Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used
bedelstein.com
bedelstein.com
people in the film/tv/production industry also use them to buy various fasteners and hardware for rigging lights, microphones, building complex camera systems onto gimbal platforms, etc.
My memories of McMaster from doing my hobbies is that it is outrageously expensive.
In my experience, the overhead of what you suggest is significant. Leading and instructing an employee or subcontractor, dealing with learning curves, etc. It sounds nice, but the logic in the GP comment is sound (i.e. that spending 2x or 3x the price for what you get can be worth it in most cases).
McMaster is "expensive" but it isn't like they are charging a crazy amount of money. They are just expensive.
I still use them over randos tho bc I know I'm going to get what I ordered. I never did not, but if I did, I'd have the correct part maybe even same day.
For common components, I need a parametric part so that I can instantly change the length, size or type. If my M12 becomes an M16, I want all the taps and C'Bores to adjust without any further input from myself.
For more expensive parts, it's nice to have a homegrown parametric part to minimize potential missorders.
Not every component is this trivially inexpensive, but we are working in a price range where it's very much worth paying the high McMaster prices. Let them hire the entry level CAD guy and spread the cost across many more prototypes than your company will make.
When you refine the product for mass production, then it is worth shaving pennies.
That is insane. Mad props to them
When we sold an old company to a PE group, all the McMaster loose stuff in the warehouse went back to them stacked in boxes on a pallet for them to work through. I wouldn't be surprised to learn our CM did the same thing after the sale.
Didn’t think of that. Still damn impressive
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 and dedicate next to zero effort to their web ordering process.
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.
Anyway, lots of barriers, makes you think it's either a requirement that I as a layperson don't understand, or a hole in the market.
That said, what about German electronics parts sites like Conrad or Reichelt?
I even got a call from a nice, older gentleman who asked me why do I want a business account and could this be avoided somehow. Funny he should ask.
To me it appears that these companies see presence in the web as a necessary evil and would rather do business the old fashioned way: calling and in-person meetings.
Apparently so far they hadn't had any incentive to change.
I'd rather do business with anyone BUT Amazon, and its telling I still find myself having to order some bits from them every month.
But yeah for areas that are "old fashioned", what B2B has of experience they lack in getting on with the times.
Is it that much different from SaaS companies that instead of prices show a "contact sales" button?
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.
- Almost nothing is on stock, most items have 10+ weeks backorder time.
- Ridiculously expensive, its common to find 2x prices than in other shops.
- Full with Chinesium crap (but some high quality items too), one can never be sure what they will get.
Its like a shitty Aliexpress
The reality it that most EU customers already know the price before they order (or have a good idea it’s going to be 20% more). But they like to pretend they don’t.
Quoting the article: «Bolts are commonly specified by their thread size (e.g. 1/4"-20), and their length. I'm looking for a 1/4"-20 x 1" bolt, meaning that the bolt's diameter is 1/4" and its length is 1", so I select these filters.»
Why not go to the site and take a look. They, obviously, sell both metric and imperial bolts (and everything else).
It's not like Americans don't occasionally need metric bolts.
It’s becoming a lot more common than not in fact. Automobile industry for example is pretty heavy on using metric bolts / screws. It’s not a recent thing either, a 2004 F-250 I used to have had many (most?) bolts as metric.
I’ve mostly only seen that really with jumbo cheap quality “Father’s Day gift” type tool sets. If you are buying good quality tools, SAE and Metric are most often sold separately in my experience.
I'm so glad we can order from mcmaster here in canada, even though shipping is two days and usually min 30 USD even for tiny orders. All local industrial suppliers are truly stuck in the 80s. They have a paper catalog, without prices (if you're lucky you can get a PDF too). If you want prices, you have to call a salesperson, or send an email with an item list and wait a day or two to get a quote back. Then you get your quote, and some items are in stock, some others in stock "nearby" (next day delivery), others are backorder (1-X weeks). Then you have a lengthy phone or email back and forth to try and figure out what's in stock as a replacement.
So yeah, McMaster whenever possible and I'll gladly (have my employer) pay more for it. Shout-out to Misumi, too, however. I do mostly prototyping and I use so much of their customizable items, like rotary shafts. Much cheaper and faster than doing a drawing, sending it out to 3-8 local shops to try to find one that is quiet enough jobwise to take on a tiny one-off project and waiting 4 weeks for it, at a high price.
What in god’s name what!? How much business are they losing from that I wonder haha
In B2B we have Fabory: https://www.fabory.com
I've heard some mixed reviews about what it's like to work there, but I completely agree: as a customer, despite the (sometimes very high) prices, I was always incredibly happy with McMaster.
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.
Machining/industry runs on McMaster.
[0]Sometimes you need to spring for air shipping if you are in the sticks.
Could it be that you live next to one of their warehouses?
On the other hand, Amazon delays orders on purposes if you aren't a Prime member.
I.E., With USPS you can pretty much assume that you are going to get a letter next-day if it comes from your state
Sounds like a conflict of interest if they literally start transit then delay at some point. Like maybe retailers shouldn't be able to own shipping
I've seen both Fedex and UPS do it, but in some places it seemed like one or the other.
I don't see it all that much anymore though. Definitely post-covid but tbh it's really been years since I've seen it. I can't tell how much of that is vs me moving away from a rural home (might be more likely to attempt "batching" deliveries in rural areas due to distance) vs an actual change in behavior here.
It may also be the shift to JIT logistics too - you have to have a big warehouse or something to hold them. Even if it's sitting in a trailer somewhere, you still have to have a big lot to hold them. These are costs that are probably not justified for the return of "lol make customers more amicable to pay more for better shipping", the conversion there is ~0% for the most part. The 5-day window is nice for the courier if they need it of course, holiday is madness in the mail business (and payments, retail, etc) from what I know, but if your throughput is significantly lower than your mail volume then you've got problems, so you need to be able to ship it through in 2-3 days on average anyway, and if you can do that... why pay for someplace to hold onto it when we can JIT it right onto a truck?
Today it seems like if your shipping drops off for a couple days it's usually lost. I had one package stop tracking and then bounce 100 miles in the wrong direction, another where it stopped tracking and then showed up with box damage, etc, but haven't seen it just hang out like the old days.
Amazon, too, will play games with shipping windows... on a thunderbolt hub, they set a delivery date like two weeks out, sold and shipped by amazon. Like a week later I see a ship notice, cool it'll be here soon right? Lol nope, shipped UPS Surepost, so they got their week out of it.
I’ve had countless packages “stuck” in Troutdale for days before suddenly continuing on to Seattle.
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.
Unless it’s USPS. Then nothing makes sense.
If you split the fulfillment off from the retailing, the fulfillment will still have a queue.
Should the government mandate first in first out or something, no ability to pay for priority?
you delay for up to a week, this lets you build efficient shipping batches.
But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
I did think it was pretty funny that the same tweezers CVS sells for $7 a piece in midtown Manhattan costs 5/$1 on Aliexpress. Only difference is the CVS tweezers are available immediately whereas I had to wait 20 days to receive the ones from Aliexpress - though I more or less have a lifetime supply now. :)
Maybe you didn't see the Footnote:
Footnotes
[1] "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
I buy screws there all the time. It isn't like it is $10 a screw! It's like a nickel or less.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm not a prime member and I frequently get orders delivered before the estimated delivery date. On the other hand I also see instances where amazon takes suspiciously long to ship something. A charitable explanation might be that their logistics capacity (eg. planes or vans) is limited, so if you're not a prime member you get deprioritized.
I avoid using Amazon, so as you can imagine, I don’t have a prime membership. It doesn’t seem to matter.
In addition, you can generally get a useful human on the bloody phone at these companies!
The delivery priority is because their customers are losing real money until that shipment of parts to repair their production line comes in. If those parts don't come in when they're supposed to, the people who cut checks are gonna start yelling.
However, I tend to prefer MSC (https://www.mscdirect.com/) over McMaster if I can--especially for machine tooling.
It really feels like McMaster really relies on the fact that they can be a "one stop shop" so my experience has been that things tend to be slightly more expensive and with "servicable" quality and with "very good" delivery. However, with a bit of Internet-Fu, you can generally find a better version of the McMaster product at the same price point.
I also can't find anything on their website, what a terrible search and catalog functionality they have. Like the opposite of Mcmaster.
However, a quick look shows them to be dead on price for Mitutoyo dial calipers. Boring heads look a bit more expensive than I remember. Milling bits seem normal price-wise as well.
Who is your go to? Machine tooling is always expensive and I'm always looking for places that are cheaper.
Kurt DX6: $650 on AllIndustrial, $737 on MSC.
Bison 7-866-0800 (a 3-jaw 8" forged steel chuck that I happen to own): $1090 through USA Bison retailers like Ajax, $1376 through MSC. I bought multiple Bison chucks through a similar site to Ajax: www.lathe-chucks.com (extremely old school web design, person owns several sites that sell different tooling, way better prices than MSC though you sometimes have to email for a quote).
Don't even get me started on their "value line" which is their Taiwanese or Chinese imports, only you get some intense MSC markup to go along with it vs when you buy the same item from a site like AllIndustrial.
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 instead of cold rolled. If you’re doing something that needs more strength than that, you can get grade 5 or 8 bolts. These will be cold rolled from higher strength steel and may be tested with a penetrant dye to check for any fractures. You can get those at a hardware store or at many online stores. If you need more strength than that, you’re probably in an aerospace application and I recommend that you don’t ask for advice on HN.
If you’re buying a shit-load of bolts (like, more than a thousand of one kind of bolt), then you can go to a wholesale website.
Hardware store has been my go to, is that the reference people are using for saying McMaster bolts are 4x overpriced?
I see Home Depot has 1/4-20 18-8 stainless steel bolts for $7 a pack of 10. McMaster has them for $8 a pack of 50.
The exception is when I need just one or two of something and it is available in the single-unit bins at the local hardware store. With McMaster the minimum quantity is usually a box of N, but the price per unit usually quite a bit cheaper.
And of course the selection is vastly better. For the above example, I'd usually really buy 316 stainless, which Home Depot doesn't even have.
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.
I did buy a different model[0] this time around and it's been over 5 years since my last purchase, but the quality on this bed is much better. All of the holes were pre drilled/tapped correctly and they've vastly improved the way the mattress slats are secured.
For the drawers underneath, the joining method was much simpler than before and while I still wouldn't look forward to taking it apart if/when I move, I can at least see a viable path for disassembly and re-assembly at my future house. The previous drawers were junk and got stuck or broke within a month.
I'm currently assembling a TV stand[1] and so far it's been great except for the top shelf. It's a veneered wood product and I guess they want you to pick the "best" side and you have to tap the holes yourself. I would have preferred pre-drilled holes since a TV is going to cover 90% of the top anyway, but it's not a huge problem. It's also possible they use the same part number in some other product that doesn't require holes so this way is better for their logistics.
0: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/gladstad-upholstered-bed-2-stor...
1: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/fjaellbo-tv-unit-black-90339290...
I just ordered 8, 1.5" x 3/8" square head set screws from Fastenal. . . . for $18.
That's a bit much.
Small Parts was amazing they specialized in, you got it, small components such as fasteners (you could get titanium screws if you needed them), small mechanicals such as tubing, solenoid valves, bearings, shafting, metal, etc. They were a prototyper's dream.
Also they do not have a massive selection...
I wrote them off long ago due to that - guess it's time to give them another try. Thanks for the heads up!
I love their connector harnesses and I have standardized all my prototypes around them. It sounds expensive at first, but it's cheaper and less annoying than making them myself or hiring someone to do it for me.
Which is a shame, I'd love to be able to use them.
- 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, standards, creativity, and long-term continued investment with which you built your offline operations to be your competitive advantage in the first place.
There aren't many legacy organizations that successfully digitized with that second path in mind, at least not at first - McMaster, B&H Photo, and Sweetwater come to mind as notable exceptions. It's a useful thought experiment, I think, even for those working on startups and green-field projects.
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 beneath, and the related-items suggestions are usually at least relevant if not spot-on, which is more than I can say for many sites.
But where they shine is the integration of humans into the process.
Back in 2015, I thought I might pick up a digital piano/keyboard sort of thing. I wasn't having a great time making sense of the lingo, so I gave them a call, and within seconds (I think I might've pushed one button in an IVR system), I was talking to real person who knew everything there is to know about keyboards. We talked for probably ten minutes about what I wanted to do, my budget, the ergonomic and acoustic constraints of my workspace, etc. He explained some terms to help me understand how the offerings differed and how those would impact my playing, and ultimately steered me to one of the models that was already on my short-list. We also talked about companion software, but I elected not to take that step at the time.
I went from hesitant to confident, and completed the purchase minutes later. The cool thing is, that confidence followed me through delivery, unpacking, setup, and my first plinking across the octaves -- I never felt alone like I was just gonna have to figure this out for myself, I _knew_ that this was the right instrument for my needs, and set out through basic finger exercises with the determination of one who's divinely inspired.
Then something even cooler happened: A week after delivery, that same sales engineer emailed me, just checking in. To make sure I got everything set up and was comfortable with it, to see if I could use any further help. As it happens, I was fine, but if something along the line had derailed me, this absolutely would've made a difference in getting me back on track. An expert whose entire job is to make sure I have a good experience with their stuff.
Now, I've had other e-commerce sites email me and follow up, sometimes with phone calls, but it's not the same. In some cases it feels like outright harassment (lookin' at you, Global Industrial). Often it's just a ploy for reviews or further business.
With Sweetwater, it's different somehow. Yeah I'm sure their goal is to keep me as a customer so I'll spend more money with them in the future, sure, and I'm fine with that. But they don't lead with the money, they lead with the caring. And that makes all the difference in the world.
With McMaster it's almost precisely the opposite, I've never spoken to a human there and I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. They're like the supremely efficient robot that just produces the parts I need, immediately and without fail. There's no need for warm-fuzzies in this process, and they seem to understand that as well.
It's why, when I thought about getting a piano years later, I didn't really consider anyone else.
I've had two sales engineers now; Dontae who walked me through the keyboard choice apparently moved on, and I haven't had a need to call up Colton yet, but his name is in my notes, and I'm sure I'm in his.
10 years ago I would have said Misumi's website was better than MMC. Unfortunately Misumi has gotten a bit less usable over the past decade, while McMaster has improved. Misumi's paper catalogue is incredible though and I surprise myself to say I would rather browse it than either their or McMaster's website.
Top quality configurable / customizable parts is certainly the way of the future, and it's amazing that Misumi has the whole process figured out. You can get a custom precision leadscrew of the length you want with the ends turned down to the diameter you want and the retaining ring grooves you want, and buy just one piece for a reasonable price. Any ordinary machine shop would reject the order unless you bought fifty or more.
How does that work? I have been searching the internet for stainless steel M8 x 20 set screws with a torx socket, maybe uncommon but straightforward. I have yet to find these anywhere outside of having them manufactured in china by truckload - I need maybe 100.
McMaster has everything (almost)!
Like this: https://ever-hardware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Torx-se...
Torx grub screws are super uncommon, I don't think I've ever seen one. Usually they have a hex socket (for an allen key), or occasionally they're slotted (for a flat-blade screwdriver).
Cap screw: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/221005020664/?Category...
Flat head: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/221005020686/?Category...
These are just standard parts though. Misumi's real configuration flexibility comes from parts that are parametrically defined. For example you can basically design a shaft by specing the material, coating, diameter, length, tolerances, and additional parametric features (external threading, tapped holes, flats, grooves, etc).
Here's an example: https://us.misumi-ec.com/vona2/detail/110302399810/
Once you've specified the parameters, it generates a price table including quantity discounts.
There is no comparison shipping. You need an industrial tricycle that gets the job done? Great. Add an industrial tricycle to your cart. Unless there is a meaningful difference between models, there will be only one choice. It will be curated and it will do what you generally expect it to do.
You'll pay more than you can get it for elsewhere, but it will do the job and it will arrive on time.
That's McMaster's value proposition. It is often a very good one.
On the other hand, I take one look at this mostly-prefabricated building and I'm like "...I could use one of those." https://www.mcmaster.com/6704T998/
Interesting things they have had in the past include basketball hoops (in a kit, ready to go, for all your "our institution needs a basketball court... today" needs) and a urinal.
But yes, there are real uses for industrial tricycles -- need to move some stuff (or a person) pretty far pretty quickly inside a warehouse? Industrial tricycle.
They still have them: https://www.mcmaster.com/basketball-hoops/
Don’t buy their basketballs, though. They aren’t RoHS or REACH compliant (https://www.mcmaster.com/45425T23/)
Also in shipyards, for similar reasons.
But I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a government auditor complained about it too
Something breaks and the maint guy hops on, loads up his toolbox and cycles out across the plant to go fix it.
An automotive assembly plant can easily be 10 million square feet.
Never need to charge/fuel it. A coaster brake model out of the weather can go years without any maintenance. Will work for decades with $50 worth of parts. Some models fit anywhere wheelchair accessible. Cheap enough that you don't need keys. Stores anywhere.
In an industrial setting they are extremely useful.
Basically they are used to transport parts around large warehouses or factories.
I wish we had more firms that still valued quality and proper customer service in this world. Too much chinesium junk out there these days, in a race to the bottom that everyone loses.
That said, the way they've done things won't work for many ecommerce platforms. They're established, they have a massive catalog of highly-customizable parts, they sell in bulk, and they're (mostly) B2B. Those factors really lend themselves well to a simple, catalog-like experience. A new name selling to customers that only has 15 products isn't likely to benefit as much, although there are still things they could likely learn.
I also like their parametric search. If you type '1/4"-20 screw', the page goes to the overview of that screw type AND populates the "machine-readable" parameters on the left side with what you typed. It's wonderful. I also appreciate that their search term tokenizer understands that you're looking for a thread size ('1/4"-20') and doesn't strip the non-alphanumeric characters like most would. (Amazon has gotten better at this over the years. I wanted to say "look at those idiots, giving you any screw that has the number 1, 4, or 20 in the description", but they bring up the parameterization as well.)
Finally, McMaster has a reputation for being pricey, but sometimes you just pay the same price that everyone pays for something. For example, say you want a set of Mitutoyo 4" digital calipers. On Amazon, which is rife with counterfeit knockoffs, you'll pay $136.94. On McMaster, you'll pay $129.19 (plus shipping, yeah I know). And it won't be counterfeit! As always, shop around, but they are not trying to screw you on price, or by subbing in counterfeit trash to make a few bucks. Truly a marvel of online shopping. I wish they sold everything.
This is something I wish more e-commerce sites would grok. I go to Lowes and type in
1/2" 10-32 stainless bolt
Same for you, Amazon! "64GB sd card" and then Amazon's filter lets me further drill down... by capacity. DUHH, I specified the capacity! How can Amazon operate for almost 30 years and still not have this one figured out?
Even when Amazon's product parameters are correct, their filters are frequently outdated -- for example, their category for "internal hard drives" has a single filter for "4 TB & Above", even though capacities as high as 20 TB are available. They also have a filter for 1500 RPM (not 15k!) drives, which I'm pretty sure have been out of production for longer than Amazon has sold hard disks.
Some of them do a decent job, most don't. There are also incentives to completely ignore parametric search and throw as many ads at the customer as possible instead of relevant results.
But IMO, it's not enough in some categories. Especially where item parameters and specs are critical for its interoperability and functionality.
Otherwise the site is flawless in my opinion.
Tangential note: you can open a part number's product detail page via this URL, https://www.mcmaster.com/<part_number>/
And all part numbers will have the form: (4 or 5 integers)(1 capital letter A-Z)(1, 2, or 3 integers)
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.
On the point of hierarchy they are messing up their categories:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/
Hovering over the links in that category, you get links such as:
mcmaster.com/raw-materials/foam
But clicking "foam" takes you to: mcmaster.com/foam/ and there's no link back to raw-materials. This is a mistake. They've booted you out of the hierarchy and neglect to offer breadcrumbs or equivalent category navigation.
Clicking "browse catalogue" menu fails to identify what category you're currently in.
If I'm in mcmaster.com/fabricating/ and click "drills", why am I taken to a page called "hand drills"? The naming is a mess. Why am I seeing screwdrivers on that page?
Pardon the pun, but if I drill down to the hammer drill product page, the URL is:
mcmaster.com/29835A69/
What? That's ridiculous. The URL should be:
mcmaster.com/fabricating/drills/dewalt-cordless-hammer-drills/[product-name/ID]
Sorry to interrupt the "best website ever" theme!
As for the urls, just having it be the part number is super convenient. There tend to be many different names for things and it's so easy to miscommunicate. Part numbers avoid ambiguity - it doesn't matter who made it or what you call it, if it has the right number it works. You can have an intern who doesn't know the difference between nut and a bolt but as long as they have that number they know exactly the url they need to go to.
It might not be a great set up for all ecommerce sites, but it's ideal for any site selling hardware.
That's what sub-categories are for:
/foam/packaging/wrap or /foam/sound-absorbing/countoured
Hardware isn't some special case to abandon hierarchy. Hardware is perfectly suited to neat categories.
The site dips its toe into categories, but goes no deeper than /foam, even though it clearly lists about 20 foam categories. Each of those can be clicked, but the URL remains /foam. I highly doubt this is by design.
You mentioned packing foam. What if you wanted to send a link to your colleague showing all the packing foam this site offered? You can't do it easily. The best you can do at first glance, is send them to /foam and tell them to scroll down to "packaging and shipping" where 7 sub-categories of packing foam are listed.
There actually is a way to get the link to packaging foam, but you have to use the search bar to type it in manually. But don't press enter! You'll get taken somewhere else if you press enter, you must choose from the drop-down.
Amusingly, the site search doesn't want to respect my search term. When I search for "pickles" it takes me to "picks and pullers". What it should do is tell me it has no matches for pickles, but offer a suggestion.
Anyway, all good.. it's nice and fast and no doubt much loved site for parts pickers who know the part they want.
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 you like toys because you're a parent who's buying your kids stuff for x-mas. The site wants to know that sort of thing and send you to the toys for x-mas section.
What Mcmaster.com looks like to me is an old fashioned mail order company that's converted their old mail order catalogue straight to a website, perfection.
Also note with Bezos tinkering with every pixel on the website is very old news, this doesn't happen anymore.
P.S. I'll eat the downvotes.
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 filtering because everything that they sell is highly legible – it's all defined by quantitative specs.
Most products don't lend themselves so well to filtering.
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.
To be fair, "searching for a present for my kid" is a legitimate job in the jobs-to-be-done sense... it's just a lot fuzzier than a "business job" which has external constraints.
No one is going on McMaster just looking for something interesting to buy. And frankly if you're not amazon, odds are people are trying to buy something specific from you as well.
Maybe that's the core issue. How are people expecting to interact with the site?
I think when you're selling with an obvious B2B focus, the "value subtract" nature of a lot of consumer-targeting selling practices become clear.
There's no point trying to jump a B2B customer through a bunch of cross-sells and (poorly) related products, because there's a fair chance he doesn't even have the purchasing authority to add any of them.
If your search or filtering sucks, time is money, and they're going to go somewhere that respects that.
Maybe what retailers should be looking at is ways to break up the "browse" from the "focused buy" experience.
Instead of getting me in-cart for the browsing experience, build some external content. Instead of "here's a category of 3000 toys, start clicking", write up some high quality articles about different products, target markets, etc. with deep product links. Since you're curating the content, you have a chance to "conveniently" sort the products to promote what you want or whoever gives you a kickback for browsing customers, while not frustrating the "focused buy" customer with a deluge of EKTIBAQNN brand USB cable/fire-starters.
Besides the handy website, their many-thousand page phsyical catalog is great. We have a copy at work and it's easy to spend a long time flipping through, learning about all of the different things they have, and why they are useful.
Here is Adam Savage talking about why their catalog is awesome: https://youtu.be/8kbu34dk92s
Enter McMaster-Carr. For significantly less money than fixing one bad o-ring, I have a pile of replacement sets for every seal in the system.
(The part I can’t find on McMaster or anywhere else is a high quality EPDM or FKM gasket for a garden hose.)
Perhaps part of why their website is so good is because they deliver the goods. They follow through. Ever need a 4x8 sheet of copper? It gets delivered to your front door. Sooner than you expect, and at a very fair price.
MMC is mostly about not making the mistakes everybody else makes, which puts it near the top even before you consider what they do well.
They clearly are indifferent to customers except to the point required by law, or as needed to keep the cash flowing in.
It costs money to do the things that MMC does and Amazon prefers volume and revenue over the margins that MMC can command by providing quality service.
Also, my own experience was that I did not pay a "premium". I really did need 1/2 sheets of copper on a regular basis. I could get small pieces at a premium. I could get larger sheets by driving for a hour or ... I could pay about the same total cost or less and get them delivered to my door... This was not limited to a few items. I needed plastic bags, about quart size. Again I got just functional bags - not shoddy at all - at a very reasonable price. The same things at amazon would have been a) not functional or b) impossible to find among all the shoddiness.
I still check them though as they often have good enough parts for a lot less than OEM prices. Though I also still go to the OEM when I get tired of third party parts that don't work (after the switch issue above I went to my local auto parts store - the switch fits but doesn't work, I'll see what the OEM part does. Rock auto was $8, local store $20, deal $140 - but I trust the dealer switch will work for another 20 years)
Sad to say, comparing them to most other sites where you try (or attempt to try -- yes, often it is that bad) makes a case for saying, yes indeed, they are great!
I can drill down to a specific part for a specific car in seconds, and see pics of the product, part numbers, specs. It’s lovely.
You always roll the dice with aftermaket parts of course, but my experience has been that they usually don't sell utter crap like you'll find on Amazon and eBay. They make some effort to verify that the parts are not bottom-of-the-barrel because they don't want to deal with returns and after all, they are car people themselves.
My favorite thing that I like to tell people that have not heard of RockAuto yet: I can buy a full of wiper blades for my two cars for about the same price as ONE mid-quality wiper blade at Walmart.
Mcmaster is great, but it's important to point out there's no brand or product selection decisions. You pick your criteria and get exactly one option. It lends itself to a very different experience.
How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
When I am on Amazon, trying to find something, I always feel like I have to fight the site, rather than being helped by it. Paid ads, very poor categorization/property-search, deceptive UX, fake reviews, "amazon picks" etc etc etc. And when I find the right product, I might receive a fake.
I think what people enjoy and celebrate about McMaster-Carr is that it is exactly the opposite of that.
> How would this work for cars or couches or headphones?
This would be great for many things! I'm sure there are plenty of people who just want a good quality, reasonably priced -whatever- and would be fine with this model. Actually, that seems like it's basically just the business model for Kirkland.
If there was a retailer who just sold one carefully-chosen thing in each category, I think they'd do pretty well. They wouldn't be able to capitalize on market segmentation, fashion trends, etc. which would hurt their profitability, but they'd also benefit from being the "default" choice for many people.
You only compare among Monoprice, and they usually have a decent bar for quality.
Big retailers will have 100 different white t-shirts to choose from. Thread will (roughly) tell you which white t-shirt to buy.
The tricky bit is that fashion is _so_ personal, so what you have to do is actually have all 100 (or in many cases _far_ more), with all the necessary data to be able to differentiate, and then understand "style" in such a way that you can confidently recommend specifics. I'm biased, but I think Thread has become really very good at this.
It's for people building things that already have a good idea of what they need. For the most part, if you need an 18mm long 1/4-20 flange head hex-socket grade-8 bolt in a black oxide finish, you don't care about having a ton of options from different manufacturers, because there should not be a meaningful difference between any of them.
> McMaster sells a very small breadth of things with incredible depth in its selection.
is not the case. They sell virtually anything anyone in an industrial environment could possibly be interested in. See other comments about "industrial trikes" and feel free to choose some arbitrary thing and try to find it there.
This is the frustrating thing for me, they are objectively very good at what they do, but in a completely unsustainable way.
If you have a problem with that, well, I have some bad news about how commerce, medical, and industry go about wastage in general. Bought 1000' of foobar filler rod and only used 50'? Chuck the rest cause it'll cost more in labor to deal with the excess.
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.
Okay but responding to customer enquiries isn't uncommon.
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 :)
I still have an 8"x10"x0.062" 6061 aluminum sheet I bought from Small Parts probably 15+ years ago, still in the plastic wrap. Don't even remember what I wanted it for :-)
DigiKey's website has gone downhill so dramatically the past five years or so... it's astonishing. Random failures, login attempts just redirect back to their homepage, horizontal scrollables inside of vertical scrollables (?!?!!), and that new filtering scheme that has javascript that grays-out/disables options randomly in response to you moving your mouse the wrong way. WTF.
Please DigiKey, learn from McMaster. Your website is junk, kill it with fire and start over. I love everything else about Digikey.
most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
anyone remember datanet?
Are there any electronics websites that actually organized like McMaster?
[1] https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/monitor/detail/1264/C49...
When filtering McMaster on the other hand, I have absolute confidence that I will find the part I’m looking for, assuming it is stocked. It’s really intuitive and robust. I’m sure much of this can be chalked up to the fact that McMaster has a much smaller and more specific catalog, but still.
EVERY online retailer should take notes on how McMaster is able to create psychological safety when browsing. It’s a real peace of mind, as strange as that may sound.
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 mouser or digikey though, they have a LOT of product types in the catalog, and tens of millions of products in their warehouses. Just cataloging it all is a massive amount of work.
I'd actually be curious what the data structure of the McMaster catalog is to support that. It's a cool website, it makes it seem so effortless to search for parts.
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.) to be manually selected/checked.
So annoying that digikey doesn't do this, you have to click each value/range separately.
At McMaster, there would be one 555 timer, one utility op-amp that implements the LM741 spec, one low-noise op-amp, one 5V regulator, etc. They would all perform at or somewhat above average, but you wouldn't know precisely what you were getting.
There probably is room for a McMaster-like Digikey (or a simplified Digikey storefront for those who aren't picky about details), but it is unclear how large its market opportunity might be. It might look kinda like SparkFun.
A lot of the time, details in electronics really do matter. I think I've ordered almost every variation of the LM35 temperature sensor over my career. Sometimes you care more about price, sometimes you care more about accuracy. McMaster would probably only stock one of the grades, not sure which.
I was also intimidated by the huge table and hundreds of columns the first time I use Digi-Key, but only later realized how handy it is to have all the parameters listed together. It makes comparison subtle difference of each parts so much easier.
The filter above will also tell you existing enum values within the current showing list, so you will instantly get an idea you are comparing.
Again, both have their advantages, but I recommend give it a try. Finding parts isn't any harder this way.
1) the money to order whatever I wanted from them and 2) the knowledge to make cool things with all of those parts.
One of these days I'm going to find some time and do a few electronics projects. I've always been interested, and I did a fair amount of simple experimentation as a kid, but as an adult life has kept me busy with other pursuits.
I've seen a carparts store online and it had something really similar, a few words like "oil filter 2017 ford mustang" and you were literally looking at the part in the dropdown list, exactly what you want.
What do most sites do wrong?
1) Not loading the search data into RAM on the server so it is really fast - most companies could do this with their level of stock and only need a couple of GB per web server 2) Requiring a postback to start filtering 3) Not allowing the ordering of search terms to be changed e.g. "Ford Mustang Oil Filter" should match the same as "Oil Filter Ford Mustang" 4) Not having images for all results 5) Not being able to zoom in on images to check something is what you think it is 6) Using a stock image which doesn't necessarily match the item
For companies whose primary interface with the public is searching for stuff, most e-commerce sites I use are shamefully bad at both performance and usability.
Kudos to Mcmaster!
I'm in the same boat as far as looking for a MMC equivalent (they refuse to ship here at all)
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.
In fact, I was just browsing Home Depot for some tool hooks, but I think I'll buy them from this place instead.
No upselling, no "popularity" filtering, no cheap imports that under-perform. You don't reviews to select between items because if you know what you need, you just buy that.
Of course this requires some expertise. You need to know what you need. And that's where the value of a physical trade shop comes in, where you can go, talk, even show the problem to somebody who might have seen your problem before.
I was aware something is going on when Tyler McVicker introduced himself with "mick".
English teachers usually have a typical repertoire of their pet details like schwa and so on, but seems there's a blind spot here.
The "Mac" prefix means "son of" and "Mc" is an abbreviation of that. The "a" is schwa and where I grew up, is pronounced with a short I, as "mick". But I have heard others pronounce it "mack". The McDonalds ads on TV and radio seem to try to split the difference by pronouncing it "meck".
It's also possible that some people go out of their way to say "mack" in an attempt to acknowledge and avoid the "mick" slur that was sometimes used in England and in the US against Irish and Scottish immigrants.
Similarly excellent UI. One benefit that I take advantage of is free delivery to their local warehouse for in person pickup.
I don't know why more companies don't serve the customer with this.
You can pay them to open the local branch at 2 AM on a Sunday if you need a part and they have it in stock.
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.
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.
I got pretty excited looking at this site because I'm refurbishing my home at the moment, and doing most of the work myself, so new suppliers of materials and tools always catch my eye. I'm not sure Screwfix et al really cut it next to this but then, of course, I noticed all the prices are in dollars and all the measurements are of the somewhat ironically named imperial variety.
Is there anything like this for the UK market? I've noticed that CPC and their various subsidiaries (Farnell, for example) can be pretty good, depending on what you need. But you seem to need a set that includes Screwfix, Toolstation, CPC, Farnell, RS, and a bunch of tool vendors (like SGS and Toolden) to really cover it off. I ended up buying specialist drillbits from a niche supplier that I can't even remember the name of now.
[1]:https://www.hondaparts-direct.com/oempartfinder?aribrand=HOM...
Ways I've seen it done wrong include middle-click/Control+click not working at all, because the links are some kind of onclick="javascript:" monstrosity, or the link working but some script in the background also redirecting the page on the tab I originally clicked on.
(I can understand some kind of "flow control" during the checkout process to stop you from double-submitting the "place order" request. But not when I'm browsing the products, and sometimes want two tabs open side by side to compare things.)
/s obviously, but it just points to the absolutely uselessness of ‘modern’ websites
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.
So what is your cut off for "modern" here? Rails was released August 2004...
Ah yes, the oh-look-a-shiny-thing development paradigm.
Sometimes they sell a bolt, but sometimes they don't carry the companion nut (when dealing with specific stuff like alloy or specialty breakaway nuts, etc).
If you are spending your own money you might find other suppliers offer more value.
McMaster-Carr
Grainger
...and there are a few more.
...or Arrow, Mouser, or Farnell.
Yes, I realize 10 other people said the same thing. But I feel so strongly about this that I don't think an upvote is sufficient!
I always tolerated McMaster's crappy UX as just a symptom of how MEs are willing to tolerate more shaggery than CS types.
They are very smart. And weird. During my final round with the CTO I was waiting for him in his office on a couch. The couch was in a living room-like area of the office. After a few minutes of waiting I turned around. The CTO was sitting there staring at me; I've no idea for how lone. I stared back, then said "hi, I'm moeymo1. Are you Mr. X?" We started the interview.
They are conservative because the owners "like getting their dividend check and eating caviar" I was told. Apparently they tried to expand internationally in the 1970s when an employee wanted to move home and start a warehouse there. It turns out "home" was Iran, and the warehouse and its contents were seized after the revolution. That apparently put them off international expansion for a very long time.
They can pay big bonuses like financial firms. I didn't take the offer because they were too odd. Years later I ran into a woman that used to work there. Apparently they are super, um, not nice to women, at the exec level. She left for Grainger.
I had a question about a bracket and its datasheet. The secretary put me on hold for 45s, and someone with a Japanese accent answered and said he was the lead engineer of that line(?!?!)
Like within 1m total, I had the authoritative answer down to the .002 deg, and the head engineer answering me.
So, I buy Misumi.
I also find McMaster is also in that top list of "Just buy from them and not worry!"
A) Understands what they’re selling
Really, there is no B, except for another feature that’s made it easier to buy from retail sites: Apple Pay.
Apple Pay on websites has made it much easier to buy from companies where I won’t drop by often enough to warrant creating an account. One-click checkout without the Amazonian death by a thousand cuts.
> To view this website and enjoy a better online experience, update your browser for free.
Yes, I'm on an old laptop, but it works with most sites. No way to even let the current browser try. Kind of a fail, if you ask me.
Edit: mcmaster.com works fine. bedelstein.com is the problem. It's just a blog. It should render well enough, even with an old browser.
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.
I agree that they aren't the cheapest, but the quality is unimpeachable and the shipping is fast and reasonable even for small (i.e. retail) orders. I also love how everything in the catalog includes a brief but concise description of what it is used for.
Also, at the risk of perpetuating (largely accurate) stereotypes about gender psychology, it's clear that the website is designed around the typical male shopper: I am shopping to fulfill a very specific need and I want to acquire the solution as quickly and efficiently as possible.
All in all, I'd say to be careful with stereotypes. I'm sure women love the McMaster-Carr shopping experience.
I guess it's a pretty complicated problem. There are so many suppliers, standards, file formats and competing interests. But it does seem like it's a market ripe for disruption... somehow.
Simply put - to build a successful business focus on the entire business and not just the website. People can get over an unintuitive UI and slow search. They cannot get over the fact that you don’t carry what they want.
It is clear that it is a site designed for people that just need to order parts for cars. I’ve never spent more than 45 seconds to find the exact part I’m looking for.
Incredible
If my price range is 21 - 45, I don't want to fiddle with a double tick slider dragging it pixelwise to get to the exact numbers I want. Not everyone has perfect hand and mouse dexterity to move it a couple of pixels. Not some senior citizens. It's easier and faster for me to enter two numbers or just one number for the max. I don't need to enter a min number. Plus Amazon is already showing some popular ranges. I think
Why do we tend to pretend this kind of thing isn't beautiful. Most people would agree it is.
Why do we tend to pretend function and form are two different things. Even as a colloquialism it's misleading. No need to throw visual design under the bus, what you enjoy about this site is the product of such design done thoughtfully.
As you search I’m pretty sure it downloads the entire database of items after each key stroke. No standardised tags on things like bolt sizes ( try quickly find M20 grade 8.8 galv bolts).
just the worst!
- However they've managed SEO, searches for their part numbers on normal search engines never have the part page as a result
- Searching for part numbers on their page only takes you to the series page for that part number, rather than the "Product Details" page for the part.
I tip my hat to them, the most reliable execution I’ve seen from any supplier, always on time, always on target.
There are times I can't find the part even when it's something I know you must sell.
And I don't need to wait ages for jazzy pictures of screws to show up. It's a screw.
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.
Most websites don't care to much about illustrations, even though that's what many people use when buying. Taking your own photos, or doing illustrations is pretty expensive, but it really helps the customers pick the right products.
The grayscale may be a way of insuring that customers aren't overly focused on the illustrations, and instead actually read the product descriptions.
This is amazing!
if you want to make a sale all you can do is give them what they want
most stores have to convince the user that they want something, and that could be anything, and it doesn't much matter what it is.
Should be the best e-commerce website render content without JavaScript?
Completely absurd and I'll never order from them again.
- If you haven't read the article, would you think this site great?
My point is: no one knows what is a great e-commerce website. Is one that sells a lot? Amazon does it.
Is not one that sells a lot, but that is very easy to use?
The author explained why they think it's great, so rather than waving your hands and denying that greatness could ever be defined, what about a constructive approach? Engage with the elements the author identified. Criticize specific ones, or suggest others. Say something you actually believe!
Maybe I didn't express myself very well.
If you don't know what a great ecommerce website is, what is has, what it does, does reading a piece where someone says some site is a great e-commerce website influence your opinion? Does it shape your view?
If so, how does previous literature about the subject influenced the writer?
So, a great e-commerce website should be measured by it's form or by it's results?
Why non functional and not great websites thrive?
Would Jeff Bezos be fixated on those pixels because he believed that as long as amazon.com kept growing and selling, the site must therefore working great?
Those are all sincere questions, not rhetorical or trolling.
What do you think? The article emphasized form and function. You seem to be proposing that results matter. Say that!
Just cobbling together bits of what you're "asking" it seems like you might instead have written the following: "It seems to me that the article focuses on form: simple design, great search and filtering, and useful information like CAD files. But being 'the best e-commerce site' needs to include succeeding at e-commerce. Being very easy to use might help. But there seem to be non functional and not 'great' websites (by the article's definition) that thrive."
Then I talked to regular people (like my friend who builds high-end magic tricks) who happened to use the site and like me wondered why more sites weren't usable like this.
And then after a few years, I saw that people in the comments here and elsewhere thought the same.
And this post is the latest.
I think there's something there.
No, I would have ordered what I wanted, quickly and easily, and probably not thought about the website at all. Which is what makes it great.
I am infuriated when shopping for clothes, computer parts, etc. because the items are rarely categorized and when they are, it isn't comprehensive so searches tend to miss out on the obvious so I end up browsing a site's entire catalog.
And, they do sell a lot. They're the industry standard. The only problem I've had is that they won't ship to individuals in Canada so I had to think up a fake company name.
If you search HN comments for "McMaster-Carr", you'll see their website is frequently brought up as an example of great UX, going back over 10 years.
even if you're not going to buy there (their prices are high, compared to alternative suppliers, is what I've heard, and there are items and brands they don't carry) it's still a super useful reference of what's possible and what general solutions in that area look like and cost, or even just basic lookup for what types of nuts and bolts you should look for in a project. like it's actually just a really nice pleasant interface for working with hardware in general.
I disagree. I know what is a great e-commerce website -- in the sense the article is talking about.
- loads fast
- makes items easy to find quickly
- has a simple, efficient shopping cart mechanism
- gets me in, order placed, and out in the shortest time possible
- is run by a company with great customer service
OTOH I don't know of any serious hobbyists (of whatever) who get the majority of their supplies from Amazon. When you ask, people generally say that selection is poor and quality is always highly suspect.