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Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

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Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#91

Post by wl »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #37
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…

> makes opening in a new tab impossible This has been happening to so many commerce sites for the last several years. It's infuriating. They absolutely hate the idea that you might want to look at several items at once. Anyway, in Firefox I kludge around it by right clicking the tab I'm on, selecting Duplicate Tab, then clicking the item in that new tab. Sometimes you gotta duplicate a lot that way, but it usually wo…

> They absolutely hate the idea that you might want to look at several items at once.

B&H's bot detection will trigger on this from time to time.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#92

Post by LeifCarrotson »

daveguy wrote: post #81
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 printe…

No, it's typically ~0.4mm out of tolerance.

Perhaps gear meshing was a bad example requiring higher tolerances. You'd not be able to set the depth to a tolerance of a few microns, but you'd know if you were off by a factor of 2 due to confusion calculating diametral pitch vs OD.

We most recently used it to check timing belt compatibility, whether the belt could be installed over the pulley using the very limited travel available in the belt tensioner, or whether we needed a pulley with smaller flanges or a different way to adjust and change belts. Trying to figure out in CAD whether you could stretch a belt over the pulley, or slip the pulley over the shaft while the belt was pre-installed, is pretty difficult. Printing it and proving that it was easy cost $2 and reduced risk a lot.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#93

Post by RajT88 »

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…

The people listing the products are not trying to game the system with McMaster.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#94

Post by ryloric »

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…

Most underestimate how important laying out a clear map of your content is. Rather than letting the user build some incompletely inefficient map inside his head, lay it our clearly somewhere easily accessible.

That's why I love websites with sitemaps or when their url scheme tells me the topology of content clearly.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#95

Post by ericwood »

azdle wrote: post #89
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 doe…

They're most of the way to doing it correctly! What's missing is a few edge cases, such as ensuring the click is happening without modifier keys.

This is how react-router handles it: https://github.com/remix-run/react-router/blob/main/packages...

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#96

Post by analog31 »

gumby wrote: post #54

Unmentioned is the origin of much of this value: > McMaster-Carr shoppers don’t encounter distractions; you can see proof of this on the homepage which jumps right into the action: The web site is based on the paper catalogue (book), from layout, visual interface, and organization. The paper version was excellent and useful. Instead of trying all sorts of "fun" (for the designer) web capabilities, they focused on ohw…

I learned so much from keeping a copy of the yellow catalog in the bathroom. Like, how many different kinds of nuts and bolts and fittings there are. I still remember that stuff when a colleague is trying to design something.

In addition to a paper catalog that "just worked," they started out with a business that just worked, before the Internet came along. I'd say that Mouser and Digi-Key stand out in that regard too. About 25 years ago I remember calling McMaster and ordering a heavy steel machine base. It showed up the next day on a flat bed truck, and had to be unloaded with the forklift. It must have been drop shipped from their supplier, meaning they had already worked out a huge amount of logistics stuff before ever going online.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

exhaze wrote: post #19

I think is article is written from an eng/design perspective and thus fails to address business realities. Example: “product pages are way too long” Product pages are long because longer pages tend to perform better at SEO. Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates. Sure, maybe a better global maximum exists, and every…

I don't know how to describe it succinctly, but I find there to be a stark category difference between what the article talks about and what you mention. In particular, the former is what I appreciate as a user, the latter is what I hate.

> Furthermore, at least in my experience, longer product pages don’t actually have a significantly negative impact for on-site conversion rates.

That's probably because e-commerce stores aren't commodity. The user is going to convert anyway, even if they hate every minute of the experience.

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#98

Post by hammock »

gumby wrote: post #54

Unmentioned is the origin of much of this value: > McMaster-Carr shoppers don’t encounter distractions; you can see proof of this on the homepage which jumps right into the action: The web site is based on the paper catalogue (book), from layout, visual interface, and organization. The paper version was excellent and useful. Instead of trying all sorts of "fun" (for the designer) web capabilities, they focused on ohw…

>Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers'

I'm not sure that's the whole story. A critical point is that this is a B2B site. The people shopping here would tend to have a need in mind that can be solved by finding the exact right part that meets their specifications.

By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching. Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I might like to "get in and get out" but so many consumer shoppers LOVE to go to a place like Target or HomeGoods and browse around aimlessly, window shop, discover, explore - and that indicates a far different type of UX than what B2B would look like. These shoppers value stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#99

Post by jameshart »

Just… astounded that the starting point for a discussion of e-commerce usability would ever be ‘let’s go gather some learnings from “a B2B site that recently made the top of HackerNews as the best e-commerce site”’

Are HN users even representative customers of McMaster Carr? Let alone of any other e-commerce site?

Re: Best ecommerce UX practices from mcmaster.com

#100

Post by skilled »

This year's UI/UX trends have been an absolute disaster. Many brands are now using some kind of an amalgamation of animations + on-scroll effects that transition into this linear 3D experience. Replit is a good example of this, even though what they are doing is quite tame to what I have seen.

Now, the crazy thing about this trend is that I honestly just close the page whenever I encounter it. And I am 100% positive that many other people do this, too. So, unless your brand has outstanding reputation and you were introduced to their service through word of mouth, a lot of these bombastic landing pages are left to rot by themselves.

And lastly, these pages are supposed to leave you feeling something, or at the very least - fire up a neuron or two in your brain because the experience is refreshing. I have not experienced that a single time. And I bookmark quite a lot of random pages I am inspired by from a design perspective.

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