I beg to differ. Rock Auto is where it's at for auto parts. The website is ugly as hammered shit, but it's fast, shows you the options grouped by rough quality level (economy/you cheapskate, daily driver, performance, etc), shows you what part to select so it ships from the same warehouse as the parts already in your cart and saves you shipping, and returns are painless (disclaimer: I've only ever done returns for core exchanges). I have never had a better online purchasing experience.
And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades.
Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie.
Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down.
Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer.
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.
RockAuto's easily navigable catalog is what has gotten them $5000+ in sales from me over the years.
Autozone / NAPA try, but the catalogs are clunky and require many page loads to navigate to a given item. Once you find an item, it's a crapshoot whether the listing will be items that are actually for sale at a store near me. Half the time the first 5 items will be "generic" parts that don't actually fit my car anyway.
RockAuto lets you drill down to the exact part you need, compare 5+ different brands on the spot and add it to the cart without ever changing pages. It's a real triumph of slim web design.
I hope Rock Auto never replaces their website. Sure I have to scroll down the whole page to find my manufacturer in the alphabetical sidebar listing, and then open the nested categories like I'm looking for a folder in Windows 3.1, but once I get there I find a list of parts that I know will fit my car arranged so I can tell the quality vs. price trade-offs.
I used to look for parts on Advance and O'Reilly's sites, half of the time it seemed the search results would have parts that wouldn't fit my car. So I really like the way that RA's nested folder structure ensures the most important constraint (compatibility) is met during the search.
Overall I agree, but I've found it wise to cross-reference their part numbers as they are sometimes wrong for lower volume models. Eg: offering standard Ford Focus brake pads when the model searched is a Focus ST
Try the search. Its phenomenal. And then when you click enter, the next search box that appears. And then the filter box. I dont ever have to scroll on the rock auto page.
I'll second Rock Auto. A dated looking website that Just Works (TM).
Parts-tree another great one, focused on yard maintenance equipment.
Ace hardware is kind of neat. I ordered some stuff as Christmas presents and the local store called me on the phone to ask if I was going to be home and where would I like them to put the items. I asked if they could stick them in the garage and maybe in some generic looking boxes to preserve the surprise (of being presents) and the boxes all showed up neatly hand wrapped in brown paper! Only one data point but definitely made me feel like ordering again.
I'll go a step further on the interface. It's one of the best shopping experiences online. Ive noticed this about auto part stores POS systems, but rock auto especially, is something special.
You can use the search to REFINE as you search. Start by typing Toyota Camry YEAR and 2.4L if you want. It will keep making suggestions but you can click enter. Then you have a tree to select from OR you can use the new search box that appears to keep searching just in that tree. Then when you get to a category, a third search box appears you can use to filter the results. It's honestly amazing how fast you can search for things. There was another comment about having to scroll a lot, but that's the slow way to use the site.
Rock Auto is one of those sites that will never work as well if it became "mobile first." Like craigslist and photoshop, and the old facebook, its beauty is in its density and how quick you can navigate and drill.
I've also had great experiences with Rock Auto. I've been ordering the occasional part from them for about 10 years. Shipping can be expensive but everything comes pretty quick.
Some parts are cheap but they're also inexpensive.
Yeah, I try to bundle things up to save on shipping. On the other hand, by the time I need anything, I probably also need wiper blades, and the price difference on just one wiper blade usually covers the cost of shipping.
Newegg has a good website, but their customer service and return policy is not up to par with other retailers and I have started buying from other vendors if the price is remotely close for this reason.
My favorite parts site is PartsGeek. Pretty easy to find what I want and every product has a picture so I can make sure it matches what I need. Never had a bad experience with them.
Advance and I believe Autozone also let you place orders for in-store pickup. At one point, Advance was putting a coupon code right at the top of the homepage that would save you 20% off your order if you did that.
And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades.
Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie.
Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down.
Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer.