https://www.mcmaster.com/ is fast. I've never been to Georgia, I don't live in the US, I don't even need hardware. But I still enjoy just clicking on random links and seeing a swift response.
What I like about it is that it's a no-BS e-commerce store, get in and get out.
I've seen people shopping for hardware on reddit say that the navigation is clunky and confusing, and IIRC they said the products are price-gouged?
I'd be curious to know what other users here with an eye for design think of it, and if they know of similar websites, as I've been working on a hardware e-commerce store (mainly for my own use) that uses a lot of the same principles of no-BS shopping, I'm supposed to present it to my mentor next week
Also, a lot of the speed is pretty standard with most frameworks, they did a good job of blending in the slow loading bits into something that feels fast. Overall It's a great website and I'm sure it makes lots of sales
Mech engineer here. We truly buy everything we can for our company from here. If you order by 6pm and select ground shipping, it comes the next day by 11am, and we’re in Boston where the closest warehouses are NJ and Chicago.
Also they have the best return policy. If you don’t like it, send it back and they will reimburse you without asking a single question.
Lastly, part of the no-BS aspect is that no brands are given most of the time. You need test leads for a bench top multimeter? They offer whatever length or specs you want, and any of the ones you choose will be high quality and most likely made in the US (in my example, all their test leads are Pomona brand). The ability not to have to sift through Amazon reviews or decide whether a premium brand is worth it is easily worth the extra cost.
> Also they have the best return policy. If you don’t like it, send it back and they will reimburse you without asking a single question.
Sometimes I forget how good we have it in Europe. In the EU we have a pretty close to universal [0] 14 day no questions asked return period for all online purchases. You occasionally get a crappy retailer who tries to push back but one link to this document stops that pretty quickly.
> I've seen people shopping for hardware on reddit say that the navigation is clunky and confusing, and IIRC they said the products are price-gouged?
I think these people are used to shopping from Amazon and Home Depot. They can get their bolts and random specialty items and it comes cheap. When you’re talking about a quality, precision piece of hardware, one where you know the manufacture and have reliable dimensions (and probably even a CAD model) it comes at a price. And if you’re working On something that matters, especially if this is your business, you’re willing to pay for that.
Yup, you see the same thing in industrial automation, even Automation Direct[1] which is on the cheap end is going to be 5-10x what HD/consumer options are. That said you know what you're getting and also that you'll be able to get support/replacement parts on short notice(I had one of their flow sensors go bad on me and they RMA'd + shipped with absolutely zero hassle).
I love the UI. You know what's clunky? Amazon. Amazon's UI is awful and their search is the worst (it's just about useless and I think that's by design.) It looks pretty though and I doubt you'll hear people on Reddit complaining about it.
As a ME, I used to manage a lab in a large corporation. McMasterCarr is ingrained in the US engineering culture. Every lab has a 5 inch thick yellow catalog.
Also Thorlabs. Everytime I'd open their shipment, it'd include Lab Snacks™. I wrote about it here [1]. Both are awesome companies to deal with.
We buy a ton from there. The price is a little high but not enough to matter unless its a significant part of your expenses. They save me money on balance by being fast and convenient.
Is it just me, or did they custom/hand-draw all the illustrations for the hardware being sold?
And man, the UI is brilliant. Straight and to the point - just enough complexity to handle what they're selling, without the clunkiness of Amazon's UI.
Pretty amazing company. They're a big Ruby on Rails shop. At least they were back in 2016. FYI, I was offered a position there but didn't take it up due to long commute.
I don't know if they still have it but they used to have a giant catalog that was the same thing in paper form. Super thin paper thousands of pages of just random stuff.
McMaster is really cool, but not for the quick response time of their website (its actually not very fast)... the wide variety of parts available is why I like them.
They appear to be using the Backbone.js/Marionette framework, which is super hardcore but also dates when this site was probably developed (I can't remember the last time I saw Backbone in the wild!)
In the spirit of clarification / correction (vs pedantry), SPA is a client-side web architecture pattern, whereas Next.js is a web framework best known for its support for rendering outside the browser (SSR and SSG).
Thanks. Terminology aside, what I referred to was exactly Next.js's pre-rendering (SSR & SSG) and prefetching. I feel like without them it'll be harder to achieve OP's interactivity with just React/Vue.
React / Vue is also irrelevant here however. It all depends how your actual prod code is built in the end. (For example you can use React with Next.js and still do all the SSR SSG stuff) In this case you're writing React for your server side rendered pages as opposed to the 'traditional' pattern of an SPA where everything happens in the client.
Might also be using the native Context Index API.[0] That's usually used to allow sites to be downloaded and browsed offline. I think that's how SVGOMG does it too
