[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

[HWR_14]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[jameshart]

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.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

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