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 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.
This is why I love building B2B software. You get to help people do their jobs, rather than trying to sell them things. The site in the OP is a fantastic example of building a tool to help someone be successful at their job.
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.
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 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.
An awful lot of products _would_ lend themselves to filtering, but the folks putting the sites together don't bother coming up with good parameters, or when they do, they don't populate them on all the relevant products.
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.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible
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.
> For someone who's just browsing for something interesting to buy it's terrible.
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.
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.