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!
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.
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.
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".