441–450 of 501 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please tell me there's a story behind an "industrial tricycle?"
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).
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah their checkout experience used to be horrible. Shipping costs were never displayed until the order shipped and it was often 10x the item price.
As soon as I saw the title of this post, I thought "best e-commerce site? they don't even show you the shipping price until the item has been sent, and the shipping prices are insane!" I wrote them off long ago due to that - guess it's time to give them another try. Thanks for the heads up!
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 y…
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 fil…
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.
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.
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 d…
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 begin…
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.
I always tolerated McMaster's crappy UX as just a symptom of how MEs are willing to tolerate more shaggery than CS types.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
this definitely used to be a thing until like... early 2010s. Back then I completely recall watching tracking for some items and they'd accept it and run it a couple hops and then... it'd just sit for 3 days or whatever. Fedex said it was gonna be 5 business days? Then don't expect to see it in less than 5 business days. I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other. I don't s…
I wonder if they are applying ML to the distribution batching and coming up with probabilities to each route's batching efficiency. With enough detailed delivery transaction data, they could identify the probability of it being worth holding the package in the warehouse or trailer to batch it, versus sending it on its way.
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, standard…
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 b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
I mean renovating your house is not B2B so it makes sense they want business registration. I think they do it because they don't want to bother with small buyers. If people knew how much cheaper the parts are in these companies compared to hobby markets they would all want to buy few pieces to save money. This is not customer they want, they want customers that buy massive quantities.