151–160 of 501 posts
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.
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?
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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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?
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 mouse…
In practice (based on experience of selecting electronic components), I don't find this a big issue; after filtering on some other obvious, more binary fields, what left is often a small enough pool of values (like 16V, 16.0V, 12-20V, etc.) to be manually selected/checked.
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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.
How can they make money doing that?
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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
Plenty of dedicated shipping companies do exactly the same thing (if you don't pay for next day then they'll deliberately delay it so it takes 5 days or whatever you paid for), it's got nothing to do with being owned by a retailer or not.
Unless it’s USPS. Then nothing makes sense.
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 bo…
/s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
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 mak…