Best place for a hobbiest to buy small amounts of parts?

Amazon has a place to ask quesitons. Usually they're answered by other purchasers but some sellers (and even manufacturers) use it as a suport channel. I make two or three Amazon orders a month but haven't bought from eBay for five or six years (and never AliEx). n =======================================================================

On Amazon once an item has been ordered and shipped, but not yet delivered, hit the orders button to view your orders, then the "get help with order" button. In at least one of the choices in there you can contact the seller directly, but you will have to drill down a bit. Before shipment and after delivery the get help button isn't there, but I think you can use the request return button to contact the seller. I asked the seller of a little power supply I bought for a schematic, and they sent me a hand drawn sketch of the connections which just duplicated what was printed on the pcb anyway, sigh. But I at least was able to make contact :-).

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

MS doesn't have customers. They have hostages.

Hence the phrase "hostage to fortune"!

Mike.

With eBay you can have the same lame conversation with the seller

*before* the purchase. I don't consider getting questions answered by other buyers to be the proper way to get help. But then you can converse with other buyers who may not have all good to say about the item.

I will say I bought an Amazon branded shredder once which was the lowest price I could find for a unit of that capability with free shipping as well. The unit works great and I have no complaints which is rare with me.

I'm just not comfortable with buying from unknown quantities on Amazon. The few times I did it I wasn't happy and I'm not comfortable with the overall process. If I can't contact the seller, why should I buy anything from them?

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Rick C

Most of the new things of any big price I order from any place is something I already know about. I have orderd from ebay from China many items less than $ 25 and have been satified.

I have ordered some items off ebay that I look on Youtube to see if anyone has done a review on them. Good thing about ebay is you can look at a venders feedback and if they have done lots of business and have a rating of around 99 or beter then I feel good about them.

The way I see it, Amazon has ratings on the products but not on the outside venders.I ordered a book from one of the Amazon venders and did not get in about 3 weeks I tried 2 times to send them an email and did not get a response. Went to Amazons problem page and got credited in less than a week by them.

Depending on where you are sometimes they have free shipping. so far as i know they don't have minimum orders on most common parts, I think that I heard that digikey has free shipping if you are in USA and order by mail with cheque enclosed.

yeah... quality can be suspect too, but if y're prepare to be vigilant it can work.

you could look at "sparkfun" and "adafriut" and "pimoroni", but I'm not guaranteeing that they will be a good fit for you.

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This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

Yeah, but they lied to me about the price, "Buy now $3 shipping" specifically mentioning my location. I clicked the button and they charged me $30 for shipping.

Ironically I was buying a book about fraud by big business.

You don't have to agree to pay shipping on "faulty product" or "not as described". If the vendor can't make an acceptable offer in the time allotte aliexpress will take interest in the deal.

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This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

I still lost $120 US or so, even after they took interest.

Their argument was that it was a relatively large amount of money so I should lose half. If it was $5 or $10 they probably would have made the dishonest vendor pay 100%. So, caveat emptor.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

That's so BS, but it may be a cultural thing. A friend was in a taxi in Vietnam and a cyclist was hit. The two drivers started haggling and bystanders joined in to mediate. In the end it was decided that the cyclist should get $50. They said my friend should pay.

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Rick C

in

Sounds like a good scam. Perhaps the same "bystanders" do that every day...

Mike.

Try Jameco. They have a $20 minimum and sell a lot of "pulls" & odd stuff. Almost all are "through hole" devices, which can be handy.

Hul

Yes, typical Asian logic and I'm all too familiar with it- if the foreign devil wasn't there the taxi wouldn't have been carrying him, and thus the cyclist wouldn't have been hit.

You can see a smidgeon of that in some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric on this side of the pond.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

I got a email yesterday that Newark is doing $5 shipping on orders < $49 and free shipping on orders $49 and over. Cavaet is parts must be in a USA warehouse and shipping to a USA address.

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Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

From what my friend says, there is no small element of "the money comes from the one most able to pay". We get that here sometimes.

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Rick C

It's called "joint and several liability".