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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

#311

Post by twarge »

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…

Central New Jersey: Same day shipping, cheaper than ground: Order before 11, get it after lunch.

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

#313

Post by stdbrouw »

jwr wrote: post #272
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…

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…

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.

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

#314

Post by LaputanMachine »

leobg wrote: post #310

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…

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.

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

#316

Post by stdbrouw »

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.

Are you stripping hex bolts? If so, the solution may be to buy some good hex bits (and a bit extender) which make it much easier to avoid slipping and stripping the bolt compared to a plain hex key.

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

#317

Post by hpeinar »

exabrial wrote: post #158

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.

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

#318

Post by terom »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #153
paulmd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Digi-key definitely could sanitize/normalize their field values better. But I feel they are intentionally being conservative about touching datasheet values given by the vendors. 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.)…

https://tme.eu does a better job of this. If you enter "16V", it knows to also select the 12-20V ranges. It also works the other way around, you can enter "10-22u" in the parameteric search and it will find both 10uF and 22uF parts.

So annoying that digikey doesn't do this, you have to click each value/range separately.

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

#320

Post by parker_mountain »

exodust wrote: post #214
parker_mountain wrote: post #4

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.

> 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 :)

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