[gumby]

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 the web could augment what they were already successfully doing. No redesign for design's sake.

Some of the best paper catalogues like McMaster and Sigma had excellent, customer-centered design, which led to long term loyalty. Easy to find what you needed, and useful as references, not just as a place to buy. They have retained that philosophy into the web world.

Compare this to, say, Amazon where Amazon's needs are prioritized over the customers', with the obvious result of reduced loyalty and the need to shore that up with rewards (prime, discounts, advertising).

[hammock]

>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

[geodel]

> By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching.

Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.

> 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 ...

Yes I love to stores and see various items that I wouldn't typically buy. I could even go to, say Costco website to see random "newly arrived seasonal items".

But on shopping websites when searching for products most people are not looking to enjoy "incredible joys of discovery" by being forced to scroll through search results for things which they haven't even searched for.

Its purely ads and "marketplace" bullshitery from Amazon and others.

[spchampion2]

> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.

When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? They're called end caps, and stores make a lot of money from brands to put them there because customers are more likely to see them and purchase whatever.

Also, have you noticed that the shelves at stores usually contain the most well known brands at eye level while the cheap stuff or weird stuff is usually down low or up high? That may be store optimization, but more commonly those top brands pay for that eye-level placement.

Amazon didn't invent this. They just came up with the digital equivalent of what stores have been doing for decades.

[yamtaddle]

Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.

[wwweston]

As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.

At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.

[yamtaddle]

Yeah, good point.

Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.

[geodel]

I can ignore displays and go to right aisle to choose on products. On Amazon there is no equivalent. If they just ignore my search request I am stuck with trawling through irrelevant results.

[turtlebits]

Amazon search may have lots of results that I don't care about, but is generally accurate on the first try.

The brick and mortar experience is ostensibly 10x worse than being able to use a search box. Grocery stores and Home improvement stores are the worst - I probably spend 80% of my time there trying find where things are, with the overhead labels generally being useless.

[novok]

I find when amazon doesn't show what I want when I get specific, it's because they don't really sell it. When they do, it matches pretty close or 1:1 fairly quickly. Also notice they're not good about items that have a lot of customization, like macbooks that a very specific config or something like shoes that let you chose 6 different color combos for various parts. For those speciality things I find you just need to go to the brand store which creates custom software for it. Maybe your looking for things they don't sell or is pretty customizable?

[julianlam]

I was (and still am) frustrated with Amazon's practice of showing me what _they_ think I want, instead of what I searched for. It violates a basic tenet of the server-client relationship, serve what the client asked for.

I was happy to discover that AliExpress didn't do these shenanigans. You search for an item, it shows matches. Wonderful — and then they changed it, so now halfway through your results, you'll see completely unrelated items.

So now it's just a garbage web filled with garbage results.

[geodel]

Exactly right. And considering how many here do appreciate Amazon's position here, to me, it just shows Amazon/ e-commerce web sites have conditioned tons of users to find terrible user experience agreeable.

[davnn]

I have made the opposite experience. I enjoy the search results Amazon provides, but find it incredibly difficult to find the right product on AliExpress. How do you navigate the seemingly auto-translated jungle of similar products on AliExpress?

[cjbgkagh]

A critical component of being able to change high rates for sponsorship is to not show people precisely what they’re looking for. Also, once people find what they’re looking for they stop looking which reduces ad impressions.

Amazon are just in the exploit stage of the build-exploit cycle and are making so much money doing it I doubt they’ll stop.

[geodel]

True. Founder CEO is out. Incoming one just has to keep growing ad business and leave Amazon with probably billion dollar retirement/severance package. After all it wouldn't be unheard of in 1-2 decades.

[TeMPOraL]

Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them.

> stimulus, sparks of ideas, reviews and testimonials, and all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com

In meatspace this is often discussed as customer-abusive design - overloading senses with shapes, colors, sounds and smells, confusing and ever-changing shop layout forcing shoppers to wander and explore, defeating the no.1. normal people advice for responsible shopping - make a list beforehand and stick to it.

I don't think HNers are that much different. We complain more, because we know more about how the web works, and realize things could be much better.

[yamtaddle]

> Wonder how much of that is actually a preference of typical consumers, and how much it is just being forced on them.

I can just about guarantee it's mostly the latter.

My elderly dad was shown how to do a couple things on Craigslist, years ago, and has been using it without assistance for years.

Meanwhile he often has to ask for help with the fucking phone app on his phone. And every time Google updates it or he gets a new phone, he has to figure it all out again. For no benefit, just to be able to do the same shit he already could.

Design thrashing and all kinds of slow-downs and animations and "helpful" pop-ups and crap make things harder on everyone, it's just that some of us can push past it. It has a cost, but we become blind to it because we're so used to putting up with it. A few seconds lost there, a couple minutes here, but we've forgotten about it by the end of the day. For those on the edges it's catastrophic to their ability to actually use their devices for anything.

[geodel]

Great point.

At this point it is pretty clear Amazon is fattened on sweet billions from ads. To add insult to injury they also get to say We are delighted to offer ten thousand brands of USB cable in hundreds of colors to suit every personal style

[MengerSponge]

McMaster is also better for wandering the aisles than Amazon! Just hop onto a catalog page, and see related item after item.

Amazon tries to sell you things that are cross-correlated, so if you buy tiny resealable bags for your board game collection, they try to sell you portable precision scales.

[dahdum]

> McMaster is also better for wandering the aisles than Amazon! Just hop onto a catalog page, and see related item after item.

It’s all fun and games until you get blocked for viewing too many pages. Been a few years since I needed to use them but that was always super annoying.

[gumby]

Ordinary people are well known to suffer from "choice fatigue" and overstimulation. In a supermarket though it's considered a zero sum race between independent players.

On a web site run by a single entity that need not be the case.

> all the other "cruft" that was removed from McMaster.com

The point of my comment is that crap was not removed but rather was never introduced in the first place.

[mmmmpancakes]

Not only this but Amazon is a marketplace for buyers AND sellers whereas it appears McMaster-Carr is the seller. Sellers on Amazon are also Amazon customers who want their own pages, copy, etc.

[somat]

I don't know if it is the same as amazon. but I suspect it is.

Newegg: the store, I love, newegg: the marketplace, I dislike. newegg at least had the grace to include the filter "sold by newegg" when they made the transition to marketplace.

So then "amazon: the store" would be what? books? does amazon still sell books? or is that all amazon: the marketplace" as well? it is impossible to tell with amazon.

[azalemeth]

I wish Amazon was more like McMaster Carr or RS or any of the good websites. The ability to have filters that are meaningful (sort by random technical parameters, filter by dimensions or manufacturer, warranty, lead time, item location and that of manufacture, as well as price) and datasheets that were informative world be absolutely fantastic. I'm probably spoilt by datasheets for chips but God I miss them elsewhere...

[ooklala]

I’m surprised you mention RS in the same breath as McMaster— their website is awful. Yes, you can put in very detailed parameters, but if you want a fairly generic part (like a DPDT 12v relay) you’re presented with hundreds of options, only one of which will be in stock— which they only tell you after you add it to your trolley… Given that RS is mostly ‘I need one of this part, tomorrow’ the inability to filter by stock completely ruins the usability of the site. It’s bad enough that I just use Farnell or Rapid—who both let you filter by stock—despite their sometimes worse selection. (and about a year or so ago the RS site stored state on the server side so if you hit the back button, or opened something in a new window the site would freak out and bring you back to the homepage)

[analog31]

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.

[divbzero]

I believe the parent is referring to Sigma-Aldrich?

Here is an example of their search results:

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/search/edta

[gumby]

Indeed, I was referring to Sigma's and Fisher's old paper catalogues. Mcmaster seems to have done the best at preserving that value.

[mmmmpancakes]

The problem with your comparison to Amazon is that the scale of products offered on Amazon is completely different.

A catalogue system like this is only viable if the number of products is relatively small, as appears to be the case of mcmaster-carr.

[stingrae]

McMaster has >700,000 products available on its website so I wouldn’t really call that relatively small.

It is more segmented than what Amazon offers.

[mmmmpancakes]

Amazon has roughly 350 MM products if you account for third party sellers, so yeah, the scale is massively different.

[ckemere]

Maybe a related big difference is that McMaster Carr actually know what they sell?