Comment by mastax
3 years ago
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.
> foams can be raw materials, but they can also be packing material
That's what sub-categories are for:
/foam/packaging/wrap or /foam/sound-absorbing/countoured
Hardware isn't some special case to abandon hierarchy. Hardware is perfectly suited to neat categories.
The site dips its toe into categories, but goes no deeper than /foam, even though it clearly lists about 20 foam categories. Each of those can be clicked, but the URL remains /foam. I highly doubt this is by design.
You mentioned packing foam. What if you wanted to send a link to your colleague showing all the packing foam this site offered? You can't do it easily. The best you can do at first glance, is send them to /foam and tell them to scroll down to "packaging and shipping" where 7 sub-categories of packing foam are listed.
There actually is a way to get the link to packaging foam, but you have to use the search bar to type it in manually. But don't press enter! You'll get taken somewhere else if you press enter, you must choose from the drop-down.
Amusingly, the site search doesn't want to respect my search term. When I search for "pickles" it takes me to "picks and pullers". What it should do is tell me it has no matches for pickles, but offer a suggestion.
Anyway, all good.. it's nice and fast and no doubt much loved site for parts pickers who know the part they want.