Yeah, the inflation of price is really noticeable these days. I used to buy things like screws on Amazon, but vendors are starting to charge prices like $13 for an assortment of 200 of the shittiest made-in-china-out-of-string screws and it's just so ridiculous. McMaster is cheaper and the quality of the product is so much higher. And that's crazy because McMaster is not trying to compete on price. (Also have you guys ever used McMaster's website? If those software engineers worked on Amazon's website, Amazon would have taken over the world in its entirety ten years ago.)

I'm worried about Amazon over the next five years. Premium prices for counterfeit or subpar goods, and the data says Amazon is making more on sellers fees than AWS now, so it's going to be difficult for them to meaningfully fix it. Too many meetings like "we'll be ruined if we stop taking money from counterfeiters".

I just spent a few minutes browsing around the McMaster site. Never used it before as I'm not into that sort of thing.

It's really fast! Doing some digging, it appears they are using a flavor of HTML over the wire, ala Rails Turbo/Laravel Livewire/Phoenix Liveview. Maybe Blazor? I'm not sure of the file extensions for C#, so maybe they can use the aspx extension?

Cool to see some folks still actively working towards making fast ecommerce sites!

> Also have you guys ever used McMaster's website?

McMasters website is the best kept secret in the ecommerce world. I always find what I need via search and the drill down options are always relevant. Plus they have an amazing variety of things making them a first stop when I'm fabricating something.

I'm so impressed every time I use their search. It understands my query and then checks all the checkboxes on the side that apply. So you can refine by checking or unchecking them. It's absolutely flawless.

The checkout experience is also wonderful (they remember your login cookie / session forever, and the process itself is more seamless than 1-Click), the order confirmation and shipping emails are informative and visually pleasing, and when the order arrives each item is annotated with the order line number and your internal identification code.

I also love their no-branding and black-and-white drawings aesthetic. It's like they're saying "we'll find you the best brand, just pick what you actually need".

They're doing amazing. I feel like a dope when I pay twice as much as Aliexpress or whatever, but I feel even better when some screw doesn't fail a year down the road and kill me.

When buying ebooks, I find one can get drm free ones in epub/pdf with watermarking from the publishers often enough and not locked into kindle. the prices are sometimes higher/lower/same but the product is better.