most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
I wish digikey was as good as McMaster. With digikey I often have to parse through a huge table with many pages to figure out what the difference is between a bunch of search results. On McMaster you can clearly see search results categorized in sub tables and densely arranged to make clear what the options are.
Are there any electronics websites that actually organized like McMaster?
Electronics are a different market than the one that McMaster serves. Frequently at Digikey, you need an exact part number from a specific manufacturer. Or, if you're buying parts at scale, you might be quite price-sensitive.
At McMaster, there would be one 555 timer, one utility op-amp that implements the LM741 spec, one low-noise op-amp, one 5V regulator, etc. They would all perform at or somewhat above average, but you wouldn't know precisely what you were getting.
There probably is room for a McMaster-like Digikey (or a simplified Digikey storefront for those who aren't picky about details), but it is unclear how large its market opportunity might be. It might look kinda like SparkFun.
A lot of the time, details in electronics really do matter. I think I've ordered almost every variation of the LM35 temperature sensor over my career. Sometimes you care more about price, sometimes you care more about accuracy. McMaster would probably only stock one of the grades, not sure which.
I was thinking the same. Digikey, Mouser, etc. are great, but their websites don’t give me the same confidence that McMaster does. There’s always a fear in the back of my mind when browsing these electronics sites, wondering if the part I’m looking for slipped through the cracks of my filters.
When filtering McMaster on the other hand, I have absolute confidence that I will find the part I’m looking for, assuming it is stocked. It’s really intuitive and robust. I’m sure much of this can be chalked up to the fact that McMaster has a much smaller and more specific catalog, but still.
EVERY online retailer should take notes on how McMaster is able to create psychological safety when browsing. It’s a real peace of mind, as strange as that may sound.
digikey, mouser, and arrow are the big ones that I'm aware of. All of their UX is really bad compared to McMaster though.
I love when a field value table has redundant values for 20mm, 2cm, 2.0cm, 20mm with a trailing space, etc. A lot of the value-add here from McMaster comes from pure data cleanup and categorization and cleaning up the categories and fields. That gets way harder to do on something the size of mouser or digikey though, they have a LOT of product types in the catalog, and tens of millions of products in their warehouses. Just cataloging it all is a massive amount of work.
I'd actually be curious what the data structure of the McMaster catalog is to support that. It's a cool website, it makes it seem so effortless to search for parts.
Digi-key definitely could sanitize/normalize their field values better. But I feel they are intentionally being conservative about touching datasheet values given by the vendors.
In practice (based on experience of selecting electronic components), I don't find this a big issue; after filtering on some other obvious, more binary fields, what left is often a small enough pool of values (like 16V, 16.0V, 12-20V, etc.) to be manually selected/checked.
https://tme.eu does a better job of this. If you enter "16V", it knows to also select the 12-20V ranges. It also works the other way around, you can enter "10-22u" in the parameteric search and it will find both 10uF and 22uF parts.
So annoying that digikey doesn't do this, you have to click each value/range separately.
I was also intimidated by the huge table and hundreds of columns the first time I use Digi-Key, but only later realized how handy it is to have all the parameters listed together. It makes comparison subtle difference of each parts so much easier.
The filter above will also tell you existing enum values within the current showing list, so you will instantly get an idea you are comparing.
Again, both have their advantages, but I recommend give it a try. Finding parts isn't any harder this way.
I use filters all of the time, but they frequently don't work (as mentioned but a sibling comment) sometimes the filter value don't allow a range so if you want anything between 10 and 100 you have to select all of the values between 10 and 100. Other times, the options aren't sorted so you have to select 10,000 uf and 10 mf and 0.01 F. Still other times numeric values are sorted alphabetically so you get 1 ohm, 1.1 kohm, 1.2 megaohm, 2 ohm, etc. So to select a range you need to clock through around the entire range of values looking for the order of magnitude you want.
also, the reason why they're all good is because they're not trying to sell you anything. they're for people who are at work, know what they need, know they have options on where to buy. therefore it's streamlined as much as possible to make life at work easy (which becomes their differentiator, along with easy billing terms and fast shipping), rather than market things to people who aren't even making decisions on what to buy...
"Functional websites" is not what we are discussing here, but amazing websites.
I've seen a carparts store online and it had something really similar, a few words like "oil filter 2017 ford mustang" and you were literally looking at the part in the dropdown list, exactly what you want.
What do most sites do wrong?
1) Not loading the search data into RAM on the server so it is really fast - most companies could do this with their level of stock and only need a couple of GB per web server
2) Requiring a postback to start filtering
3) Not allowing the ordering of search terms to be changed e.g. "Ford Mustang Oil Filter" should match the same as "Oil Filter Ford Mustang"
4) Not having images for all results
5) Not being able to zoom in on images to check something is what you think it is
6) Using a stock image which doesn't necessarily match the item
For companies whose primary interface with the public is searching for stuff, most e-commerce sites I use are shamefully bad at both performance and usability.
Wow, Jameco -- I haven't thought about them for a long time. When I was a kid I used to get those paper catalogs full of electronics parts and browse through them, wishing I had both
1) the money to order whatever I wanted from them
and 2) the knowledge to make cool things with all of those parts.
One of these days I'm going to find some time and do a few electronics projects. I've always been interested, and I did a fair amount of simple experimentation as a kid, but as an adult life has kept me busy with other pursuits.
RS, on the other hand, are so-so. The new JavaScript stuff looks shinier but still they don't surface out-of-stock status in the search which is infuriating when do many things are on long lead times.
most of these online catalog parts houses have excellently functional websites.
but like, even back in the day distribution warehouses had excellent terminal based inventory search and ordering interfaces over packet switched networks.
anyone remember datanet?