To anybody that doesn't know what you're talking about:

http://www.mcmaster.com/

It's a hardware store that sells pretty much every single part you could imagine or need.

I've never found Amazon's site particularly well done, but they could definitely learn a thing or seven from that site.

Amazon is not about getting you to fill your purchase order with the parts list of your latest project. It's about trapping you and selling you things you didn't know you wanted.

What would you want Amazon to learn from them?

Indeed. One nice thing though is that they honor Amazon Prime free two-day shipping.

While McMaster shipping certainly isn't free, it's always overnight, and often less than 100% of cost, so if Amazon is actually 2x price, McMaster still makes sense.

Side note: McMaster has, hands down, the best/most useable site I've ever used. The flow always gets me quickly to exactly what I want, even if I don't know what that is going in.

I'll second that, McMaster's site is a work of art, especially if need something and you don't know the industry name/term for something.

I know this is the third "me too comment" for this, but you cannot overstate how awesome McMaster Carr is for this sort of thing - they have everything. Massive amounts of information on the site, super fast shipping, reasonable prices. If you build stuff in your spare time and haven't tried McMaster-Carr, you're missing out.

That's a good point. It's been many years since I ordered from McMaster and I didn't remember shipping always being overnight.

I am taking notes on their website. Now that is functional design, stripped down to the core.