McMaster is definitely B2B oriented, but I think one of the reasons they're much loved is because they do a lot better job of dealing with individual consumers and small orders than a lot of B2B. There are sometimes annoying MOQ and sometimes high shipping fees (they do sell a lot of bulky/heavy/long items), but for the most part McMaster is still perfectly pleasant to deal with if you're buying a few bits and pieces for a household project. This really matters to me: doing some electrical projects, for example, there are things (like certain Legrand raceway) that are difficult to buy other than through electrical distributors that only want to deal on account and have a fifteen-step process to open one. McMaster sometimes has a good equivalent and they'll just ship me one!
It works pretty well for consumers, but McMaster is 100% aimed at MRO/B2B. The couple of complaint comments here in this thread make it pretty clear that people don't know that, and are blaming the website for business choices that have made McMaster as dominant as they are.
The UX practices used on McMaster are most suitable for B2B sites.
If you were trying to sell beauty products to consumers with a landing page like theirs it likely wouldn't perform that well. You could, however, draw inspiration from McMaster if your brand was selling the same beauty products wholesale to retailers.
If there were a beauty products web site that was organized that well, I'd switch to it immediately.
I've spent more than 3 hours linearly searching local CVS and Walgreens for basic stuff in the last week, so you've touched a nerve!
For any given product category, they now group some stuff by brand, then function, and other stuff by function, then brand.
A given brand or function can be split across a half dozen such hierarchies. Also, they then slice the inventory by attractiveness to shoplifters, doubling the already intractable search problem. Finally, the aisles for a given type of product are not necessarily contiguous.
Amazon actually has a landing page like the McMaster one for beauty products:
- It displays "featured categories" which can be expanded with "show more", but there is no "show all categories" button.
- The first screen is spam, the second screen is content. More spam (== algoritmic suggestions not based on intent) until roughly screen 10,
- At that point, there is a helpful "filter hair care by ethnicity" table. Since this is their second most important flow (apparently), let's focus on it.
Back on screen two, tapping "hair care" drills down to hair products, but there is no ethnicity filter. Why even have an ethnicity grouping (and waste scarce landing page space on it) if it is not discoverable by people shopping for hair care? Also, how do you filter skin care, cosmetics, etc by ethnicity?
What about other facets, such as medical issues (e.g., sensitive skin or allergic to fragrances)?
This might fit into edge cases. I've used McMaster-Carr as a consumer many times, and though I might get a discount if I bought a minimum quantity, I've been able to purchase what I needed in singles each time. I doubt if there's an e-commerce site out there that will let you purchase and ship 4 screws for less than what you would pay for 200. Even at brick and mortar hardware stores you're ripping yourself off by buying 50 screws instead of 200 (or 1000). I get that you don't need them all but the price per unit is still astronomical.
I bought a bunch of defective keg o-rings that waste CO2 and emptied a keg on to the floor over night (looking at you: More Beer!). For the price of one retail kit, I put together 10 rebuild kits worth of o-rings at McMaster. In that case (5 hours of researching which $0.05 o-ring to buy), the minimum quantity was more a feature than a bug.
I can understand the annoyance for non consumables, like screws.
A B2C store has flashy 'modern' design, sparse text, ads, a blog, logos, customer reviews, pay-later options, a wish list, discount codes, a newsletter sign-up, up-sells during checkout, etc.
Business consumers find that revolting, so it won't work for them.
Consumers on the other hand are easily tempted with 'discounts' and 'up-sells'.
