McMaster Carr – The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard Of

Summary

Most people I know haven't even heard of it, but mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used. McMaster-Carr is an industrial supply company. They sell nuts, bolts, bushings, bearings – pretty much anything an engineer needs to build stuff. I've purchased from them dozens of times over the past few years, both for personal and school projects.But what makes their website so great? And why should an industrial supply company have the best e-commerce site on the internet?mcmaster.com is great because it does what it needs to, and nothing else. First, let's look at the visual design of the site. Minimal, mostly grayscale, with accents of green and yellow. There are no popups, animations, banners, carousels, or videos – just a calm, static page with categories and a search bar. Even the images are grayscale, to avoid inadvertently catching your eye.It's not the most visually stunning site, but that doesn't matter here - McMaster has chosen function over form. A user's goal when they visit McMaster-Carr is to find their part as quickly as possible. The website is designed entirely around that fact. Users rarely come just to browse, so there are no AI recommendation algorithms, featured products, new arrivals – that doesn't make sense in this context. People visit McMaster-Carr with high intent to buy a specific part, that's it. So how do we get from the 700,000 products in their catalog down to one part? Here's what I do.Let's say I'm searching for a bolt:I type "bolt" into the search barMcMaster shows me several subcategories: hex head, socket head, set screws, etc. I'm looking for socket head, so I select that one.Now I move my attention to the left nav bar, which shows me several filtering options. Bolts are commonly specified by their thread size (e.g. 1/4"-20), and their length. I'm looking for a 1/4"-20 x 1" bolt, meaning that the bolt's diameter is 1/4" and its length is 1", so I select these filters.There are over a dozen other filters, such as materia...