabricating/drills/dewalt-cordless-hammer-drills/[product-name/ID]
Sorry to interrupt the "best website ever" theme!
The issue is that their products don't fit into a neat hierarchy. Yes foams can be raw materials, but they can also be packing material, or insulation, or liners, or safety equipment. Similarly, polyurethane foam and stainless steel are both raw materials but no one thinks of them as the same thing, nor is there often a need to navigate easily between the two.
As for the urls, just having it be the part number is super convenient. There tend to be many different names for things and it's so easy to miscommunicate. Part numbers avoid ambiguity - it doesn't matter who made it or what you call it, if it has the right number it works. You can have an intern who doesn't know the difference between nut and a bolt but as long as they have that number they know exactly the url they need to go to.
It might not be a great set up for all ecommerce sites, but it's ideal for any site selling hardware.
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Eek I'm going to go against the grain here a little. That site is useful when you already know what you are looking for. For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
Obviously it's been made for exactly that purpose and does it well but for general e-commerce it's bad. The retailers are looking to send you to an area of their website with "stuff" you are interested in. For example you like toys because you're a parent who's buying your kids stuff for x-mas. The site wants to know that sort of thing and send you to the toys for x-mas section.
What Mcmaster.com looks like to me is an old fashioned mail order company that's converted their old mail order catalogue straight to a website, perfection.
Also note with Bezos tinkering with every pixel on the website is very old news, this doesn't happen anymore.
P.S. I'll eat the downvotes.
This is why I love building B2B software. You get to help people do their jobs, rather than trying to sell them things. The site in the OP is a fantastic example of building a tool to help someone be successful at their job.
To be fair, "searching for a present for my kid" is a legitimate job in the jobs-to-be-done sense... it's just a lot fuzzier than a "business job" which has external constraints.
Yeah the title is clickbait. McMaster is regularly praised in engineering forums, which is great. Clearly they nailed the UX for their users. There are some good lessons to learn from it, but it's not some sort of golden standard for e-commerce as a whole.
The main praise is usually search/filter, but that really comes down to this quote from the article:
> McMaster is able to provide such intuitive searching and filtering because everything that they sell is highly legible – it's all defined by quantitative specs.
Most products don't lend themselves so well to filtering.
An awful lot of products _would_ lend themselves to filtering, but the folks putting the sites together don't bother coming up with good parameters, or when they do, they don't populate them on all the relevant products.
This vexes me constantly on HomeDepot.com, for instance. I was looking for a set of sockets, either 1/4" or 3/8" drive, metric 6-point, deep, impact. I was shopping for sockets at the Depot because I was already buying some other things, and I honestly like Milwaukee's offerings in this space, so let's take a look.
Search for "metric deep socket", so far so good. Gets me into the category so parametric filters appear. Filter by "6-point" and all the sets disappear -- that parameter only applies to sockets sold individually, despite most sets consisting exclusively of 6-point or 12-point, rarely a mix, and they even indicate this in their item titles. The data is there, but you can't filter by it, because the site sucks.
Just the first example to mind because it happened two days ago.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible
Maybe that's the core issue. How are people expecting to interact with the site?
I think when you're selling with an obvious B2B focus, the "value subtract" nature of a lot of consumer-targeting selling practices become clear.
There's no point trying to jump a B2B customer through a bunch of cross-sells and (poorly) related products, because there's a fair chance he doesn't even have the purchasing authority to add any of them.
If your search or filtering sucks, time is money, and they're going to go somewhere that respects that.
Maybe what retailers should be looking at is ways to break up the "browse" from the "focused buy" experience.
Instead of getting me in-cart for the browsing experience, build some external content. Instead of "here's a category of 3000 toys, start clicking", write up some high quality articles about different products, target markets, etc. with deep product links. Since you're curating the content, you have a chance to "conveniently" sort the products to promote what you want or whoever gives you a kickback for browsing customers, while not frustrating the "focused buy" customer with a deluge of EKTIBAQNN brand USB cable/fire-starters.
I think the "yellow catalog look" is just an aesthetic. The site is actually extremely modern.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
No one is going on McMaster just looking for something interesting to buy. And frankly if you're not amazon, odds are people are trying to buy something specific from you as well.
Maybe check out https://www.govolition.com
Bezos is too busy tinkering with the sorts of things that wouldnt go anywhere near him when he wasnt a billionaire to bother with a website
If you're not familiar with McMaster-Carr, this Hackaday article is a good introduction: https://hackaday.com/2017/09/13/noobs-guide-to-mcmaster-carr...
Besides the handy website, their many-thousand page phsyical catalog is great. We have a copy at work and it's easy to spend a long time flipping through, learning about all of the different things they have, and why they are useful.
Here is Adam Savage talking about why their catalog is awesome: https://youtu.be/8kbu34dk92s
My homebrew keg was leaking CO2, and the brewing supply company only sells the same crappy (= non-silicone) o-rings that had just failed. They wanted something dumb like $25 for a replacement part.
Enter McMaster-Carr. For significantly less money than fixing one bad o-ring, I have a pile of replacement sets for every seal in the system.
Is silicone really a good material for this? In my experience, silicone picks up smells and is not so easy to clean.
(The part I can’t find on McMaster or anywhere else is a high quality EPDM or FKM gasket for a garden hose.)
Another vote for McMaster-Carr. It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all. I don't know of any other websites that meet that relatively simple standard.
Perhaps part of why their website is so good is because they deliver the goods. They follow through. Ever need a 4x8 sheet of copper? It gets delivered to your front door. Sooner than you expect, and at a very fair price.
Yeah. It's kind of like how in chess, many learners study openings and gambits and obscure checkmates, when the low hanging fruit is just learning to spot and avoid blunders.
MMC is mostly about not making the mistakes everybody else makes, which puts it near the top even before you consider what they do well.
I think everyone knows what the "mistakes" are, it's just that its en vogue to "hate your customers" the way amazon and similar companies do, racing to the bottom to squeeze money out of them with dark patterns instead of just charging more for good service
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McMaster's pricing and structure also self-selects for the right kind of customer -- customers who are willing to pay a reasonable premium for quality, speed, and customer service.
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> It is not like they are great, they just are not stupid or frustrating or annoying at all.
Sad to say, comparing them to most other sites where you try (or attempt to try -- yes, often it is that bad) makes a case for saying, yes indeed, they are great!
I like buying auto parts from RockAuto. Their website is dead simple to use. They have nice features like good/better/best, showing the most popular item of that category for that car, an icon for OEM parts, and another icon that shows items in the same warehouse as the item in your cart. So when you can't decide between a dozen brands of sparkplugs, you can pick one that is both OEM and is in the same warehouse as the air filter you needed so you only have to pay for one shipping cost.
I used to. Then I bought a part that didn't fit (a switch that obviously didn't have the right number of terminals), and the return process turned me off.
I still check them though as they often have good enough parts for a lot less than OEM prices. Though I also still go to the OEM when I get tired of third party parts that don't work (after the switch issue above I went to my local auto parts store - the switch fits but doesn't work, I'll see what the OEM part does. Rock auto was $8, local store $20, deal $140 - but I trust the dealer switch will work for another 20 years)
I find that to be the case for many "industrial" (for the lack of better word) online stores. E.g. for plastic containers, https://www.usplastic.com/ is similar.
I’d like to add RockAuto as a peer to McMaster. It’s auto parts, and somehow uglier than McMaster, but damn if it isn’t the fastest no nonsense website I’ve seen for parts.
I can drill down to a specific part for a specific car in seconds, and see pics of the product, part numbers, specs. It’s lovely.
Rockauto is one of my favorite things in the world. The site is a perfect case study in how to make a UX that's ugly as sin but has evolved to be a million times more usable than anything the "minimal sleek modern UX" crowd could ever come up with.
You always roll the dice with aftermaket parts of course, but my experience has been that they usually don't sell utter crap like you'll find on Amazon and eBay. They make some effort to verify that the parts are not bottom-of-the-barrel because they don't want to deal with returns and after all, they are car people themselves.
My favorite thing that I like to tell people that have not heard of RockAuto yet: I can buy a full of wiper blades for my two cars for about the same price as ONE mid-quality wiper blade at Walmart.
holy shit, thank you!
"People visit McMaster-Carr with high intent to buy a specific part, that's it."
Mcmaster is great, but it's important to point out there's no brand or product selection decisions. You pick your criteria and get exactly one option. It lends itself to a very different experience.
How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
> there's no brand or product selection decisions
> How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
This would be great for many things! I'm sure there are plenty of people who just want a good quality, reasonably priced -whatever- and would be fine with this model. Actually, that seems like it's basically just the business model for Kirkland.
If there was a retailer who just sold one carefully-chosen thing in each category, I think they'd do pretty well. They wouldn't be able to capitalize on market segmentation, fashion trends, etc. which would hurt their profitability, but they'd also benefit from being the "default" choice for many people.
You never have to worry about it being junk, though. When I order fasteners, metal parts to be machined/used in fabrication, or just misc. supplies from McMaster-Carr, I know whatever supplier they are using will be high quality and the part won't be a counterfeit. It also seems that they tend to stick with US manufacturers if possible.
I agree. Amazon over-indexed on being the world's biggest store and chose to do zero curation. I'm thinking they thought reviews would solve for bringing quality to the top before learning how badly gamed they'd become. Now about half of what I get on Amazon has to go right back. So much junk.
Wouldn't that be exactly the same, just with more filters?
When I am on Amazon, trying to find something, I always feel like I have to fight the site, rather than being helped by it. Paid ads, very poor categorization/property-search, deceptive UX, fake reviews, "amazon picks" etc etc etc. And when I find the right product, I might receive a fake.
I think what people enjoy and celebrate about McMaster-Carr is that it is exactly the opposite of that.
It might not work, and it doesn't have to. McMaster isn't designed to be a highly competitive retail marketplace for the average consumer or the average consumer product.
It's for people building things that already have a good idea of what they need. For the most part, if you need an 18mm long 1/4-20 flange head hex-socket grade-8 bolt in a black oxide finish, you don't care about having a ton of options from different manufacturers, because there should not be a meaningful difference between any of them.
Oh I agree and envy their use case. They've built a really nice model for what's probably a great & loyal group of customers.
This is basically Costco, Trader Joe's, or IKEA -- all well-loved business. Small selection but their customers like what's on offer and don't have to comparison shop. Turns out that people really like soviet store style businesses and "huge selection" doesn't really live up to the marketing hype.
This is almost exactly the problem Thread is solving for clothing (I worked there for >7 years).
Big retailers will have 100 different white t-shirts to choose from. Thread will (roughly) tell you which white t-shirt to buy.
The tricky bit is that fashion is _so_ personal, so what you have to do is actually have all 100 (or in many cases _far_ more), with all the necessary data to be able to differentiate, and then understand "style" in such a way that you can confidently recommend specifics. I'm biased, but I think Thread has become really very good at this.
Many good examples in this thread, surprised not to see Monoprice mentioned.
You only compare among Monoprice, and they usually have a decent bar for quality.
The counterpoint to this is that a site like Amazon can still succeed to dominate the industry despite being a horrendous mess with nonfunctional search, a horrendous counterfeiting problem, and widespread review fraud. Does take the wind out of the sails of IA/UX purists somewhat.
Amazon does not dominate the market that McMaster-Carr exists in. It's not even in the running. If you attempted to use Amazon for the type of project McMaster-Carr exists to support, you're going to get laughed at at best. MMC/Misumi/Grainger/etc. own industrial/mechanical, Digikey/Mouser/Arrow/etc. own electronics, RockAuto owns automotive aftermarket, etc. It's actually incredible how little fight Amazon has put up in these markets.
I feel like the part everyone is ignoring is that McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection. The features people are raving about in this article and thread only make sense in the context of selling bolts for industrial use, and could never be implemented at a place like Amazon.
I don't love McMaster due to their insane over packaging and environmental issues, but this
> McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection.
is not the case. They sell virtually anything anyone in an industrial environment could possibly be interested in. See other comments about "industrial trikes" and feel free to choose some arbitrary thing and try to find it there.
This is the frustrating thing for me, they are objectively very good at what they do, but in a completely unsustainable way.
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Never mind industrial uses. It’s nearly impossible to find the right sized bolt or screw for a basic residential task on Amazon. For example, to replace a furniture screw that was lost during a move.
Amazon succeeds because they can get a tube of toothpaste, an onion, a washing machine, an extension cord, a can of paint and an iPad at your doorstep in under a day. Sure their search interface might not be the best but no one really cares. They are a logistics company, and don’t go too deep into any one niche.
Great website. Great company. Can't find what you're looking for? Website failing you?
Don't worry, just click the email link at the top of the page and they WILL get back to you - even over a 20 cent part.
I've never emailed them but I have called them on a few occasions. Somehow they pick up before it even rings once. And it's a real person, not a phone tree. Pretty remarkable.
Call center software does the job of picking up
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They are really fast to get back to you and will tell you what stuff is which can be helpful in certain situations where the material or vendor might matter.
> they WILL get back to you
Okay but responding to customer enquiries isn't uncommon.
It's a lot less common than you think, especially by email. In my spare time, I work on motorcycles, and I often have to source specific parts or - in rare cases - reach out to a local machine shop. I've given up on email, a phone call is often the only way to get a response.
When you work in the tech industry, you get accustomed to everything being done by text, but the rest of the world isn't so convinced :)
Reading about the Google account lockout nightmares here, I would say getting a human on the other end on first try is remarkable.
Mcmaster is what the web is supposed to be like.
I agree so much. It's what every single mail order company should have done. Freaking parametric search eaverywhere and uniform engraving style pictures so that your eye quickly catches the difference between the screw types.
McMaster is like the backend of an auto parts store. You tell the clerk what you need and they might ask if you want the cheap or premium version, then you pay and leave. You don't want to walk the aisles looking at stuff because you've got a dead alternator that needs to be replaced by Monday morning. Shopping at Amazon is like going to a massive department store. They've got everything but they lay out the store in a way that almost forces you to browse. You aren't in a rush because you are just looking at kitchen gadgets and might also be interested in buying a new pillow.
My mobile strongly disagrees
At some point several years ago, Amazon actually tried to compete with Mcmaster and others selling in this niche. They had a sub-site or something like that, I think it was called "Amazon Pro" and it focused on nothing but the sorts of parts and fittings that Mcmaster sells. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as Mcmaster, and it sank (AFAICT) without a trace.
Amazon bought a company "Small Parts" in 2005, they were a knock off of McMaster. This was probably to make sourcing fasteners easier for Blue Origin.
I referenced Small Parts in another post. They weren't really a McMaster knockoff. They specialized in physically small items while McMaster carried everything industrial.
I still have an 8"x10"x0.062" 6061 aluminum sheet I bought from Small Parts probably 15+ years ago, still in the plastic wrap. Don't even remember what I wanted it for :-)
EDIT/UPDATE: apparently it was called Amazon Supply, later "upgrade" to Amazon Business, and now sunk without a trace, it seems.
Amazon pro failed badly due to mismatch of service levels. Raptorsupplies.com is a similar one that's purely non-US though.
I really wish DigiKey would fire their web team and have McMaster's web team run their site.
DigiKey's website has gone downhill so dramatically the past five years or so... it's astonishing. Random failures, login attempts just redirect back to their homepage, horizontal scrollables inside of vertical scrollables (?!?!!), and that new filtering scheme that has javascript that grays-out/disables options randomly in response to you moving your mouse the wrong way. WTF.
Please DigiKey, learn from McMaster. Your website is junk, kill it with fire and start over. I love everything else about Digikey.
digikey, jameco, mcmaster, ingram...
most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
anyone remember datanet?
I wish digikey was as good as McMaster. With digikey I often have to parse through a huge table with many pages to figure out what the difference is between a bunch of search results. On McMaster you can clearly see search results categorized in sub tables and densely arranged to make clear what the options are.
Are there any electronics websites that actually organized like McMaster?
Electronics are a different market than the one that McMaster serves. Frequently at Digikey, you need an exact part number from a specific manufacturer. Or, if you're buying parts at scale, you might be quite price-sensitive.
At McMaster, there would be one 555 timer, one utility op-amp that implements the LM741 spec, one low-noise op-amp, one 5V regulator, etc. They would all perform at or somewhat above average, but you wouldn't know precisely what you were getting.
There probably is room for a McMaster-like Digikey (or a simplified Digikey storefront for those who aren't picky about details), but it is unclear how large its market opportunity might be. It might look kinda like SparkFun.
A lot of the time, details in electronics really do matter. I think I've ordered almost every variation of the LM35 temperature sensor over my career. Sometimes you care more about price, sometimes you care more about accuracy. McMaster would probably only stock one of the grades, not sure which.
I was thinking the same. Digikey, Mouser, etc. are great, but their websites don’t give me the same confidence that McMaster does. There’s always a fear in the back of my mind when browsing these electronics sites, wondering if the part I’m looking for slipped through the cracks of my filters.
When filtering McMaster on the other hand, I have absolute confidence that I will find the part I’m looking for, assuming it is stocked. It’s really intuitive and robust. I’m sure much of this can be chalked up to the fact that McMaster has a much smaller and more specific catalog, but still.
EVERY online retailer should take notes on how McMaster is able to create psychological safety when browsing. It’s a real peace of mind, as strange as that may sound.
digikey, mouser, and arrow are the big ones that I'm aware of. All of their UX is really bad compared to McMaster though.
I love when a field value table has redundant values for 20mm, 2cm, 2.0cm, 20mm with a trailing space, etc. A lot of the value-add here from McMaster comes from pure data cleanup and categorization and cleaning up the categories and fields. That gets way harder to do on something the size of mouser or digikey though, they have a LOT of product types in the catalog, and tens of millions of products in their warehouses. Just cataloging it all is a massive amount of work.
I'd actually be curious what the data structure of the McMaster catalog is to support that. It's a cool website, it makes it seem so effortless to search for parts.
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Use filters.
I was also intimidated by the huge table and hundreds of columns the first time I use Digi-Key, but only later realized how handy it is to have all the parameters listed together. It makes comparison subtle difference of each parts so much easier.
The filter above will also tell you existing enum values within the current showing list, so you will instantly get an idea you are comparing.
Again, both have their advantages, but I recommend give it a try. Finding parts isn't any harder this way.
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You just need a digikey approved monitor to fit the table[1].
[1] https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/monitor/detail/1264/C49...
also, the reason why they're all good is because they're not trying to sell you anything. they're for people who are at work, know what they need, know they have options on where to buy. therefore it's streamlined as much as possible to make life at work easy (which becomes their differentiator, along with easy billing terms and fast shipping), rather than market things to people who aren't even making decisions on what to buy...
"Functional websites" is not what we are discussing here, but amazing websites.
I've seen a carparts store online and it had something really similar, a few words like "oil filter 2017 ford mustang" and you were literally looking at the part in the dropdown list, exactly what you want.
What do most sites do wrong?
1) Not loading the search data into RAM on the server so it is really fast - most companies could do this with their level of stock and only need a couple of GB per web server 2) Requiring a postback to start filtering 3) Not allowing the ordering of search terms to be changed e.g. "Ford Mustang Oil Filter" should match the same as "Oil Filter Ford Mustang" 4) Not having images for all results 5) Not being able to zoom in on images to check something is what you think it is 6) Using a stock image which doesn't necessarily match the item
For companies whose primary interface with the public is searching for stuff, most e-commerce sites I use are shamefully bad at both performance and usability.
Kudos to Mcmaster!
Wow, Jameco -- I haven't thought about them for a long time. When I was a kid I used to get those paper catalogs full of electronics parts and browse through them, wishing I had both
1) the money to order whatever I wanted from them and 2) the knowledge to make cool things with all of those parts.
One of these days I'm going to find some time and do a few electronics projects. I've always been interested, and I did a fair amount of simple experimentation as a kid, but as an adult life has kept me busy with other pursuits.
RS, on the other hand, are so-so. The new JavaScript stuff looks shinier but still they don't surface out-of-stock status in the search which is infuriating when do many things are on long lead times.
I'd throw in smatec if you're looking for cables or electrical connectors. They at least used to send individual samples for free as well.
I often hear about McMaster from US sources and how great it is (though you pay for convenience), but are there equivalents in Europe? France in my case.
Farnell is my nearest equivalent (in Ireland). Same "why doesn't everyone ship like this" experience, but more electrical than mechanical.
I'm in the same boat as far as looking for a MMC equivalent (they refuse to ship here at all)
You could perhaps try Misumi. They were happy to ship to me in Canada when McMaster would not.
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Small note on the part about the price range UI controls: the author criticizes Amazon for using min, max number inputs rather than a slider control.
2 arguments against a slider:
1. Potentially it is much harder to make an accessible slider control. 2. Sliders break down when you have a distribution skewed away from normal. For instance, if 90% of results are in the range $0-$50, but then a few results are over $1000, how do you calibrate the slider? A naïve approach would render it almost unusable if you want to limit to products between $20 - $30. Otherwise you need some sort of logarithmic scale. I've not seen examples of this being done well.
Agree with you here. I thought the article made some good points but I've also been bitten by the "naive" [mix, max] slider you describe - I did yearn for some good old text boxes back then!
What a beautiful, functional, perfect e-commerce site. After so much frustration looking for parts and tools at big box store web sites, this is fresh like a sea breeze. Sold, 100%.
In fact, I was just browsing Home Depot for some tool hooks, but I think I'll buy them from this place instead.
The shocker is it has existed in this form for nearly 20 years
The website design itself is very similar to how other ecommerce sites used to be 20 years ago, at least in my part of the world. Unfortunately we seem to have lost a lot of the simplicity over the years.
McMaster is the golden example of only trying to sell people what they need.
No upselling, no "popularity" filtering, no cheap imports that under-perform. You don't reviews to select between items because if you know what you need, you just buy that.
Of course this requires some expertise. You need to know what you need. And that's where the value of a physical trade shop comes in, where you can go, talk, even show the problem to somebody who might have seen your problem before.
I was very confused when Ben Krasnow pronounced McMaster with a "mick" at the beginning. For 10+ years of my English education nobody bothered to explain that Mc is "mack", but sometimes it's pronounced "mick".
I was aware something is going on when Tyler McVicker introduced himself with "mick".
English teachers usually have a typical repertoire of their pet details like schwa and so on, but seems there's a blind spot here.
I expect pronunciation largely boils down to regional and personal preferences.
The "Mac" prefix means "son of" and "Mc" is an abbreviation of that. The "a" is schwa and where I grew up, is pronounced with a short I, as "mick". But I have heard others pronounce it "mack". The McDonalds ads on TV and radio seem to try to split the difference by pronouncing it "meck".
It's also possible that some people go out of their way to say "mack" in an attempt to acknowledge and avoid the "mick" slur that was sometimes used in England and in the US against Irish and Scottish immigrants.
Hmm isn't McMaster pronounced just like McDonald's?
Apparently this varies. Adam Savage does not pronounce it with "mick".
I love McMaster, but also want to give a shout out to their competitor, grainger.
Similarly excellent UI. One benefit that I take advantage of is free delivery to their local warehouse for in person pickup.
I don't know why more companies don't serve the customer with this.
Grainger isn't directly a competitor as they focus on "everything" but they're amazing.
You can pay them to open the local branch at 2 AM on a Sunday if you need a part and they have it in stock.
Wow, Thats crazy, but as it should be. Hope the employees get OT.
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Grainger was my N95 respirator buddy for a while. Fast shipping / great logistics too.
I love having a Grainger within walking distance of my workplace because it means I can order some bearings (or whatever) and go pick them up on my lunch break. Grainger's prices are nothing amazing but sometimes the total purchase price ends up being less than all other options when you don't have to pay for shipping.
That Amazon sucks at finding what you‘re looking for is perhaps not a bug, but a feature. Many here on HN have the engineer‘s mindset where shopping for an item is just solving a problem. But perhaps, for most people, online shopping is something different altogether. Perhaps the a sizable majority of people actually enjoy „hunting“ for a good deal. They, perhaps, enjoy getting „inspirations“ along the way. So Amazon, through testing, might find that making search very fuzzy and even customer reviews not very reliable to actually boost sales.
In an ideal world, I‘d like Amazon to filter fake reviews, weigh the rating of products with hundreds of reviews higher than those with just a handful of reviews, and give me filters to exclude words, search by strings, block particular brands, sort not only by price but by price per unit, and so on. I used to think that Amazon was just lazy in not implementing these things. But I now suspect that the real reason is that they‘ve found that most people do not want to shop like that. For them, shopping perhaps is much less about mere „procurement“ than about gamification, the thrill of the hunt, and entertainment.
I believe it's not about customer enjoyment, it's about profits. If a customer spends more time on the website, they might buy more stuff they don't even need.
It's the same reason why you have to waltz to the back of every supermarket to buy essential items, walk back to the front, and look at individually packaged, overpriced snacks for several minutes while waiting in line at the register.
Allow me to correct: "Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used" that only those of you in the US, or possibly North America, will be able to use in any practical sense, which is I'd guess at most about 60-70% of HN's readership.
I got pretty excited looking at this site because I'm refurbishing my home at the moment, and doing most of the work myself, so new suppliers of materials and tools always catch my eye. I'm not sure Screwfix et al really cut it next to this but then, of course, I noticed all the prices are in dollars and all the measurements are of the somewhat ironically named imperial variety.
Is there anything like this for the UK market? I've noticed that CPC and their various subsidiaries (Farnell, for example) can be pretty good, depending on what you need. But you seem to need a set that includes Screwfix, Toolstation, CPC, Farnell, RS, and a bunch of tool vendors (like SGS and Toolden) to really cover it off. I ended up buying specialist drillbits from a niche supplier that I can't even remember the name of now.
This is a great example of doing one niche incredibly well. Another example I've seen of doing this well is motorcycle parts[1]. You select your motorcycle, it presents you with a set of schematics of the bike split by function - for example you pick the Cam chain tensioner. You pick the schematic for the part you want and it'll show you the schematic with every part numbered, and a numbered list beside it with the name of the part, the part number, the price and a "buy" button. So simple, works absolutely perfectly.
[1]:https://www.hondaparts-direct.com/oempartfinder?aribrand=HOM...
It sort of reminds me of a video game UI for an RPG or something. Game UIs usually do a great job of organizing and simplifying complex hierarchical information and making it quick and intuitive to find what you need. A lot of the web tech I've built over the years has been inspired by well designed games.
Yes completely agree. I was going to post the same thing and did a quick CTRL+F to see if anyone else felt similarly. I don't even play video games that often but this immediately made me think "Wow this really feels like a video game somehow"
mcmaster is great, i had ordered a small part from once and wanted a catalog, asked them what the order minimum was for a catalog and they emailed me back basically saying "a catalog is on its way" no asking if i actually wanted a catalog or what my address was, they just sent the 20lb book over
The first thing I tried is, does middle-click open a new tab properly? Turns out it does, which already puts this site above average compared to a lot of online shops I use, simply for not breaking a standard browser feature!
Ways I've seen it done wrong include middle-click/Control+click not working at all, because the links are some kind of onclick="javascript:" monstrosity, or the link working but some script in the background also redirecting the page on the tab I originally clicked on.
(I can understand some kind of "flow control" during the checkout process to stop you from double-submitting the "place order" request. But not when I'm browsing the products, and sometimes want two tabs open side by side to compare things.)
Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
/s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
But the whole point is that the UX of the website is perfect. It has nothing to do with what the webapage is built on.
It could be built on PHP, it could be Java, it could be node, it could ASP.NET but if it's fast and with perfect UX like Mcmaster.com, what's the difference?
It is definitely possible to build such a website using all the mentioned languages, they have happened to have chosen ASP.NET and have done it well, but I wouldn't blindly throw everything else under the bus with such a comment.
And they aren't clear of "fancy web shenanigans" as well, they use socket.io and their website is unusable without Javascript so there's a lot of going on and this isn't your typical static website anyway.
So I think your sarcasm is a bit out of place in this instance.
And yes, I'm biased as I've been node.JS developer for a long time but I don't agree that the languages are the ones building shitty UX webpages that are slow... it's the developers that do that.
> Yeah but it’s not node, wasm, sass, typescript, react bootstrap, rails, flask, ecma, flash enabled, spa web 3.0 with social media and crypto integration so it’s pretty much outdated and useless….
Ah yes, the oh-look-a-shiny-thing development paradigm.
>> /s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
So what is your cut off for "modern" here? Rails was released August 2004...
It's pretty good. On at least two occasions I've had to look in multiple categories for stuff that I wanted.
Sometimes they sell a bolt, but sometimes they don't carry the companion nut (when dealing with specific stuff like alloy or specialty breakaway nuts, etc).
My one complaint about their website (they don't give you an estimate of shipping costs in advance, so you just have to hope they're reasonable) has supposedly been fixed since the last time I ordered from them
One thing I love them for is their curation. They find solid tools from companies the average retail buyer might not know.
Yah, you generally don't have to worry, need a ratchet, need a metal shelf, need an air filter, it's going to do what it's supposed to.
McMaster Carr is an amazing company. Its like if Uline was doing only hardware.
Nice find ! I also would like to share one. https://rockauto.com/ Really easy to use. I think it was built in-house. Enjoy.
It’s overpriced. I rather order from Misumi or Accu.
McMaster is only overpriced if you are spending your own money! :-)
If you are spending your own money you might find other suppliers offer more value.
McMaster-Carr
Grainger
...and there are a few more.
Also, the website has basically been unchanged for the ~20 years I've been ordering from there.
I don't miss not having featured items, fake reviews, and suggestions
Exactly. The website being unchanged is definitely a feature.
McMaster.com webdevs should do Digi-Key next.
...or Arrow, Mouser, or Farnell.
Yes, I realize 10 other people said the same thing. But I feel so strongly about this that I don't think an upvote is sufficient!
I don’t always see it but sometimes on their home page there is an element that shows a few random products with their nice line drawings they do for the product. This just feels like it would be a really cool thing to put up on an e-reader as a kind of digital photo frame. Just random nice line art of McMaster products, hopefully just reusing the existing web element they display on their home page. If anyone works this up please let me know!
McMaster in general for all things high quality if I need to make something. Calipers, verniers. Tap sets. Electrically conductive TPU filament. Amazon is for crap.
OMG I frikkin hate McMaster's navigation and comparison options. Their standardization is even quite sloppy, i.e. some screw vendors apparently include the head height in the length spec, and you don't find this out until your box of #2-56's show up for your precision fixture and are ~1mm too short.
I always tolerated McMaster's crappy UX as just a symptom of how MEs are willing to tolerate more shaggery than CS types.
Go to the product detail and they show precise measurements and often CAD models of the part.
IOW the "principle of least surprise" is not even expected to be observed in the ME world. We're talking about a product category -- machine screws -- that has been full standardized for over 100 years. And when McMaster still manages to crap the bed, the rebuttal is "why didn't you load up the CAD model and verify things yourself?"
I interviewed there and got a job many years ago.
They are very smart. And weird. During my final round with the CTO I was waiting for him in his office on a couch. The couch was in a living room-like area of the office. After a few minutes of waiting I turned around. The CTO was sitting there staring at me; I've no idea for how lone. I stared back, then said "hi, I'm moeymo1. Are you Mr. X?" We started the interview.
They are conservative because the owners "like getting their dividend check and eating caviar" I was told. Apparently they tried to expand internationally in the 1970s when an employee wanted to move home and start a warehouse there. It turns out "home" was Iran, and the warehouse and its contents were seized after the revolution. That apparently put them off international expansion for a very long time.
They can pay big bonuses like financial firms. I didn't take the offer because they were too odd. Years later I ran into a woman that used to work there. Apparently they are super, um, not nice to women, at the exec level. She left for Grainger.
I'd also highly recommend Misumi for extrusions.
I had a question about a bracket and its datasheet. The secretary put me on hold for 45s, and someone with a Japanese accent answered and said he was the lead engineer of that line(?!?!)
Like within 1m total, I had the authoritative answer down to the .002 deg, and the head engineer answering me.
So, I buy Misumi.
I also find McMaster is also in that top list of "Just buy from them and not worry!"
Wherever possible, I vastly prefer to buy online from a company who actually:
A) Understands what they’re selling
Really, there is no B, except for another feature that’s made it easier to buy from retail sites: Apple Pay.
Apple Pay on websites has made it much easier to buy from companies where I won’t drop by often enough to warrant creating an account. One-click checkout without the Amazonian death by a thousand cuts.
> Your Browser Is No Longer Supported
> To view this website and enjoy a better online experience, update your browser for free.
Yes, I'm on an old laptop, but it works with most sites. No way to even let the current browser try. Kind of a fail, if you ask me.
Edit: mcmaster.com works fine. bedelstein.com is the problem. It's just a blog. It should render well enough, even with an old browser.
Mcmaster.com is also insanely fast. The reaction to every click is so incredibly responsive. There is something so pleasing about it.
It's amazing how fast things can be with no crap ads and just pure content.
McMaster is the greatest retail website to ever exist, albeit in a bit of a niche. I used to absolutely LOATHE tracking down a specific bolt, nut, fitting, coupler, etc... but McMaster completely changed that. If I need something specific, I'm going to McMaster first every single time, and I'm almost always ordering from them. If it's something really expensive I might cross shop elsewhere, but McMaster is easily the most pleasant platform out there, and I like knowing I can just immediately ship stuff back if it doesn't work for me (no authorizations, just return it).
You pay a little premium, but it beats driving to 50 different local stores to find out no one has what you need, or ordering from another online retailer and not really being confident when your order will show up.
I'm a hobby guy when it comes to this stuff, but if I owned a business I'd be drinking the kool-aid even more. Time is money, and McMaster is reliable and fast as hell.
I normally browse HN incognito on my phone but had to go to my desktop and login to say this: I fucking love MMC and their website. I got into woodworking during the pandemic and eventually built a loft bed for my son. I needed some very specific sizes of furniture bolts in small quantities and Amazon just didn't have what I needed. McMaster-Carr to the rescue!
I agree that they aren't the cheapest, but the quality is unimpeachable and the shipping is fast and reasonable even for small (i.e. retail) orders. I also love how everything in the catalog includes a brief but concise description of what it is used for.
Also, at the risk of perpetuating (largely accurate) stereotypes about gender psychology, it's clear that the website is designed around the typical male shopper: I am shopping to fulfill a very specific need and I want to acquire the solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Why is that a typical male experience? There's no reason a female would want anything different here
I think the stereotypical female experience is wanting to see the breadth of items available, and maybe "oh wouldn't this go nicely with that thing you bought?" I really don't think the stereotype is true, though. I LOVE browsing McMaster with no specific items in mind, and would not at be mad about "you just bought 1/4-20 18-8 stainless steel screws. here are nuts."
All in all, I'd say to be careful with stereotypes. I'm sure women love the McMaster-Carr shopping experience.
I have never noted a gender disparity among colleagues who use McMaster. Everyone likes it just fine.
Your gender stereotypes are made up, and ridiculous to boot.
I am lucky enough to live in the same town as a McMaster Carr warehouse. If you are close enough you can pick up your own order a few hours after it's in... I highly recommend checking it out if you can! So much automation... Conveyer belts... :)
McMaster is defintely amazing. Now I wish that Digikey and Mouser got their shit together when it comes to providing models and footprint files without me having to scour the internet for them, without having to login to various sites.
That would be amazing. A dream come true. The Amp Hour podcast has touched on this a little bit. https://theamphour.com/577-product-lifecycle-management-with...
I guess it's a pretty complicated problem. There are so many suppliers, standards, file formats and competing interests. But it does seem like it's a market ripe for disruption... somehow.
I’ve posted this on HN before, but I’ll say it again. At my work, an idea is more likely to be prototyped if it can be done with parts available on McMaster. Sometimes I just browse the McMaster catalogue to come up with design ideas.
McMaster doesn't show you shipping and tax before you place your order! How is that legal? Everything else is fantastic though. I adore their catalogs and having the print version is a point of pride.
Because most of their business comes from other businesses that receive quotes and pay net 30. The buyer already has a FedEx account so they just send that and it's billed monthly.
They didn't used to and it was annoying. Now they do!
Purchasing from McMaster is a very refreshing experience. Couldn't agree more. Loads quickly, looks the same on any browser I tried it on, I don't feel lost or like I'm wasting my time. However, it raises a quetion for me, how is it that they're able to stay in business and simultaneously respect their customers' time and sanity? If you look at the way other sites are designed, you'd just assume there's no way to make money with a frictionless, no frills, no distractions, no tricks storefront.
You answered your own question - they're able to stay in business because they respect their customers' time and sanity. People may not use McMaster because they land on the homepage and see a “Mega Deal” going on in a product they don’t need. People who visit the site are almost certainly going to buy something. Compare that to other e-commerce sites where people just visit to check specs, compare prices or just landed on the page from the search index.
I get it. Only certain customers get to have their dignity respected. It makes sense I guess, if you're a low value customer you're just not going to get the same treatmeant as valued customers.
Their description of the site and its usefulness is probably correct, but I think people are taking the wrong message from it. Mcmaster.com isn’t good because of its UX. The service would be exactly as useful had it looked exactly like Amazon.com. Its UX is simply secondary to its inventory and logistics.
Simply put - to build a successful business focus on the entire business and not just the website. People can get over an unintuitive UI and slow search. They cannot get over the fact that you don’t carry what they want.
The article specifically compares McMaster-Carr’s website to Amazon.com to demonstrate a superior UX.
Rock auto also gets a vote for great sites.
It is clear that it is a site designed for people that just need to order parts for cars. I’ve never spent more than 45 seconds to find the exact part I’m looking for.
Incredible
I don't fully agree with the slider the author is sugegsting.
If my price range is 21 - 45, I don't want to fiddle with a double tick slider dragging it pixelwise to get to the exact numbers I want. Not everyone has perfect hand and mouse dexterity to move it a couple of pixels. Not some senior citizens. It's easier and faster for me to enter two numbers or just one number for the max. I don't need to enter a min number. Plus Amazon is already showing some popular ranges. I think
I live in France, and I feel sad every time I have to buy a screw.
Living in Germany I'm really disappointed there is nothing like Mcmaster here. Misumi is kind of close, but is online-only and doesn't work with private customers.
Posted to the one forum in collective agreement of this fact.
>It's not the most visually stunning site, but that doesn't matter here - McMaster has chosen function over form.
Why do we tend to pretend this kind of thing isn't beautiful. Most people would agree it is.
Why do we tend to pretend function and form are two different things. Even as a colloquialism it's misleading. No need to throw visual design under the bus, what you enjoy about this site is the product of such design done thoughtfully.
Their search funnel/filtering works great and whenever I call during business hours I get a real person within 30 seconds. You get what you pay for.
The inverse to this website being the Australian equivalent blackwoods[1] which is the worst website ever.
As you search I’m pretty sure it downloads the entire database of items after each key stroke. No standardised tags on things like bolt sizes ( try quickly find M20 grade 8.8 galv bolts).
just the worst!
[1] https://www.blackwoods.com.au/
My only complaint about McMaster is that their search integration is a bit wonky:
- However they've managed SEO, searches for their part numbers on normal search engines never have the part page as a result
- Searching for part numbers on their page only takes you to the series page for that part number, rather than the "Product Details" page for the part.
Last I checked they don’t deliver to Canada so not the best site I have used as I couldn’t order the parts I needed. They were the only one who had the part I needed so had to get an American friend to buy it and ship it to me afterwards. I really hope they can see Canadians would buy from them if we could.
It seems they only do B2B in Canada. We use them all the time.
When you target the general population, it's sadly more profitable to design for exploitable, manipulateable, lowest common denominator. You can only have nice things if your consumer base isn't generally morons and you are therefore somewhat protected from predation by unscrupulous companies.
The world would be a slightly better place if everyone had some form of engineering background. Not necessarily software nor mechanical, just an inkling of making things more efficient, more logical, and more usable.
What a blast in the past, MMC was a client at the agency I was at and we pitched a lot of modernization updates.
But people love the site. What types of things did you pitch?
Part of McMaster is the execution. You order 5 different things, as you realize you need them during a build. They show up tomorrow in one box. There is one shipping charge. Amazon doesn’t even come close.
I tip my hat to them, the most reliable execution I’ve seen from any supplier, always on time, always on target.
I build my own HVAC system for a guest house last summer and I got to be really impressed with supplyhouse.com. You can find all the part you need very easily and they shipped quickly. Some of these specialized store websites are WAY nicer than trying to find something on Amazon on Ebay.
I like rock auto website. It's just business no funny business just straight to the things you need.
No love for Rock Auto?
Rock Auto is great, definitely more consumer oriented and delivery is much slower, seems like professional mechanics rely on same day delivery. The biggest difference I see is that McMaster is curated, you want something there is usually one or maybe a couple options and it doesn't usually openly display the manufacturer. Rock Auto shows you all the options.
Rockauto is catering specifically to auto parts. It is far ahead of their competitors however.
Without RockAuto is right up there with the submitted site.
Right! Rock Auto might be my favorite e-commerce site.
Aside from their very good and intuitive site, McMaster's delivery speed is excellent. I use them for parts for my 'non profit' old car addiction, orders appear ridiculously fast in stout cardboard boxing. Perfect gold standard ecommerce imo
My absolute favorite part about McMaster-Carr as a 3d printing enthusiast is the 3d models. Countless side projects have been saved with the ability to print a weirdly specific m<x> nut/bolt to validate a build before purchasing them in bulk.
I have fond memories of the Small parts catalog (and e-commerce site). Amazon bought them and then destroyed the ability to search. I've since discovered that the tubing and small screw portion of their company lives on as componentsupply.com.
The illustrations/photos/images are extremely well done. This sort of consistency and “flattening” of the stile is not trivial at all (the author mentioned the absence of color, but the point of view and shading is also consistent).
Mark Rober - the popular YouTuber (ex NASA/Apple engineer) also recommends this site in his Studio course.
https://studio.com/mark-rober-engineering
Except they don't ship overseas! There is a huge market they are missing out on
I know someone who worked there for several years. From what I heard they take very good care of their employees as well and because of that tend to have folks that stick around for ~5 years on average. Unheard of in tech.
Have people here any suggestion for mcmaster alternatives? I live in Europe.
I love McMaster-Carr. It’s one of the only places online to reliably get quality titanium fasteners for racing applications. Between all my hobbies I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with them.
I worked as an engineering technician in the facilities management realm for a couple of years and this resource was a godsend for just knowing what materials were commercially available for use.
Can someone at Screwfix read this please?
There are times I can't find the part even when it's something I know you must sell.
And I don't need to wait ages for jazzy pictures of screws to show up. It's a screw.
The only downside to their site is that it does not render correctly on mobile. But they now have an app (at least on iOS) that provides a UI and workflow akin to their website.
Totally agree - yet they still don't have countersunk M7 that I needed so badly (apparently I managed to get it from Volvo)
I love their visuals / filters of the products. A lot of times I don’t know what a part is called on go on there to browse
The site is using Yahoo User Interface, discontinued since 2014. As I always suspected stick to old tech is not always bad.
I used the YUI framework back in the days for "backoffice" / "admin" pages. It was one of the most productive frameworks. It had a lot of really good abstractions around dom manipulations, data sources and events.
It also had an amazing set of components including an awesome charts library. The data table was state of the art at the time, and could probably beat many of the react tables that are made today. From my point of view it was so much better than most of the alternatives, but it had the negative stigma of a Yahoo ownership.
Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used and they listen too. Look how big is the search bar now! :))
As someone who software engineers and builds physical shit from time to time, yes, but money helps making this true.
Their site is amazing. I often use it as a research tool to find out what might be available to meet a design idea.
McMaster is the best. I use them for everything, mostly because of the models and extra info noted in the article.
For all the shade interface designers get around here, folks sure do talk a lot about great interface design!
Agreed. Used it numerous times and am totally impressed with the quality of their front end and the service
I wish they wouldn't break the back button by inserting a redirect when you visit via a search engine.
Great site. A few others that I use come to mind like boltdepot.com, uline.com, allstatesign.com
I once got to work with a technical PM from McMasterCarr. Hands down best PM I ever worked with.
ULINE is another B2B with a great site. Basically McMaster-Carr for the shipping department.
Stick to the basics, make it fast, ignore what the PM has to say, and avoid feature-bloat.
Grainger tried copying them a few years back. Don't think that sister site caught on.
Best e-commerce site? Ok, trying to search for “bolts filips”. Showes me ALL products.
I wonder what platform / framework / language was used to make this website?
Seems to be React with .NET
IIRC their dev team is in Chicago. .NET is common there.
And I bet the tech is all done by 3 guys and maybe a data entry/modelling team...
It feels like this website has been posted around here for hundred times already
Just curious, are images intentionally all grayscale? Or just a legacy thing.
I didn't know about mcmaster.com, but I took a look at it, and the images was a surprise. The uniformity of the product images is nothing sort of amazing.
Most websites don't care to much about illustrations, even though that's what many people use when buying. Taking your own photos, or doing illustrations is pretty expensive, but it really helps the customers pick the right products.
The grayscale may be a way of insuring that customers aren't overly focused on the illustrations, and instead actually read the product descriptions.
I’ve always said about them: For mechanical engineers, by software engineers.
omg the instananeous page load times. surprised this wasn't mentioned. would love to read a piece on how they engineer the site to be so fast.
It's so clean like Apple Store but more cheap.
yeah it's awesome. i wish video streaming sites had a similar interface. would be so easy to find something to watch.
Anyone has something comparable in the EU?
Also: Privacy Badger - No Trackers Blocked
This is amazing!
Would a company like Apple use McMaster
because the people ordering bar stock or whatever know what they need, and it's very specific, and they cannot be upsold
if you want to make a sale all you can do is give them what they want
most stores have to convince the user that they want something, and that could be anything, and it doesn't much matter what it is.
In a better world, we’d have more companies like McMaster selling people what they need and providing a highly valued service, instead of using ads and weaponized psychology to convince them to buy some more junk they don’t need that’s going to end up in a landfill by December.
This website is really good
bolt depot is another very good, albeit simpler site in a similar vein
Damn, that site is good
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> Our website requires JavaScript. Please enable it in your browser.
Should be the best e-commerce website render content without JavaScript?
McMaster has the most environmentally unsustainable shipping practices I've ever experienced. I once ordered a particular kind of 8 foot brass rod. They shipped it, not in a tube, but diagonally oriented in a gigantic rectangular box that was 99% empty.
Completely absurd and I'll never order from them again.
Now be completely honest:
- If you haven't read the article, would you think this site great?
My point is: no one knows what is a great e-commerce website. Is one that sells a lot? Amazon does it.
Is not one that sells a lot, but that is very easy to use?
"If you haven't read the article, would you think this site great?"
No, I would have ordered what I wanted, quickly and easily, and probably not thought about the website at all. Which is what makes it great.
> If you haven't read the article, would you think this site great?
If you search HN comments for "McMaster-Carr", you'll see their website is frequently brought up as an example of great UX, going back over 10 years.
Yes, because its catalog is also a CAD library, so you can put the parts into your design and be sure the parts will fit when they arrive tomorrow. Because every part is neatly categorized, searchable by its properties.
I am infuriated when shopping for clothes, computer parts, etc. because the items are rarely categorized and when they are, it isn't comprehensive so searches tend to miss out on the obvious so I end up browsing a site's entire catalog.
And, they do sell a lot. They're the industry standard. The only problem I've had is that they won't ship to individuals in Canada so I had to think up a fake company name.
The not delivering to Canada was my only complaint. I had to get a US friend to buy it and ship it after to me. I didn’t think of using a fake company to get it shipped.
Ok, but if we're being honest, you can make that sort of claim about anything and it's equally as unhelpful. Things can have value even if you can't perfectly define a metric, and even if others might use different metrics.
The author explained why they think it's great, so rather than waving your hands and denying that greatness could ever be defined, what about a constructive approach? Engage with the elements the author identified. Criticize specific ones, or suggest others. Say something you actually believe!
Hi, thanks for your message.
Maybe I didn't express myself very well.
If you don't know what a great ecommerce website is, what is has, what it does, does reading a piece where someone says some site is a great e-commerce website influence your opinion? Does it shape your view?
If so, how does previous literature about the subject influenced the writer?
So, a great e-commerce website should be measured by it's form or by it's results?
Why non functional and not great websites thrive?
Would Jeff Bezos be fixated on those pixels because he believed that as long as amazon.com kept growing and selling, the site must therefore working great?
Those are all sincere questions, not rhetorical or trolling.
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I haven't read the article, and I think the site is great. I've used it many times and it exemplifies what I think a great e-commerce site should be (from a customer perspective). They've built their website so you can find and order what you need with the bare minimum of effort. If I imagine trying to search for some of the things I order on McMaster, except on Amazon, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to.
I came across mcmaster.com like 10-15 years ago and I thought its design and experience was amazing. I didn't understand why other sites weren't like this.
Then I talked to regular people (like my friend who builds high-end magic tricks) who happened to use the site and like me wondered why more sites weren't usable like this.
And then after a few years, I saw that people in the comments here and elsewhere thought the same.
And this post is the latest.
I think there's something there.
lol, mcmaster carr is probably one of the only specialty e-commerce sites that anyone will randomly bring up in UX discussions or hobby conversations. everyone loves mcmaster carr, like actually everyone, so yeah, lots of people who haven't read this already independently decided that mcmaster carr is great.
even if you're not going to buy there (their prices are high, compared to alternative suppliers, is what I've heard, and there are items and brands they don't carry) it's still a super useful reference of what's possible and what general solutions in that area look like and cost, or even just basic lookup for what types of nuts and bolts you should look for in a project. like it's actually just a really nice pleasant interface for working with hardware in general.
> My point is: no one knows what is a great e-commerce website
I disagree. I know what is a great e-commerce website -- in the sense the article is talking about.
Yeah, there's probably an item or two I've forgotten from that list, and yeah, other people likely to order from a site might have a slightly different list. But I have no doubt that I would recognize the same qualities on other websites that I and many (probably most) people would recognize as great -- or at the very minimum, as websites that don't suck.
That website routinely comes up in a lot of crafts and craft-related hobbies (in my case, it was guns, where gunsmithing can involve parts they sell), so it's not exactly a secret. And yes, people do actually like it regardless of the article.
OTOH I don't know of any serious hobbyists (of whatever) who get the majority of their supplies from Amazon. When you ask, people generally say that selection is poor and quality is always highly suspect.
Curation and variety would top my list of important features.