My nomination is McMaster-Carr (mcmaster.com) - They have a huge catalog of parts/tools yet somehow it's so intuitive to browse. I was a mechanical engineer in a previous life and McMaster's website was my bible. Step one for any new prototype design was to browse this site. Best case scenario, you could cobble together your prototype from various COTS (commercial off the shelf) McMaster parts. And if that wasn't an option, scan the catalog for necessary parts and raw materials. If they don't exist at McMaster, your design idea just got at least 10X expensive and lead time doubled.
I was always shocked by McMaster-Carr's delivery speed. I felt like the parts would arrive as quickly as I could have conceivably picked them up.
This was 10 years ago now, so sort of like Amazon Prime before it became ubiquitous, but for materials and tools. However McMaster was and remains much better organized and much better spec-ed.
That's because they already have to delivery that fast for car repair shops. Fast delivery has never been an extra for them, it's always been the core product.
What's interesting is that considering the existing logistics, none of these guys though of expanding into other ecommerce earlier. One of them could have been Amazon...
I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon is re-solving problems that traditional supply chain companies like McMaster-Carr solved 1-2 decades ago. It would be fascinating to read a case study comparing the two.
Amazon is trying to shed all possible liability as a merchant and collect their 15% or whatever rent, since that’s where the margins are. That’s at odds with what I’m looking for as a buyer, which is a seller that will vet and stand behind their products.
I would like to know if a McMaster-Carr, Grainger, et al had fallen into the same traps Amazon has when it comes to supply chain and if eventually Amazon will be shaped into a similar company & business model.
Amazon's actions make it clear that the company's goal is not to provide the customer with products of a minimum and consistent quality, nor is it to make it easy for customers to even purchase products from Amazon.com. Note how they hide the option to filter for only products shipped and sold by Amazon.com
Amazon knows that retail margins are tiny, a few percent at best, and that is not what they are interested in. It takes a lot of labor to provide high quality vetting and constant vigilance over suppliers. What they are interested in is high margins, which comes from being a platform.
I don't think McMaster Carr or Grainger ever had any intention of becoming platforms for resellers so they could take a top line cut of sales and outsource quality control.
If anything, I think Amazon is probably trying to reduce their shipped and sold by Amazon.com retail operations and focus on the high margin web services. Why compete with Walmart/Target/Best Buy/Home Depot/Lowes for <5% profit margin with huge liabilities when you can make 20%+ easy on super scalable web services?
Once, circa 2006, I ordered some rubber tubing from McMaster-Carr in the morning. It was shipped it from New Jersey to western Maryland, where I lived, by that afternoon.
Same, gets there practically as soon as the call is hung up, their catalog has everything, and their websites search function is intuitive and efficient
I like McMaster-Carr, but I often hear them being held up as a positive UX example when, in my experience, their website is endlessly frustrating. They often force you into choosing arbitrary categories too early, break tabbed browsing expectations, and have a frustrating mix of metric and imperial measurements that can't be escaped. Their pricing is also generally at quite a premium.
For example, let's say I want a piece of hollow metal cylinder (any metal, to be determined later based on cost and availability), with an ID of around 12 mm and a wall thickness of at least 5 mm, at least 150 mm long. It ends up being a needlessly frustrating experience even for such a simple item.
I know what you mean, and I can say that most of the categorization, which may seem arbitrary, reasonably comes from how those items are manufactured and used historically. An example is pipe versus tube; they are measured differently and have differences in ranges of wall thickness, precision and so on, because different needs and processes developed between pipes that carry fluids vs structural tubing. Most but not all people are going to want one category or another based on intended use, and probably have a highly-available size/thickness in mind already, too.
Getting things custom made is expensive, so customers are pressured to use what's widely available. Stocking lots of things not widely purchased is also expensive. These forces have been working for a long time to give us a pretty wide selection that covers most uses.
I know that pipe and tube have different specifications and applications -- that's specifically why I picked this example. But those differences don't always apply to me. I'd prefer a UI with a check box for pipe, tube, or both, because sometimes I want my search to cover both things. Maybe I want to use a pipe as a paperweight or an art piece or whatever. If McMaster could accurately guess what I was going to use something for, my employer wouldn't need me.
Intelligent search of physical parts is something I've thought a bit about before, in a different context. Often times people with a lot of car knowledge can point out interchangeable items that manufacturers don't come out and acknowledge as being interchangeable.
Examples: Oil filters are often differently sized but still interchangeable between models. You can use an Aisin-built airflow meter from a 90s Mazda to replace one in a Toyota, even though they're different housings, and it would work (if not perfectly) because it's essentially the same part with the same electronics. Brakes and suspension parts often interchange across many models, with the possibility of 'upgrading' to heavier duty parts from more expensive models.
Anyway, it'd be great if you could combine a lot of data and NLP to search off-the-shelf parts based on parameters of varying specificity. Anything from "made of metal and roughly x/y/z dimensions" to "shares the same bolt pattern as part # on a joining surface" could be made searchable in theory.
Having used McMaster-Carr for over a decade, I strongly agree about the filtering being non-ideal and also the prices being high. There's an interaction between the two as well: You can't sort by price. Often there are many items meeting the specs I want but I just want to see which ones are the cheapest. At the moment I skim everything, making notes about candidates, and them manually compare them on price.
Yes, this exactly. This causes searches to take hours for simple things. Sometimes if I look in "steel" expecting to find something cheap, the only part matching my dimensions is military-grade superalloy tool steel that costs a fortune, so I have to go back and look again in "stainless steel" where there's perhaps a reasonable price.
Unfortunately McMaster-Carr won't deal with Canadian companies they believe could be associated with the cannabis industry "due to US Federal Laws". I've been at two companies where we've placed an order with them, then had it immediately cancelled. Only after following up did I learn the reason.
When I tried to re-order through my personal company (not in any way cannabis-related) I was told I'm not a big enough company for them to deal with (and they cancelled the order).
From a CAD/dimensional standpoint, their website is a goldmine. I just wish they would take my money.
My main experience with their site is the incredibly aggressive and trigger-happy bot filter. If you reload a page a few times due to a bad connection, they block you. Not "solve this captcha to continue", just "go away, we're not letting you in".
Can anyone nominate an Australian equivalent to mcmaster.com ?
I am prototyping something and would love to have a lost of available parts to troll through with prices.
