McMaster-Carr Browser Extension

I have been a fan of McMaster-Carr‘s large selection of products and straightforward website design for a long time. One of my favorite parts about their printed catalogs is how you can flip through pages at random and always seem to discover something new. Their website didn’t have a way to replicate this type of exploration so I sought out to do it myself and thought that a “random” button could replicate this experience in a fun way. As I started developing the extension for that task I sought input from online communities for feedback and suggestions and ended up developing a more fully featured web browser extension. Note: this was work was done as a fan-made project and was before I had any affiliation with McMaster-Carr.

Main Features:

  • Random-view a random set of products in the McMaster catalog with the click of a button (This references an array of URLs pulled from one of McMaster’s sitemap XML files with over 57,000 unique URLs for browsing their online catalog. While this doesn’t get you the resolution that individual part numbers would, it’s still a blast to see the vast scope of product offerings from McMaster this way.)
  • Search-search for a product or part number directly in the extension
  • CAD Download-enter a part number and automatically download the desired filetype, file names can be customized to be more useful than the default names
  • Make Label-enter a part number and automatically generate a label for that part that you can print, with label formats for laser/inkjet and thermal printers
  • Part Detail Table-copy an automatically formatted table with part detail information from a product page, for use with creating purchase orders and bill of material documents

The extension was made available for all chromium based browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. At its peak level of activity it had over 500 weekly active users. However, I had to shut down the development of this extension shortly after its creation once I began employment at McMaster-Carr.

To see some of the responses that people had about the exentsion as I was developing it you can see comments from a few of my more popular threads made on Reddit.

For more information on this project or if you would like to receive a copy of the files for personal use of the extension feel free to reach out.