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Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

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Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#301

Post by throwaway93702 »

fbn79 wrote: post #278

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.

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#302

Post by tinco »

lokimedes wrote: post #288
jwr wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The B2B vacuum of Europe. So many voids to fill, for the ones daring to share product details and, gasp, prices, online.

Yeah what is going on with B2B in Europe and not showing prices? It's absolutely bonkers, I have been renovating my house the past 6 years, and to even get into the stores I had to get a business account (by cheating and using my IT business registration).

None of the websites show prices if you don't have an account, and some of them even check if your business is legit so I just get refused. The one that rejected me also seems to only allow loading goods by fully sized truck so maybe it wasn't going to happen anyway, but it's so strange.

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#303

Post by JohnGB »

iancmceachern wrote: post #34

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 the…

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.

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#304

Post by abracadabra_ »

oriolid wrote: post #279
elil17 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you finding pot metal bolts? Your best option should be anything from Ace/Home Depot/Lowes. The matte finish ones are zinc galvanized, that’s just the protective coating. They are made of carbon steel and are graded according to standards set by organizations like SAE. Hardware stores will have grade 2 bolts for the most part (or the metric equivalents). These will be made with weaker steel and will be cut…

> Where are you finding pot metal bolts? Self-assembled furniture seems to have terrible bolts more often than not. Instrument stands and drum kits also come with softest imaginable bolts except the most expensive gear. I'm sure there are other products like this.

The last thing I bought from IKEA had plastic screws. To be fair, I've not had any problems with them but I as a bit taken aback to see them.

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#305

Post by Bolkan »

morcheeba wrote: post #118
fake-name wrote: post #5

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. Mach…

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.

Might I ask what for?

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#307

Post by s_severus »

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.

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#309

Post by TomSwirly »

iancmceachern wrote: post #242
WhyCause wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally, it used to be a right of passage. You'd get your first job and (usually share) a copy of the machinerys handbook, and a yellow mcmaster book. I used to keep at least one at home long into the days where you don't need it anymore "just in case the internet goes down". It was those 2 books, the pemn 3 ring binder, and the ryerson catalog to know what mill sizes there were in what metals.

_Rite_ of passage. :-)

Re: Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used

#310

Post by leobg »

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.

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