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.
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."
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!
Mouser customer service (at least 5 years ago) as a big purchaser (University) was excellent. They would do things like screw up an order and then send the replacement free of charge, even for $300 parts. But then the uni order book was probably hundreds of thousands if not millions a year, so it's nothing on their margins.
Grainger has a local rep and that makes a big difference for us. We are always biased towards local support, even when there is a reasonable price differential. It can save your bacon if you have any questions/problems before or after the sale.
For a while, it seemed like DigiKey was doing some very shady crap with pricing. There were a couple times where I noticed that DigiKey was charging me MORE on certain components upon logging in. I dropped DigiKey like a hot potato for that and was quite vocal about it to the account manager as to why they were not going to get $250K+ of annual orders from us anymore. Mouser got all the business.
Sad to hear that Mouser is completely screwing up shipping--looks like it's time to go back to ordering from DigiKey and see if they've quit playing stupid games.
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.
Yes, holy shit. Empty IC shells are super common in counterfeits. If they aren't counterfeit then QC is a nightmare, if you need consistency and spot-on values, they're dire.
> 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.
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.
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.
And back in the peak covid days they asked for donations to keep them alive and operational. They wanted the community to support them based on goodwill and now they seem happy to burn that goodwill to the ground.
Do you have a source for this? I am on their mailing list and order fairly often. I don't remember any requests for donations or any point where they were about to go out of business during covid.
A $4BN/year revenue corporation, the seventh largest electronics distributor in the world according to Wikipedia, asking for donations...wonders never cease.
....they're owned by Berkshire Hathaway. So, basically people were 'donating' to Warren Buffet. Nice.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big problem with Mouser is that you can't sort by quantity in stock. That's a very useful cue, one that DigiKey has always supported, and it has absolutely resulted in sales going to DigiKey over Mouser when in the planning stages of a new project.
I will heavily second this opinion. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I do prototype some electronics that eventually become products. One of the most important factors to me when selecting an individual component is that it will be available in volume in 6 months time and I don't know of a better way to estimate that than to look at the current quantity on hand. If I'm comparing two similar looking parts and one has 8000+ on hand and the other has 68, then I'm going for the 8000+ part.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a secret but few people appear to know this: Digi-Key has an order process with free shipping anywhere in the US. Fill out their order form[1] and mail it in with a check and, as per their "terms and conditions"[2], shipping is free.
Great deal if you're not in a hurry. I've read that this is intended for hobbyists and others that need small quantities; Digi-Key started out selling to hams and other low volume customers 50 years ago and, apparently they still value this customer base.
And Canada! I had no idea. Thanks for posting this. I usually don’t need things urgently, and shipping seems to add up really quickly with digikey. I could easily handle the added wait times.
The other day I was thinking of ordering an $18 microcontroller and the shipping was $8. It doesn’t seem worth it, and it’ll be a while before I can justify ordering $100 of parts to get free shipping.
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.
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.
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.
> then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.
Heh. I'm halfway there. I have parts in my bins that I bought 40 years ago. I even recently discovered I have an old 8085A microprocessor from the 80s left over from the first computer I built.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure, but looking them up, even those knives are noticeably more expensive than the rest of the individual items you'd find in the kitchen, just not by orders of magnitude.
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.
> What I find particularly amusing is when the cost value relationship invert, often after a stupidly high price point
See "audiophile" equipment.
It's true that you often can't reliably tell quality from the price tag. I remember in marketing classes learning about what companies do when their product doesn't provide value commensurate with the cost. One approach is to reduce the price. Another approach is to increase the price, make it look pretty, and sell it people who are really buying status. That it sucks won't hurt your sales as much as you'd think, because functionality isn't really the reason people buy it.
Yes, this is a huge area of value, which is why I was careful to write "functional value", because there are different kinds of value.
There are non-functional value which are tangibly important beyond pure function though. e.g As humans aesthetic is important to us, it affects our every day experience, and at a certain point that can even cross over into art. I will admit for some products I will make a choice based on form, and materials, but it's useful to recognise when you are doing this because even on a personal level it doesn't always make sense.
I particularly dislike "status" though, this is a hollow invention of consumerism that intentionally confuses quality and functional value with branding.
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.
> I have had the same problem with vacuum sealers.
A great example! My sealer is very cheap, and doesn't work reliably. But I use it almost entirely to package dehydrated food that I take backpacking, and getting a good one isn't worth it to me.
Instead, after I seal the food, I just leave everything out for a couple of days to find the ones that have leaked, and reseal them.
This is fine for my use case -- not ideal, but not a big problem. If I used the sealer more widely, it would absolutely be worth investing in a good one.
But then lets talk about toasters. I've yet to find one that is reasonably decent no matter what price point I've tried. So I just buy the cheapest one I can lay my hands on.
I really don't like the taste of carbonized bread, even if I do toast it's always been on the light side, golden brown at darkest. And an air fryer pretty much satisfies me for those needs - with the grille inside it gets good airflow around the back and makes decent toast at max heat. 2 mins at 350-400 will toast up a hamburger bun to the point of it starting to dry out and toast. That's fine for my toasting needs, if I was going to do bread that'd be a good start too.
Perhaps I'd have enjoyed toast more with better toasters growing up that didn't burn the bread (it's probably time to just junk my ancient toaster, I never use it). I like it in BLTs and such of course, and will sometimes toast up a bun for a burger/etc, but, like mayo, toast is one of those "as a main ingredient? no." things for me. It's an accent, not the main course.
Toast and popcorn also both have a sensory issue for me where they dry out my lips and it feels stingy and chapped and bad afterwards (even if I wash/chapstick/etc). Popcorn it's partially the salt, but it also occurs to some extent on homemade popcorn without/with less salt, and I also get it on BLTs/etc. Maybe the dryness of the bread is getting me in both cases. But I simply don't enjoy eating foods that trigger that chapped lipfeel.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
Many will be surprised to hear they're based out of a small town in northern Minnesota! That Midwest/Canadian accent you get from a cheery digikey customer service rep is unmistakable! I've had wonderful luck with calling Digikey.
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).
I don't think the margins are that crazy. Looking at a bog standard 0603 0.1uF MLCC, they're often $0.02ea on a full reel of 4000 or $0.03ea at a cut tape of 100. So, Mouser makes a whole extra dollar to cut and bag a tape for me. For an 0402, they charge $0.02ea @100 or $0.011ea @50K. So, they make an extra $0.90 by letting me order 100 instead of 50K. 0603 10K resistor: $0.008ea @100 instead of $0.004ea @1000 (5000 is a reel).
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.
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.
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.
I've had a reasonable experience with Reichelt but their shipping charges were high, and it still took longer than 48 hours to arrive (even if they dispatch on the same day)
For some reason DigiKey seem to have absolutely perfect timing with UPS, you can track it going state-to-state in the US, and then seamlessly to Germany and on to the connecting early morning flight to Finland (via Sweden).
Now I've said this I'm prepared to have my heart broken on my next order as it goes the long way round by ship or something ;)
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.
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.
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.
FYI if you're shipped something you didn't order, at least in the US, you never have to send it back. The rule exists to prevent scams related to shipping stuff people didn't order and counting on people's hesitancy / forgetfulness.
Reference 39 USC § 3009 [0] which specifies that outside of specific cases, shipping unordered merchandise is an “unfair method of competition and an unfair trade practice”, and further that unordered merchandise, whether or not it falls into the exceptions to the rule marking it an unfair trade practice, “may be treated as a gift by the recipient, who shall have the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation whatsoever to the sender.”
FWIW, I was doing a lot of electronics stuff last year in particular, and made dozens and dozens of parts orders with Mouser, Newark, Digikey and Jameco all throughout the year (in addition to stuff from Amazon, Sparkfun, Adafruit, etc). And I don't recall any specific degree of trouble with anybody in particular, including Mouser.
I did have one semi-annoying experience with one or the other of (Newark|Mouser), but I can't remember which one it was now, but it wasn't anything shipping related. It was a billing issue. I don't even remember all the details now, but I did have to spend quite a bit of time on the phone with customer service, but things did get squared away in the end. It was the kind of thing that I was fairly pissed about at the time, but in all honesty, looking at it from a "law of large numbers" perspective, you expect a few gaffes here and there when you are talking about companies that operate at that scale.
All of that said, after reading this, I might be a little more skittish about ordering from Mouser in the future. But at least so far, nothing has happened to me first-hand to put them on the "don't use" list.
EDIT: just for context, I ordered from Mouser 18 times last year, and have ordered from them twice so far this year.
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.
I bought two $40 components from Digi-Key last year and had them shipped to the EU for like $25, and the taxes were prepaid so UPS handed me the box and walked away.
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.
Even if it's cheap, never go with an untracked shipping option if you're expecting any kind of quality of service.
It sucks that mouser added it without really considering the implications. Any time I've used untracked shipping, the carrier loses it or gives 0 shits about how they handle it.
I've used Mouser every other month for the last couple years, using the $120+ CAD free shipping option, and I've always gotten it the next day with genuine, working parts.
I also order from LCSC, but from my 4 orders (~20 parts), I've had several fake parts with hard-to-debug issues that have wasted days if not weeks of dev time. I decided that my time was more valuable and I only order from Mouser now.
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.
only-for-big-companies distributors like Allied and Newark.
Huh? I'm strictly a hobbyist and I order from Newark all the time, and have never had any issues with them. If anything they are my first "go to" site to check for parts, or possibly it's a "1A / 1B" thing with them and Mouser. Nothing about my interactions with Newark have ever given me a "only for big companies" vibe, FWIW.
That would make sense. I know at least in my own mind, I see Arrow as one of the "mainly focused on big businesses" distributors. Then again, I've never actually tried ordering anything from them, so I could be wrong about that...
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.
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.
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).
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.
Hmm, I've had only one experience but it was positive. Last year I had a CrowdSupply order fulfilled via Mouser, it arrived reasonably fast and there was no hassle with customs (I'm in EU).
You can get a business account with Mouser/Digikey and then they just become another distributor. Your login gets discounted pricing (it's not much though) which is good for quick prototypes, and you can sometimes get an account manager to negotiate and troubleshoot directly.
I'm not sure how you qualify but you get to the point where you just RFQ to an email address and don't use the webpage. You don't need to be a $million+ purchasing outfit. They'll also schedule orders etc. at least I've seen Mouser do it.
Mouser is quite good on automated notifications - most importantly if anything in your order has changed (99% of the time it's a delivery date). Most of the other distributors do manual back orders in excel.
But their website is filled with annoying quirks. Here's such a basic use case:
1. Bring up a list of items from a search, say 100nF 0402 caps.
2. Sort by price low -> high (you'll see the icon, click that it'll work)
3. Now type in a quantity of say 100000 and find the best price on this part... yes the icon disappears when you fill in the quantity input field.
Download the CSV doesn't give price breaks.
Amusingly I just went to the digikey website which implements this functionality and.... something is broken. Can't even apply a quantity to a search. Also getting some strange loading page with a countdown clock... anti bot?
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...
I’m surprised they accidentally sent you your sales data. Honestly a 50% margin is nothing. We were connected with a FAE who started offering us direct sales in low volumes. Most of those parts had a 80-90% margin on digikey.
The problem is now there is invisible price colluding, you can upload the same BOM to digikey and mouser and the prices are within 5%. If you did that 5 years ago individual parts would have 20% swing. There isn’t any point shopping around any more, everyone is gouging. In our ERP we have prices going back 10 years, some parts have gone up staggering amounts.
Digikey were always the more expensive normally, but in the last year prices have gone up another 20% but they offer a discount to high volume customers. It’s funny the difference between “my price” and the normal list price has been as high as 75%.
For what it’s worth, the last RMA I did with Digikey didn’t go through. It was $5O in spacers that they miscounted, not a deal breaker but I had to put another order in for the missing spacers as it was easier than dealing with support. I didn’t realise ignoring RMAs was an option!
My biggest practical issue with Mouser at the moment is they removed the ability to sort by quality available. Do they even realise the biggest struggle at the moment finding available parts to complete a design?
I've thankfully not had a bad experience with Mouser, they're generally just fine for us. I do spend a bit more than OP though, so maybe we're in a different service bracket.
I used to prefer Mouser because I thought their site was slightly easier on the eyes, and I felt they were basically interchangeable with Digikey.
A few years ago, I needed about 60 of a very specific, shouldered washer that only Digikey had. It was Friday afternoon and I needed it in Boston ASAP.
I called their support for the first time, with low expectations.
Within a couple hours, they were prepared to put a man from their warehouse on a plane to personally fly these parts to the nearest airport. It wound up being too expensive for the project, but their facility leadership burned multiple hours trying to help solve this problem for me, and I was a very small customer at the time.
After that experience, Digikey gets the lion's share of my orders, which have grown considerably over the years, and they continue to have incredible support, every single time.
They are our first place supplier and we only use alternatives if there is a stock issue, or the price difference is massive.
I've had other vendors try to tell me that Digikey charges too much. But when I get those same vendors to price our BOMs, Digikey is less expensive, has more stock and is far more efficient (e.g., I don't have to call and wait days to place an order and I don't have to order a lifetime supply of everything).
I heard the CEO on a podcast (Adafruit or Pick Place Podcast?) maybe last year sometime, and he
came off as a genuine, nice human being.
Unless they somehow flip 180 degrees, Digikey has earned my business.
As stated near the beginning of the article, there aren't a lot of options. Designs add inertia to changing parts. If a part is available on Mouser, but not Digikey, what should the author do? These realtors cater to people and small business who can't commit to the order quantities needed to buy direct from manufacturer; they have leverage.
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.
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.
A few years ago, they switched tools partners away from Wiha (I think to Apex Group). Anyway, they ended up putting most of the Wiha tools on clearance and many of them were 80-90% off. To say I bought a LOT would be somewhat of an understatement. Sadly, the Wiha precision screwdriver large kits were sold out before I found out about it, but I got loads of other great Wiha tools at prices under the home center craptastic specials.
In the course of buying those, I also added several electronics components that I needed and they came in entirely as expected; zero drama.
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.
I think it's more about establishing business relationships with young EEs, entrepreneurs, etc who may rise to more senior positions.
Treat your small customers well and there's a decent chance they remember it when they're big. People remember good service, especially when they feel they weren't a "big fish" at the time they received that good service; it feels more genuine and consistent.
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.
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.
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.
How does a large business keep its (usually commission-oriented) sales organization from reverting to such completely pathological and short-sighted behavior for "small" customers?
I put "small" in quotes, because it's entirely likely that today's college student will be next year's engineer recommending parts for new designs.
Digi-Key never seemed to lose touch with their origin selling to radio hobbyists.
Usually by having two levels of support. If you’re a high-volume business, you get an account manager. If you’re low volume, you get the customer service line.
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.
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.
Wow, I haven't ordered from Mouser in years honestly, if I remember correctly, they had started using $60+ FedEx services for international shipping for a while.
Mostly for hobby use, it's a mix between Digi-Key and Newark for me. Newark's website really isn't on par, but pricing can make it worth ordering both places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> I will totally take low-priority shipping + cheap product occasionally.
did you not read the article? the problem was items just disappearing entirely and Mouser being dicks about refunding or reshipping things that got lost.
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.
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."
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.
