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Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

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Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#81

Post by daveguy »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42
blamazon wrote: post #4

A huge advantage of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is the 3D models - for nearly every fastener, and for certain other products, you can instantly grab a 3D model and bring it right into your CAD design. As far as I know no one else offers this, definitely not at the scale McMaster's dataset offers. An annoyance of McMaster I didn't see enumerated is how they don't show you the shipping cost until after transaction…

> As far as I know no one else offers this, definitely not at the scale McMaster's dataset offers. As an industrial engineer, most of my vendors offer this. I can get 3D CAD for robot arms, grippers, IO blocks, motors, cameras, enclosures, valves, cylinders, and just about everything else that goes in my machines. However, you're right that these don't have the same scale that McMaster does; they're selling the huge…

> No, it won't actually be strong enough to move that 3-ton casting even once, but you can trivially check that the meshing works as you expect.

This is the opposite of what I have found. I wouldn't use 3D printed parts for any sort of interfacing / tolerance check because pla usually prints > 0.2mm out of spec.

But, maybe you have a better 3d printer or I misunderstood exactly how you use it.

Do you have a 3d printer that can made dimensionally accurate parts? Or would you mind clarifying the use case?

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#82

Post by 0cVlTeIATBs »

0cVlTeIATBs wrote: post #75

It is great, but one annoyance is it's pretty easy to buy a small threaded coupler with one side blank instead of threaded like the other side--uncommonly needed parts like this will show up in my searches higher than the more common variant, and it takes careful reading of the specs to differentiate. I like how rockauto puts heart symbols next to the commonly purchased parts.

Correction, not higher in my searches. But when browsing the table-like listing of all 1/2" NPT SS adapters, for instance, I have found it easy to accidentally buy a 1/2"-blank part instead of 1/2"-1/2"

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#83

Post by ericwood »

zmgsabst wrote: post #76
ericwood wrote: post #16

There's many things to love about the design, but the fact that they use actual anchor tags and override the default behavior with JS is extremely frustrating and makes opening in a new tab impossible. When I'm looking for parts I tend to want to open up several categories or parts across a few tabs and they make it impossible. Horizontal scrolling is also remapped to scroll vertically as well, which breaks the track…

What is it that doesn’t work? I started at the home page and could middle click on both images and blue text, down to individual items. (Using Chrome from Linux.)

Oh this is interesting; right click and "open in new tab" seems to work, but cmd+click (my preferred method) doesn't. They must have something else going on that interferes with it, very strange.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#84

Post by password4321 »

Talk about free advertising!

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978

(1402 points | 2022-09-25 | 494 comments)

iancmceachern > 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.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#86

Post by dsfyu404ed »

giantg2 wrote: post #74

I have a gripe about McMaster. If I'm looking to buy some 316 stainless bolts, I'd like to see links to the applicable nuts for that size/material/threads/etc. For certain sizes, the nut selection can be limited and might not meet my needs. Then, I have to start over with 304 or something else. In my most recent case, I had to order some of the components from a different store.

My gripe is they do ranges very poorly so you wind up spending a lot of time specifying an exhaustive set of possible sizes that may work in order to see all the various options of things that have some critical feature or dimension you need.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#88

Post by chrisjc »

intrepidhero wrote: post #59

The article focuses on the UI, which is good, but the number one reason McMaster is the tops shopping experience (IMHO) is that they have a rock solid taxonomy. Every single product is meticulously categorized a dozen different ways, allowing me to drill down the feature tree to get exactly to the part I want. On Amazon even the product categories that have a few filters are hopelessly difficult to navigate. I'm stuc…

> rock solid taxonomy

> On Amazon

Although I have never used McMaster but use Amazon most of the time, I definitely agree. And it's not even really related to taxonomy. The amount of disorganized information on Amazon is frustrating and many times leads me to believe that something is just fake, drop-shit, subpar quality, etc... There's so much "WxHxD: 2", "color: yes", "weight: 34.6 inches" that I just end up buying something else or not at all

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#89

Post by azdle »

ericwood wrote: post #16

There's many things to love about the design, but the fact that they use actual anchor tags and override the default behavior with JS is extremely frustrating and makes opening in a new tab impossible. When I'm looking for parts I tend to want to open up several categories or parts across a few tabs and they make it impossible. Horizontal scrolling is also remapped to scroll vertically as well, which breaks the track…

> There's many things to love about the design, but the fact that they use actual anchor tags and override the default behavior with JS is extremely frustrating and makes opening in a new tab impossible.

I've only ever dabbled in webdev, but I thought this _was_ the right way to do it? Having an actual anchor tag with an href that overrides onclick means that your fancy javascripty partial page load works, but so does middle click and regular clicking without javascript. Is there some other way that's even more compatible?

Middle-clicking everything on mcmaster's site seemed to work for me in firefox.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#90

Post by StayTrue »

hedora wrote: post #3
StayTrue wrote: post #2

The best e-commerce site would not insert a redirect when arriving via Google search results (which breaks the back button).

I can't reproduce this in Firefox with Duck Duck Go or Google. Could you have clicked a (malicious?) Ad Sense ad?

Not sure what's going on. I can reproduce in Firefox with DDG and Google.

Edit: it only happens for me in Firefox with particularly locked down settings. It turns out McMaster is not actually inserting a 3XX redirect, it is happening via the history API.

As I updated elsewhere: upon more research it seems if you do not send a Referrer header, McMaster inserts a history entry using the history API. I can make it work/fail by tweaking Firefox network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy. It's interesting that McMaster is the only site I use in 2022 that has a problem with it.

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