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Comment by intrepidhero | Hacker News Reader

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 stuck guessing at search terms and browsing "related" lists. If you want to build an Amazon killer, you can let UI, price and shipping slide, but nail your taxonomy and I'm in.

See also digikey, parts-tree and rock auto.

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Exactly. In fact almost everything in the article is icing on-top. The entire experience of the McMaster Carr website is the taxonomy and the fact that the search and navigation _within that taxonomy_ are all built to work seamlessly and get you to exactly what you are looking for.

Search for "bolt" - you won't get 10,000 different bolts with a pretty little filter to whittle down, you'll end up on a page with broader categories of things that may or may not have "bolt" in the name, but are all things that are in some form bolts. From there you keep drilling down, selecting different attributes until you get to an individual product (or a grid of variations, like different lengths).

Honestly, it feels like the original authors have never actually used the site, they just browsed around, thought it was laid out nicely, etc

> 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

My favorite recent Amazon search: looking at LCD displays, one was categorized as “Style: Women’s”

Was this a classic case of review laundering, where a blouse was replaced with a computer monitor? Or did some code somewhere overlap with attributes that normally apply to clothing?

Whatever it was, the categories and filters on that site continue to degrade.

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.

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

Indeed, one can search by your area's local trade name for an item and still find it in their catalog, even if no one else in the country calls it that!

For an example that's not hyper-local, search "roll pin," which about half the world uses to describe that particular item. For a more dramatic example, search "hickey."

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