[HN Gopher] Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics
___________________________________________________________________
Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics
Author : zdw
Score : 268 points
Date : 2023-05-10 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lcamtuf.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lcamtuf.substack.com)
| gen3 wrote:
| I also attempted to cheap out and choose the "UPS Mail
| Innovations" option in the past year. I'm not sure if it is still
| the case, but at that time you needed to open a dropdown to
| select the option (feels they tried to hide it). I waited the two
| week delivery estimate, then called support.
|
| After a quick talk it seems that they have a problem where things
| shipped via "Mail Innovations" get stuck in a bin somewhere and
| get lost regularly. The support agent re-ordered all my stuff and
| shipped it overnight (all for free), and I learned not to choose
| the cheapest option.
|
| Months later the first package arrived. I've haven't spent more
| then $200 on Mouser over the past 6 years, so it isn't a "I'm a
| big account" type of deal...
|
| OP should have just called if they didn't. I don't think the call
| was more then 5-10 minutes and it looks like it would have saved
| a ton of pain
| WalterBright wrote:
| When the cable guy came to add another outlet to my previous
| house, I watched what he did and chatted a bit about his tools.
| He was using Digikey tools. I then ordered identical tools.
|
| For my later house, I installed all the cables and outlets
| myself, with the Digikey tools. All I can say is two thumbs up
| for them. Quick and easy, and not a single bad connection.
|
| I did this because of my troubles soldering, which all went away
| when I tried using a professional soldering iron. Ever since, I
| look at what the pros use and buy those tools.
| ajb wrote:
| This. It's even true of cleaning tools - get a mop from a
| consumer store and it's made of thin plastic and will break in
| a year or so. Get a professional one from a cleaning supplier
| and it will be indestructible - even though it's made by the
| same company.
| paulmd wrote:
| If you have the money, and you're going to use the tools
| regularly, it's often worth the 'buy once, cry once' premium.
|
| One of my cats passed away last year, and before I realized he
| was having kidney problems he'd taken to dusting a closet in a
| spare room. I tried and tried with my old carpet cleaner (10y+
| old upright thing) and just could not make progress even with
| nature's miracle enzymatic shampoo/etc. I recently got a puppy
| and decided to just bite the bullet and buy a commercial Big
| Green and it's been amazing. The day I got it, I did a rush job
| cleaning it for maybe a half hour between a couple meetings,
| and I got a ton of _glitter_ and other stuff out of the carpet
| that 'd survived through at least 2 meticulous passes with the
| old carpet cleaner. It'd been a girl's room before I got the
| house, I think, I found other stuff that fell into the vent in
| there. And after a pass or two with the new cleaner, I got a
| couple of those older stank spots out, no problem. Just an
| obviously better job cleaning.
|
| Anyway point being... the "buy the harbor freight one and then
| replace it if you use it enough to break it" is fine as far as
| it goes, but yeah, I'm increasingly this way too, I like having
| professional stuff that makes the job easier instead of adding
| additional problems. Some stuff the cheap version just is not
| good at all, or works OK for a little bit and then craps out.
|
| I have had the same problem with vacuum sealers. After a while
| the vac-u-saver systems just don't pull a good vacuum or don't
| make good seals. Eventually I start getting bags that let loose
| in the freezer/etc and get air into the bag. I've cleaned the
| heat bar carefully, replaced seals, etc, and the consumer vac-
| u-saver systems just don't work all that well after 6 months or
| so of usage. Kinda bizarre and I know it seems to work fine for
| other people (although perhaps they are more accepting of bags
| letting go in the freezer/etc) but I can't figure it out. It's
| unfortunately a lot of counter space but I'm thinking seriously
| about getting a chamber vacuum sealer for the same reason.
| Maybe if I upgrade my oven to a convection oven and then get
| rid of the air fryer I'll use the recovered counter space for
| that.
|
| It's hard to put a price on frustration and wasted time. Living
| alone/with ADHD I "don't have many spoons", and when I'm ready
| to do a project I wanna get it done, not fight crappy tools.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem now is the harbor freight ones are _too good_ and
| basically will never break; so if you don 't know what you're
| missing, you never find out.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Is that a bug or a feature?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I also watched an electrician do some wiring. He used a
| Milwaukee right angle drill to thread the wire through the
| studs. I bought one, and used it to do the low voltage wiring
| in my house.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Ever since, I look at what the pros use and buy those tools.
|
| One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was to
| identify the core pieces of equipment that really impact the
| quality/efficiency of your work and go as high-end as you can
| afford on those. Then go as cheap as you can tolerate for
| everything else.
| crooked-v wrote:
| See also: Professional chefs with extremely expensive
| personal knife sets alongside basically disposable $8 tongs
| and $20 pans.
| munificent wrote:
| There are a also a _lot_ of professional chefs rocking
| Victorinox Fibroxes which are quite cheap.
|
| People like to fetishize knives, but for almost all uses,
| they really are pretty pedestrian and utilitarian. You
| don't need some $1,000 Japanese santoku forged from a
| meteorite to chop a bunch of veg well. You just need a
| comfortable grip and a little practice putting a good edge
| on the blade.
|
| That being said, if nice knives bring you joy, then go for
| it. I have a couple of cooking knives that I like a lot.
| tomxor wrote:
| This is pretty good advice in general. The cost value curve
| of different things is different, and as you suggest, for
| the majority of things the functional value cut off is at
| quite a low cost point.
|
| What I find particularly amusing is when the cost value
| relationship invert, often after a stupidly high price
| point, especially when they introduce complexity.
| FpUser wrote:
| On one particular item - high power, high voltage small form
| factor DC-DC converter (that was few years ago) the price was
| around $300 on Mouser / Digikey vs $25 from Aliexpress. I needed
| 125 of those. Make a wild guess where did I buy from. And no, I
| did not get scammed. The converters are still merrily chugging
| along.
| momirlan wrote:
| (deleting Mouser from supplier list)
| purpleidea wrote:
| I've had crazy bad problems dealing with them. I ordered a part
| ($20 ish + shipping) and long story short, their fraud system
| went crazy and decided it was a scam order or something and
| cancelled the order. No email notification, nothing. I only found
| out after calling and calling and eventual some higher up
| explained why the order was cancelled. I was waiting two weeks
| and it wasn't even processed!
|
| This happened a second time with the same item, and then
| eventually they _finally_ shipped it on try #3. Go with someone
| else until they prioritize customer service.
| obscurette wrote:
| Experience from irregular customer (hobby and education) is that
| Mouser has not been so bad here in Europe. At least not yet.
| Haven't used Digikey much because it meant dealing with customs.
| Haven't checked lately if this has been changed. I've worked
| professionally with Arrow and it has been nightmare. China just
| isn't worth of effort - dubious quality with long shipping times.
| But probably most of the time I've used Farnell
| (https://www.farnell.com/) and it has been good enough for me.
| kosma wrote:
| Digikey also ships DDP, they do the customs for you.
| markrages wrote:
| As of my order last week, Mouser no longer offers economy
| shipping.
|
| Most of my orders from Mouser are things that are out-of-stock at
| Digi-Key. Maybe this is how they lose and join the also-ran,
| only-for-big-companies distributors like Allied and Newark.
| lnsru wrote:
| Mouser is another middle man, I keep trying buying from
| manufacturers directly. While some don't accept small quantities
| and others refer to their preferred retailers it's worth it. The
| big distributors are expensive. There is no big deal saving 1/4
| not buying from Mouser. As a distributor Mouser's fine, all of my
| orders arrived as expected. On other hand shit happens from
| statistical view alone when Mouser processes millions orders.
| Maybe sometimes an application engineer would be helpful, but
| support forums work out well (for me).
| JohnFen wrote:
| I generally prefer eliminating middlemen as well, but a good
| middleman does actually bring additional value in many
| situations.
|
| For instance, if I'm doing a project and need to order a bunch
| of different items for it, the convenience of doing it all in
| one place, with a company that will take care of me if/when
| something goes wrong with the order, can be well worth paying
| their markup.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Wow I am going through the same thing as the author right now. I
| recently placed an order with Mouser doing side by side
| comparison shopping with Digi-Key. The last time I used Mouser
| was 12 years ago in my college days. I thought hey they were good
| back then let me just compare the prices and Mouser came ahead
| this time due to the shipping cost. I am just ordering
| replacement capacitors for an old PC motherboard that probably
| has just a few more years of intermittent use out of it so my
| highest priority was cost. Ok they delivered a little slow but
| thats fine, this is not a serious project. Now I am sitting 3+
| weeks after ordering it and no indication if my package will ever
| arrive. The difference between this and Digikey was only 2-3
| dollars. Big mistake I made there. Its disappointing to see given
| I had fond memories of Mouser 12 years ago.
| Osiris wrote:
| 3 weeks? You would have gotten them faster directly from China
| and probably for a lot cheaper.
|
| The only reason for me to order from a US based company is
| faster shipping.
| tomatocracy wrote:
| Depending what you're ordering, in my experience Chinese
| sellers on AliExpress can have issues with counterfeits or
| with chips obviously removed from old boards being sold as
| "new". If I want to ensure genuine parts I'll go to Farnell,
| RS, Mouser, or DigiKey.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The only reason for me to order from a US based company is
| faster shipping.
|
| The primary reason I will always prefer to buy electronic
| parts from Digi-key (or similar) or directly from the
| manufacturer is that I'm substantially less likely to get
| counterfeits.
| konschubert wrote:
| What's the best place to order form china?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Honestly? Amazon.
| fest wrote:
| lcsc.com. But keep in mind that their prices for Western
| companies ICs is often worse than DigiKey/Mouser. The
| passives and connectors are a lot cheaper.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| I agree, the few times I've used LCSC it's been a
| perfectly fine experience.
|
| But LCSC parametric search is worse, and their product
| photos and data are often wrong. Mouser/etc have decent
| parametric search which, for me, makes them the best
| place to find parts. LCSC has so much garbage data, a bad
| UI, multiple languages, etc. When I need a cheap, china
| specific part I usually just have to resort to manually
| searching through the 1,000 or so parts by hand. About as
| much fun as one imagines. And then their website starts
| throttling you for opening too many PDFs. SMH.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > The only reason for me to order from a US based company is
| faster shipping.
|
| You don't see any service and support benefits? Component QA
| benefits?
|
| (Relevant to your comment and general experience, not so much
| the specific company in the post...)
| riceart wrote:
| > You don't see any service and support benefits?
|
| Read TFA?
| JohnFen wrote:
| TFA is talking about an issue with a specific company. It
| doesn't invalidate what themodelplumber is saying.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It's funny, when I was randomly picking a parts website in
| school (electrical engineering), Digikey gave me much better
| vibes. I mean look at their websites!
|
| One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware
| engineers in a room and telling them "we need to put our
| catalogue online!" The other looks like it has been infected by
| "UI" and "design" and other non-engineering concepts.
| fzliu wrote:
| Not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Mouser and Digi-
| Key are nearly identical in terms of UI. Search functionality
| on top followed by products & manufacturers and a list of
| products on the left.
|
| I'm with you on that second point though - both websites look
| like they were designed by hardware engineers rather than
| "omg-UI-UX-is-so-important" SWEs.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Can you offer some examples? I just went to each site, and
| compared their home page, product listing table, and product
| page. They are so comparable in design/UI (to the point that
| it feels like any time one makes any change, the other
| probably follows suit) that I have no idea which one you
| consider to be afflicted.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware
| engineers in a room and telling them "we need to put our
| catalogue online!" The other looks like it has been infected
| by "UI" and "design" and other non-engineering concepts._
|
| 1. I'm not sure why you think UI and design are not
| engineering concepts. If people can't figure out how to use
| your product then it's useless.
|
| 2. These sites are almost exactly the same
|
| https://www.mouser.com
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products
|
| The home pages have a search box & drop down menus at the
| top, product menu on the left, carousel in the middle. Then
| some featured products, some featured manufacturers and a
| footer.
|
| https://www.mouser.com/c/electromechanical/relays-
| contactors...
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/solid-state-
| relay...
|
| A product category has a bunch of combo boxes for filtering
| plus a table showing results. The results tables are almost
| exactly the same except Mouser freezes the left columns. Both
| have a lightbox popover for the product image.
|
| https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Omron-
| Electronics/G3VM-...
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-
| electri...
|
| Product pages both have photo, specs, number in stock and
| pricing. The only thing possibly offensive about Mouser's is
| that the sections on the pricing page are collapsed.
| tempestn wrote:
| They even both have a near identical locale selector, with
| two big flags, when you visit from a Canadian IP. Makes me
| think one... drew inspiration from the other.
| teraflop wrote:
| If nothing else, Mouser has one _enormous_ usability flaw
| (which has been an issue for years): you can 't sort by
| price.
|
| Or rather, they will let you sort by the "pricing" column,
| but the effect is to sort parts by their unit price _at
| whatever the minimum quantity for that part is_. But some
| parts are orderable in single quantities, and others only
| in large trays or reels.
|
| Even if you manually filter out those packaging types, it
| can often be the case that part A is cheaper than part B at
| qty 1, but significantly more expensive at (say) qty 20. So
| you can't actually do price comparisons without paging
| through the entire list, which may be many hundreds or
| thousands of pages depending on what you're searching for..
|
| Digikey does the much more sensible thing, which is to let
| you enter the quantity you actually want, and sort items by
| what their unit price would be _if you order that
| quantity_. Mouser has a similar box to enter the quantity,
| but it only affects the display of each row, and not the
| actual sort order.
| TylerE wrote:
| Sort of like how in the mechanical world you just order from
| McMaster-Carr.
| reaperman wrote:
| Yes, actually a lot like that, because in the mechanical
| world you'd order from _either_ McMaster-Carr or Grainger.
| They 're largely equivalent in broad strokes, no one would
| fault you for favoring one over the other.
|
| In 2015 that was the exact same situation for DigiKey and
| Mouser. Small differences, both have great selection, great
| service, competitive prices.
|
| This would be like either Grainger or McMaster-Carr just
| shitting the bed. It would be shocking to hear a consensus of
| serious mechanical engineers saying "When people order from
| Grainger, that's a huge red flag for me."
| exmadscientist wrote:
| It's also interesting because all four of these companies
| cater to professionals. And as a professional you _never_
| want to be talking to customer service, even if it costs
| _you_ extra.
|
| I don't think I know how to contact Mouser CS, because I've
| never had to. And I buy a lot of parts. Enough that we've
| spent more on overnight shipping this year alone than the
| article's entire spend. I'm guessing that's related!
|
| But I do know how to find Digi-Key's customer service, and
| I'm growing increasingly annoyed with them as a company.
| Not dropping them or anything rash. Just... annoyed. Their
| continued misadventures with their same-day shipping
| deadline have cost me a lot of money. So yay! Parties all
| around!
| op00to wrote:
| For all of these 4, your customer service is your sales
| rep.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| For most design MEs I think Grainger is actually a red
| flag, in the same way digikey is to mcmaster, grainger,
| MSC, etc. are to Mouser etc.
|
| It's of course different for ops, manufacturing and
| facility folks, thats mainly grainger, uline, MSC, etc.
|
| For design McMaster, Digikey and Misumi are thr core go-
| to's
|
| For ops and facility maintenance it's different
| vanchor3 wrote:
| I'll just add in that I've placed around 30 orders with Mouser
| over the past few years and have never really had any trouble.
|
| I only ever order UPS 2nd day, because FedEx loves to find
| excuses to not deliver packages and UPS Mail Innovations usually
| makes packages disappear, and I don't really see a good reason to
| save a few dollars for the package to take 5 times as long to
| arrive.
|
| The only time I had an issue was receiving the wrong color of LCD
| once. I can't really place too much fault on them, the
| manufacturers part number was very hard to read and differed by
| an easily mistakable letter. They gave me a $60 refund and I
| didn't even have to send it back.
| sschueller wrote:
| For small personal projects I have switched to LCSC in part
| because I can automate the BOM order when I generate the PCB
| gerbers all out of Kicad via gitlab pipeline. All I have to do is
| add the LCSC part numbers as an extra field in my Kicad
| schematic. If I order from JLCPCB I also get a shipping discount
| at LCSC.
|
| Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland)
| so unless my order is larger it's not worth it for small project
| that don't need any guarantee on where the part came from.
| tinfever wrote:
| How does that JLCPCB / LCSC shipping discount work? I know they
| used to do combined shipping but I think they dropped that
| option years ago.
| rts_cts wrote:
| I've been building some prototype boards for work with JLCPCB
| recently. There used to be an option to bundle parts from
| LCSC but that kind of went away. However, if you have a PCB
| order open you can get super cheap shipping if logged into
| the same account on LCSC.
|
| I've been using JLCPCB's Global Sourcing service a lot
| recently. I can get DigiKey/Mouser parts sent to JLCPCB's
| inventory for assembly. The shipping is a bit slow but it
| beats having to manually assemble a few components not
| available at JLCPCB.
| ssl232 wrote:
| Care to share your GitLab pipeline? Are you using KiCad 7's new
| CLI interface?
| sschueller wrote:
| I am using kicad 7 but with kibot. I will post the pipeline
| tomorrow here as another comment as I can't do it via mobile.
|
| Edit: I will probably do a complete write up on my blog as I
| changed a few things between 6 and 7. Should be posting it
| within a week at https://sschueller.github.io/
| JohnFen wrote:
| When you post it, also submit it as a story on HN.
| myself248 wrote:
| I'm baffled that Mouser and Digi-Key haven't put the same
| effort into a Kicad pluggin to replicate that capability.
| bombledmonk wrote:
| You mean like this? https://github.com/Digi-Key/KiCad-Push-
| to-DigiKey
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| I suspect that the KiCAD userbase is still considered "small
| potatoes" and not worthy of this kind of development effort.
|
| Which is a shame if true. KiCAD is a gem of open source and
| holds a lot of mindshare with nerds and hackers.
| sschueller wrote:
| Isn't Kicad the tool the CERN uses and also actively
| develops?
| cybrox wrote:
| It is. Research and hobby does generally create lower
| order numbers than industry, though. However, at least
| DigiKey offers an integration iirc.
| stephen_g wrote:
| CERN is big enough that they probably use a bunch of
| different EDA tools. But yes, they do have people
| contributing KiCad.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Digikey doesn't give a shit about interfacing with a hobbyist
| tool. There's no money in it. They'd much rather spend the
| resources on developing interfaces for their customers that
| spend 100-1000x more money with them.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Digikey has been pretty active on Twitter lately, targeting
| hobbyists. They're also a platinum level KiCAD sponsor. And
| they bought the kicad.org domain from a malware squatter
| and donated it to the KiCAD project.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It may not affect the economics of your situation, but if you
| do projects on a regular basis, this might help.
|
| When I order parts for a project, my baseline rule is "order 3:
| one to break, one to use, one to kick around in your parts
| drawer for next time". Then I go back through my order and
| increase quantities of parts I know that I'll be needing again
| for future projects until the order total is high enough to
| qualify for discounts on shipping.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| That's a good pro-tip, but the real pros order 10 of
| something they think will be useful in the future, and then
| let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they
| die.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| The margins are product only, excluding any cost for storing,
| packing, sending, printing invoices, collecting money, talking to
| customers, etc.?
|
| If those are all in small orders of a few $0.01 items, cost might
| exceed the the margin?
| nightfly wrote:
| "I had a bad experience with the cheap shipping, guess I should
| keep trying it until I hate the company *
| kelnos wrote:
| So when we choose the cheapest shipping option, we should
| expect shipments to just disappear, and customer support reps
| to lie or mislead us about what's going on, fail to refund or
| replace, and when they do refund, keep the shipping fees,
| despite not having actually shipped anything?
|
| The only difference with cheaper shipping is that it should
| take longer to arrive. That's not what happened here.
| Glant wrote:
| Alternatively, "Our customer constantly has issues with our
| service, let's ignore it until they are no longer a customer"
| cybrox wrote:
| Well, they won't complain anymore!
| rowanG077 wrote:
| This was not a bad experience, not even two or three. This was
| a string of pure incompetence.
| DivisionSol wrote:
| Seems the blog author was taking the "cheap" option by trading
| time-to-deliver for cost.
|
| I don't think anyone assumes when they take the cheap shipping
| option that they are eating a 10% chance the package never
| shows up. Nor mis-matched packages. Nor sudden calls from
| collections. Nor being re-labeled in the database as a
| 'distributor.'
|
| Author gave time for them to work out the bugs between each
| attempt, and, seems each attempt went worse.
|
| Classic post-2010s-era support quality.
| ilyt wrote:
| Sounds like they outsourced customer service
| zippergz wrote:
| Cheap shipping is supposed to mean "slow" and maybe "no
| tracking," not "50/50 chance of actually getting your items"
| and "we will send you to collections for the replacement order
| if the first one gets lost."
| gnicholas wrote:
| Seems like there shouldn't be a shipping option that, when
| used, results in the customer hating the company.
|
| The fact that it took this customer so long to decide he hated
| the company indicates that he is quite patient -- other
| customers might have changed their mind about Mouser sooner.
| nightfly wrote:
| I will totally take low-priority shipping + cheap product
| occasionally. Like when ordering from Aliexpress where I know
| I won't get the item for 4-8 weeks
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I happen to work for a company that ships things. Like every
| company, there are places where processes are less than ideal.
| We never treat customers like this.
|
| Our customer support people have access to know where any order
| is and if it has been split across multiple shipments. At the
| very least, we know if the box left the warehouse.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Good to know, thank you. I usually go with Digikey, but
| occasionally order from Mouser. I'll keep this in my mind for
| future ordering.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Digi-Key provides such a consistently stellar performance that
| I simply don't bother checking anywhere else first. Unless it's
| something I don't mind buying on Amazon.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I also always checked Digi-Key first and then Mouser second
| if Digi-Key is out of stock on something I need. (Unless it
| was a TI part; their direct online ordering process is quite
| nice). But going forward I'll reconsider Mouser.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree entirely. Digi-key is my first stop because my
| experience with them has always been great. Although not
| common, sometimes Digi-key doesn't stock the part I want and
| I need to look elsewhere. Mouser was always my second stop
| before, but they won't be now.
| alibarber wrote:
| I live in Finland and it is consistently both cheaper and
| faster to order from DigiKey in the States than anywhere else
| I've tried in Europe (>$50 for free shipping). If I can't get
| the part locally (and of course accept the markup for that)
| then I can have it in my hand in 48 hours from DigiKey. And
| yes they handle all the customs and tax and stuff for you at
| the checkout.
| calmoo wrote:
| Have you tried Farnell? https://fi.farnell.com/
| mailey wrote:
| You can also use one of these suppliers: https://www.tme.eu
| https://www.reichelt.com/
|
| although shipping can take from 2 to 7 days (despite the
| proximity)
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Can confirm TME can be pretty good. Their selection is
| limited, but cheap and swift shipping.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| This doesn't excuse awful customer support, but I wonder how the
| author is so sure that this is caused by Mouser warehouse black
| hole instead of UPS one. Maybe they handed over packages to the
| UPS but they vanished there before they were scanned.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I very often choose between the Digikey and Mouser. I guess I
| won't burn myself on Mouser again. Having these issues as a
| hobbyist is one thing, were deadlines don't really matter. But I
| won't gamble with it in my job.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I love how Digi-Key is this huge company and they're based in
| little tiny Thief River Falls, MN
| cozzyd wrote:
| Along with Arctic Cat, if I'm not mistaken
| jrmg wrote:
| Jameco is a smaller distributor, but they have great service.
|
| If you're in the Bay Area you can even go and pick up your order
| from their warehouse and avoid any shipping costs.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Oh, yes, Jameco is also a great company.
| satiric wrote:
| I was on an engineering team in college that built full-size
| racecars (the competition was called Formula SAE). Digikey
| offered us a 10-15% discount, depending on the parts we were
| buying, and Mouser offered a 3% discount (at that point, why even
| bother?). Digikey's discount was easier to use too. Occasionally
| Mouser had something that Digikey didn't but I tried to order
| from Digikey as much as possible.
| sbr464 wrote:
| Oh, the humanity! (Seinfeld voice)
| abvaw wrote:
| [flagged]
| Giorgi wrote:
| Wonder if they had management change recently? These kind of
| mishaps happen when CEO is replaced by the dumber one.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I got curious. I didn't find mention of a management change,
| but they did complete a pretty major expansion of their
| headquarters and global distribution center in 2020. That could
| have had an impact.
|
| https://www.insidelogistics.ca/dc-and-warehouse-operations/m...
| sixothree wrote:
| Honestly the author would be better off ordering from AliExpress.
| I pretty much use DigiKey exclusively. Zero plans to use Mouser,
| especially now.
| andromaton wrote:
| In college, I ordered a few dollars worth of chips from Digikey
| but I couldn't find datasheets. The Internet was not a thing yet.
| Without asking, they mailed me a 100 page photocopy. I'm still a
| customer. Never issues, which is more than I can say about lots
| of large companies. Digikey just works.
| ckemere wrote:
| I have had excellent experience with Digikey's customer service.
| They always answer the phone and resolve problems quickly. I've
| recently been using Mouser because their warehouse location means
| that the "standard" UPS option (@7.99) ships overnight to us in
| Houston. I greatly appreciate the fact that they autodetect the
| proximity and so actively block me from accidentally paying for
| upgraded shipping...
|
| I am curious about whether the author tried a voice call. All of
| the data suggests only electronic communication...
| cushychicken wrote:
| I had one similar experience as the author, called them after
| the parts didn't show up in two weeks, and had the order
| refunded and replacements overnight after about seven minutes
| of phone convo and zero wait time for a real human to pick up.
|
| Digikey's phone support is equally good for the one time
| they've borked an order in recent memory.
|
| Don't be afraid of the phone, people.
| floor_ wrote:
| [flagged]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| FYI HN is a big fan of https://octopart.com/ for shopping your
| parts list.
| ilyt wrote:
| My tactic with Mouser was just buying enough stuff at once to get
| free shipping (iirc >50EUR). Even got one in like 4 batches
| during pandemic which gotta gut into the profit marigins...
| oakwhiz wrote:
| Interesting. I've actually seen some increased delays from them
| as well, though I don't think I've encountered a situation that
| would require talking to them. I have had situations where I
| needed to reach out to Digikey to resolve issues and I would say
| my experiences with Digikey were good.
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| I just reached out to Mouser for a second time for an Economy
| Shipping order that never arrived. I picked the slowest option as
| I was also having a PCB fabricated for those parts.
|
| That PCB arrived a week ago and the tracking still shows nothing
| at all.
|
| This does not inspire confidence.
| analog31 wrote:
| It would seriously disappoint me if Mouser or Digi-Key went
| downhill. I settled on Mouser for my business years ago because
| they had more "consumer electronics" stuff, e.g., audio
| connectors and potentiometers. To the point where I designed my
| products around parts that they were the exclusive distributors
| for.
|
| So I'm hoping these are one-off issues and not trends. So far
| I've had no issues myself.
|
| A bigger problem has been the general scramble for available
| chips of some specialized types. I appreciate why the engineers
| prefer designing around generic parts when possible.
| MrFoof wrote:
| I'm still waiting after 7 weeks for a refund from Mouser. I ended
| up escalating to my business's credit card issuer.
|
| Ordered a $120 cable in which both vendors had recommended. It
| wasn't what was required, so sent it back as an RMA, in all the
| original packaging.
|
| Mouser refused to refund me, saying that there was a bag with my
| order number on it, and even though I sent back the original
| unopened product in its original packaging, that without the bag
| with my order number, no refund.
|
| So they sent it back to me. I FISHED THE STUPID BAG WITH THE
| ORDER NUMBER ON IT OUT OF THE TRASH, and re sent it back in for
| an RMA. 5 weeks later, still nothing.
|
| Ultimately it's going to be 3+ months to get the money back from
| my card issuer. Mouser will never get my business again.
| cool-RR wrote:
| [flagged]
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Definitely done recommending Mouser. I haven't ordered for a long
| time but any time people mentioned trying to find parts I'd find
| them there and send them the link or just tell them to search
| there for them. Not risking giving people bad recommendations.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| The high margin makes sense if their account is mostly ordering
| low-volume. The margins on cut-tape, for example, are nuts. As a
| distributor they order in bulk at low per-unit pricing, and then
| when hobbyists buy onsies twosies they can charge low-volume
| pricing for a huge markup.
|
| Doesn't mean they're making a lot of money on those types of
| orders.
|
| (That isn't an argument against the author's complaints, just
| providing hopefully interesting info).
|
| Off-topic: I clicked through to the author's Sir Box-a-Lot
| project (https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/sir-box-a-lot/) and
| immediately fell in love with the micro rocker switch they used
| for the power switch. A 7mmx3mm rocker power switch.
| https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/295/GW-1663576.pdf What an
| absolute beaut.
| erremerre wrote:
| Trying to buy from either Mouser or Digikey from Europe is very
| misleading. They have European shops in European domain. But when
| you are going to pay. You get smashed with a ridiculous delivery
| price and the uncertainty of how much customs will charge you...
|
| Wish we had a good alternative rather than having to get
| components in ebay/aliexpress.
| nebalee wrote:
| Maybe tme.eu?
| [deleted]
| garaetjjte wrote:
| When ordering from Mouser I didn't need to do anything with
| customs, and VAT is included during checkout. I suppose DigiKey
| works the same.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I've ordered from both to EU in the past year and haven't had
| issues like that.
| nottorp wrote:
| Farnell has warehouses in Europe and they say on every item
| where it will ship from.
|
| No idea what's really available though, I only buy vert rarely
| what some pros tell me to for work purposes.
| codetrotter wrote:
| How do people on HN feel about Arrow Electronics?
|
| https://www.arrow.com/
|
| I don't see any mention of them ITT yet.
|
| I've used them a bit in the past for a project I was involved
| with.
|
| They were not the cheapest but they seem pretty ok from my
| experience.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| I was initially (pre-covid) thrilled at how quickly they
| shipped and found their pricing reasonable. Orders came in the
| "you ordered 10 but our smallest box holds 10,000" style of
| packaging. Then, seemingly everything I wanted was out of stock
| and never seemed to come back. I get the sense that they know
| what they're doing, but aren't really serving the prototyping
| crowd.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| You can also look at Verical for reels of components as it's
| part of Arrow
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| My last experience with Arrow was such a gigantic clusterfuck,
| that it's hard to form a real opinion. I'm going to chalk it up
| to a big company making a statistical mistake that just
| happened to affect me.
|
| However, when my order is a customized First Article for
| verification testing, which by definition means I'm planning to
| buy tens of thousands of units later, you'd think they'd try
| harder.
| [deleted]
| joezydeco wrote:
| A few years back Arrow started a design/build consulting arm.
|
| They'd come in for lunch-and-learn sales sessions bearing
| sandwiches and a friendly smile while quietly learning who our
| clients are and, eventually, stealing design wins away from us.
|
| Fuck Arrow. Never going back.
| 55873445216111 wrote:
| Arrow is the largest electronic component distributor in the
| world. They cater mainly to mid/large companies though, not
| hobbiests/etailing.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| They had a free shipping promotion on (relatively) small
| orders a while ago, so I don't think they mind the attention.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| I've worked B2B with Arrow, and B2C. They're a big gorilla in
| the industry for B2B, but much less well known in the B2C
| world. (In this instance, for B2C I mean B2Hobbyists like
| Mouser and Digikey are). I wasn't terribly happy with them on
| B2B. They just weren't very attentive, and ended up costing our
| small business countless hours and money. In their defense they
| tended to always let us shoot up the chain and rectify things
| after the fact. But after the fact is quite painful for small
| businesses. On the plus side, they are a big gorilla, and there
| are advantages to that when you aren't well networked in the
| industry.
|
| B2C they're okayish. I prefer Mouser/Digikey/etc. But I've
| never had a bad experience with them, and sometimes they're
| cheaper, so I keep them in my rotation. For awhile they were
| making a hard push into B2C and offered free overnight
| shipping. God, that was amazing.
|
| tl;dr: They're okay, but not the best in any regard.
| binjooou wrote:
| These days I don't get to choose - I will order from whoever has
| the part in stock, price don't matter.
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