Robot Website Speed

[lynca]

There was an interesting post about the VEX website on the VEXforum.

The online shopping experience is crucial during Build season.
Companies spend months of development and feedback to improve their process.

What would improve your robot part shopping experience?

[dk5sm5luigi]

One of the things we had been saying for years would be it would be great if it was easy to compare products from multiple companies. We finally gave up hoping someone would do it and did it ourselves. You can check it out at http://www.findrobotparts.com/

[Andrew Schreiber]

I've been saying it for a while, when I do any design I end up with an excel doc of my parts with the relevant SKU (or links) and quantities. If they could give us a template that we could fill in and upload during ordering it would cut down on mistakes during ordering.

[lynca]

Originally Posted by dk5sm5luigi

You can check it out at http://www.findrobotparts.com/

Nice work ! Your vendor list alone is quite useful. http://www.findrobotparts.com/vendors/

[mman1506]

Some way to save a cart and send it to someone via email so it appears in there cart. Digikey and McMaster have similar things in place. I'd bet a lot of teams (ours included) have a single purchaser who may not be involved in the design process.

[sanddrag]

I might be asking for the moon here, but it would be awesome if VEX and WCP had a common inventory integration, where for any one item, you could see if it's in stock at either place.

Oh, and VEX EDR stuff should be available all piece by piece. I hate having to buy a whole pack of something just to get more of the exact piece I want.

[Grant Cox]

Originally Posted by mman1506

Some way to save a cart and send it to someone via email so it appears in there cart. Digikey and McMaster have similar things in place. I'd bet a lot of teams (ours included) have a single purchaser who may not be involved in the design process.

The VEX site actually currently supports this, including comments on individual items!

Instead of adding an item to your cart, click "Add to Wishlist".



Then, on the Wishlist page, click "Share Wishlist" and enter the email address(es) that you would like to send it to.



In that email, there is a link to add the entire Wishlist to your cart.

[FarmerJohn]

Some things I'd like to see fixed from the common vendors:

AndyMark
1. Refine the search so that I don't get 30 products irrelevant to my search query.
2. Organize product descriptions better so that I don't have to go searching through a page of text to find the available ratios and configurations.

VEX
1. Functionality-wise, the site is great. Visually, though, it's hard to look at. Just my personal opinion, but it doesn't seem as clean as other sites. The bland forest green background is slightly off-putting as well.

West Coast Products
1. Provide more detail on your products, especially with how to use them. There are a lot of your products that look nice but I don't know what they do or how to use them.
2. I like your resources page but it took me a while to figure out that those were links to the resources since there are just three generic-looking sentences and it's not clear that the first words are links. From there it would be nice to be less restricted on how you use the resources, such as being able to use non-HTD VEX belts and gears that aren't 20dp.

[frcguy]

Originally Posted by dk5sm5luigi

One of the things we had been saying for years would be it would be great if it was easy to compare products from multiple companies. We finally gave up hoping someone would do it and did it ourselves. You can check it out at http://www.findrobotparts.com/

Awesome website! I believe you came to our pit at Champs promoting the site but I haven't really looked at it until now. This will be very helpful for design work this upcoming season. I especially like the community suggestion aspect.

[asid61]

I would like 1 more layer of drop down menus on the Vex website. I hate having to make the "Gears" page load when I really just want 3/8" hex bore gears.