Somehow, they have only gotten better over the years. Clean, simple layout. Clear concise descriptions and photos, color coded for pricing options. Search works INSTANTLY perfect every time. literally type in 99 camry rear brake shoes BOOM you’re on the listing. That’s big in today’s world where search is complete shit.
Every time I visit their site I’m so happy it works. Then I’m angry how the rest of the internet has been enshittified to hell.
Keep it up Rockauto!!
*Runner up: craigslist. site works perfect, no reason to change.
As a longtime McMaster user, our work recently tried to get us to switch to Fastenal and/or Grainger as preferred suppliers because of some bullshit procurement dick-waving (they wouldn’t offer us a blanket 1% discount like the other guys, or something)
It’s honestly astounding how bad their websites are, compared to just about anything else, even if you have the manufacturer’s exact part number.
But yeah, McMaster is awesome,and there was enough hell raised that they were back on as a preferred supplier within a few months. Like, what even is a 1% discount when it means your engineers and maintenance guys are spending untold hours fighting a shitty website to find that one specific component that McMaster serves you up in 4 clicks?
inb4 coolstorybro
Best part is most of their stuff has cad files on their website. Working at a company where everything needed a drawing, being able to email the cad team like “hey, I need to swap part 15 on fixture 12345678 for this other part. Drawing for new part is attached” was a god send as I would get the drawing updated and sent back in like 10 minutes.
Also 1% discount means nothing when grainger is anywhere from 10% to 2000% more. My company did one worse and made a deal with a 3rd party who mainly purchased from grainger. So what we were supposed to do was go to grainger.com find what we need, copy part number, go to third party site, fill out a form including part number, wait 48 hours, get a quote from third party, go onto another site to request purchase, wait for boss approval, depending on cost wait for their boss’s approval, finally click purchase button, wait for shipping, receive part directly from grainger in grainger box. It lasted about 6 months before it was reversed.
With every discount, asking the question “Is it overpriced so it can offer discounts?” is a justified question.
There’s mass-volume incentive where discounts can make sense, but a provider could also use those gains to make smaller shipments viable to smaller buyers or individuals or just remain viable and efficient without managing any such concepts.
We used to buy plastic 5 gallon buckets. The bucket was 2.14 and the lid was 1.30 each. When they went to this system we could only buy in counts of 10(about 6 month supply, not really a big deal but annoying) and a count of 10 was 83.74, old system was 33.40 for a 10 pack. No one really cared as 50 dollars to a company making 30+ billion a year was nothing but…
Also so much time wasted jumping between the various systems which costed way more than 50 dollars.