Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jameshart 1285 days ago
Just… astounded that the starting point for a discussion of e-commerce usability would ever be ‘let’s go gather some learnings from “a B2B site that recently made the top of HackerNews as the best e-commerce site”’

Are HN users even representative customers of McMaster Carr? Let alone of any other e-commerce site?
1 comments
TeMPOraL 1285 days ago
> Are HN users even representative customers of McMaster Carr? Let alone of any other e-commerce site?

Why wouldn't they be? Yes, most HN users have some expertise or occupation in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, but other than that, HN has a diverse userbase from all around the world and great many walks of life.

link
HWR_14 1285 days ago
They wouldn't be because HN is a self-selected sample of people who tend to have tech experience, which tends to lend itself to certain ways of thinking.

If an ecommerce site depended entirely on looking through their catalog with SQL commands, I'd imagine most of the HN community would be able to navigate it (although possibly unhappy with it). I'd imagine most of the general population would not be.

link
TeMPOraL 1285 days ago
Fair enough.

> If an ecommerce site depended entirely on looking through their catalog with SQL commands, I'd imagine most of the HN community would be able to navigate it (although possibly unhappy with it).

I would love it, and I would switch to that site immediately.

Every time I have to shop for something on-line these days I'm thinking about making a scrapper populating an SQLite database with that site's catalog, because e-commerce UX is insanely bad, and even a simple SQL database browser would be an order of magnitude of improvement.

link
jameshart 1285 days ago
Sure, some HN users are going to be McMaster Carr users. Some HN users are probably Boeing customers as well, but I wouldn’t trust HN’s collective assessment of the procurement UX for a 787. The users who McMaster Carr is targeting peripherally intersect with the HN community. And it also happens to be a community that contains people who are more likely than the average population to enjoy browsing a parts catalog for fun.

I just don’t know how much you can conclude generally about effective e-commerce design from that sample point.

link
PaulDavisThe1st 1285 days ago
This somewhat misses the point that a substantial fraction of HN commenters/users spend their working hours building UX stuff.
link