Looking for mailorder company to order small amount of parts

Digikey has revised their ordering policies. While they have discounts on quantity orders of any one component (sometimes quite steep -- i.e. one

0603 resistor costs $0.10 but 100 costs $0.60), they have no minimum order, and if you have the stuff shipped parcel post then shipping can be less than $3 and it usually only takes a few days.

I think Mouser has done the same, but I mostly order from DigiKey.

And they (DigiKey and Mouser) have HUGE selections. I think Internet ordering and the available selection is the biggest thing that has killed the storefront places -- the storefronts never seemed to have exactly what you wanted, if you schedule your buying right it's not all that slower to order ahead, and the postage is about what it costs to drive downtown.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Reply to
Tim Wescott
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Back when I was young, I lived in a big city where there were stores that sold electronic parts. Whether I needed a 50 cent capacitor or a $2 box of resistirs, I just went and bought them.

With the exception of the "overpriced" Radio Shack stores (which have become very lacking in many parts), there are no stores to buy parts anymore. From what I have heard, even the big cities lack these stores anymore. And I now live in a rural area. There is NO place to buy electronic parts around here. Even the old TV-Radio repair store went out of business several years ago, and he used to sell me a capacitor or whatever I needed while he was still in buisiness.

I'm not in the electronic business. I'm just handy with repairing some electronic items, and occasionally I am somewhat of a hobbiest.

But it seems that most of the mail order electronic parts companies have a minimum of at least $50, or if they do not have that minimum, they will charge an outrageous shipping fee, (like $10 for a one dollar capacitor). At those rates, it's just nopt practical or even possible to fix stuff. I just threw a farily decent flat screen computer monitir in the junk pile in my garage, because it has a bulged PS capacitor. Getting this cap. would have cost me close to $15, and there is no guarantee that is the reason the monitor quit working. IN the old days, I would have paid $2 for the cap, replaced it, and if that did not work, then I would have either done further testing, or junked it, and would only be out $2.

But for this monitor, risking spending $15 did not seem practical, when I found (and bought) an identical monitor on Ebay for $30 (shipping included). At least that was a sure bet that it would work, since the seller had a guarantee.

Anyhow, does anyone of here know of any mail order company that will sell small orders, without any minimum order size, and charges ACTUAL (or at least FAIR) shipping fees? I have my doubts that any place like that exists, but I thought I'd ask!

Thanks

Reply to
electron206

Hi, I have asked the similar question several days ago at this topic. Accor ding to the forum user's referral. I have ordered a small order of electron ic parts from

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and received them today. After te sting them, all the components are good. May be you can have a check and or der a small order. thank you

Reply to
Skelton John

If you're in the US or Canada, there is a little gem buried in Digi-Key's terms and conditions. From

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:

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II. Conditions of Order 
  6.  Shipping Charges 
    [...] When a check or money order accompanies your order, Digi-Key 
    pays all shipping and insurance (our choice for method of shipping) 
    to all addresses in the U.S. and Canada.
Reply to
mroberds

Digikey has no minimum order, and I get my stuff shipped priority mail for about $8.

(You can read about that on their Ts&Cs page,

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.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

The last time I bought from newsmartcom.com they sent me counterfeit parts at a much higher cost than Digikey or Mouser. They also over-charged me for shipping, and sold my email address to more spammers. To top it all off, the worthless parts took over 6 weeks to arrive in my mail!

Reply to
JW

How... why...

Thanks!

(but... why?)

No similar offer for online orders by credit card?

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

Cash is nice. My standard billing terms offer a 2% discount for payment within 10 days.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

The way I read it, for some reason they don't know ahead of time the shipping cost, so they've decided to waive it when someone is ordering by mail (note the payment by check or money order). They've decided it's not worth the trouble of charging too much and then having to pay the overcharge back, so thus it's cheaper for them to just pay the shipping.

With the internet, it's all figured out before you pay up, but I know there was a period when some companies didn't seem to want to be paid by check or money order. They'd have all kinds of calculations to figure out what had to be paid, and basically it was easier if one was paying by credit card. Certainly with one company, they said they'd accept cash or check, but if you read through the instructions, there was no way of doing so.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

I've mentioned this a few different times lately. I hope they don't get inundated with $3 orders and decide to stop doing it. :)

I suspect it's some combination of the following:

Digi-Key started out selling stuff to hobbyists in the 1970s. Back then, it wasn't as common for people to have credit cards. Also, reducing the process to "you mail order and payment, they ship parts" may have been cheaper for them than "you mail order, they write or call with the shipping cost, you send payment, they ship parts".

Maybe they lose money on these small orders, but are taking a gamble on future business. Sometimes the kid that is ordering $5 worth of parts today is the engineer that will be designing the $20 microprocessors and $100 FPGAs into products 10 years from now.

Credit cards charge a few percent handling fee, paid by the merchant. Digi-Key sets their pricing so they can eat that fee once the order is over some minimum amount, but for really small orders, they may not want to.

Not as far as I can tell.

Matt Roberds

Reply to
mroberds
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credit-card processing is expensive and unreliable,

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umop apisdn
Reply to
Jasen Betts

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