Mouser vs. Digikey

Nice conspiracy. Testing....

Mouser: For 1 lb or less to California (95060) commercial: FedEx $7.04 UPS $7.04 USPS $4.95

Digikey: For 1 lb or less to California (95060) commerical: UPS $7.14 FedEx $7.14 USPS $2.80 (less than 8 oz via First Class) USPS $5.10 (over 8oz and via Priority Mail)

Looking at the Digikey chart, it appears that they will only ship USPS first class if it weighs less than 8 oz. Anything heavier would go via priority mail at a higher cost than Mouser. So, for anything weighing less than 8 oz, Digikey is certainly cheaper. Otherwise, they're about the same.

Mouser also plays games with the UPS shipping, so use the US Mail option when you can - I had them ship a package to work, which is a real workplace with staff sitting there to receive packages, and they charged me the higher "residential" rate. They also take it upon themselves to collect sales tax for states they don't operate in - for the (small) volume of business I do that basically means double-paying, since the paperwork to track it all is a time (thus money) sink far larger than just handing the state the "safe harbor amount" for online purchases. I don't recall what DigiKey does on that front as I haven't ordered from them in a while (Mouser has had stuff in stock I wanted that they didn't have for the past few orders.)

I certainly prefer Mouser's online catalog to Digi-Key's - Newark was in there for a while but has not been worth following up on for the past few orders either.

I'm surprised newark even has a website. that place is seriously backwards with their weird flip flop between the 45 names they use and inability to calculate shipping.

I might use them about once every 5 years, as a last choice.

Be thankful you're not outside USA and stuck with Newark as the ONLY house with stock of a part. We ordered two connectors ($7.52 each) and selected USPS Priority International (based on the recommendation of Newark in an email exchange as the cheapest option). Shipping of course won't come up on the Newark site, so we were somewhat pissed off to eventually get billed $38.05 for shipping. Newark haven't heard of USPS flat rate boxes.

Last few orders where I chose USPS priority, the orders were shipped UPS second day air for same price. I have no complaint with Mouser, excellent website, fast shipping, but my orders are usually $50-100 a time.

I'm shipping to MA, but it is a residential address. Zip is 02108 Shipping from Mouser is listed as $6.95, but when I process the order they add four cents for some odd reason.

On my last order of under 1lb , it didn't even come USPS as I requested, but came Fedex instead.

Sometime in the recent (?) past, Digikey switched to a "no minimum order" policy. This doesn't work if you don't provide an inexpensive way to ship small, low-cost items. This is what Digikey did.

Shipping has gotten really expensive. I can no longer "afford" to buy less than $50 to $100 of items at a time. Otherwise, the shipping represents too high a percentage of the price.

For my $.25 worth, both Digi-Key and Mouser are excellent for $50 and larger orders, or if you REALLY have to have the parts. (IOW, shipping expense isn't a factor). If you need a half dozen caps, Digi-Key will get them in your hands quicker and cheaper.

What I admire about both is No Minimum Order, No Handling Charge for small orders, and I've never been jerked around with the "Yes, we show it in stock, but we can't sell it to you" from either of them.

PlainBill

They also take it upon themselves to

I have given all the major distributors my state tax exemption number, only Allied has a problem, they always bill em for the tax, and I pay only for the parts plus shipping, with a note that my tax number is on file. They have a button on the order screen for "tax exempt" but it doesn't work. Of course, if you don't have an exemption #, then you have to pay taxes if they want to charge you. I hope you don't live in Indiana, where they think they have the right to charge me sales tax when I sell products to England, even though I have no presence in Indiana and only sell something to a state entity once every 10 years. They are completely nuts.

Gee, I really like Digi-Key's, and use it for all sorts of parts search and data sheet searching. I think their parametric search is the only one that really works well. But, every distributor has really good pricing on SOMETHING, and if you are ordering more than a few, it pays (literally!) to check them all. Allied and Newark are good for IR parts, Newark has good prices on small cabinet parts, Digi-Key is the only source for Xilinx as Avnet won't open an account for me so I have to prepay by credit card. Mouser has the best stock and prices on oddball capacitors, from SMT up to big snap-lock electrolytics.

Anyway, I have seen variation in prices up to almost 2:1 in the most extreme cases, between the major distributors. Other stuff, they will all list the same part at $2.01, exact to the penny! But, in many cases, one of them gives a better volume discount, so the single or 10-piece price is about the same, but the 100-piece is quite different.

Jon

Oh, yeah! One thing to know about Mouser, if they have to multiple-ship backordered items, they eat the cost of additional shipments. I think Newark may also do that, but check with them. I KNOW Digi-Key will charge you for every shipment, and it adds up.

Jon

I've never been jerked around with the "Yes, we show

Yeah, this is a game the non-authorized "distributors" ie. surplus chip merchants play. They have a network of items somebody has had access to at one time. You do a search on some really obscure part, and find a dozen different distributors all show 12 units in stock with the same date code. Well, those 12 parts were in one of their inventories 4 years ago, and they never took it off when the parts got sold. So, you call each one, and they tell you they will get back to you after checking the warehouse. Well, the warehouse is in China or something, so it takes a week to tell you that the parts don't exist. I've even had one outfit that said they had the parts, I gave them a credit card number, they charged it, and a week later when I called back to see when the parts would arrive, ONLY THEN did they tell me they couldn't obtain them.

So, I try to stay FAR away from the non-authorized dists. One time I got a tape of Analog Devices op-amps, and about 50% of them went up in smoke when powered on. I deduced these parts were salvaged off boards and re-taped, as the date codes were all over the place, spanning several months, at least. AD assured me that this could NEVER happen on their production lines. (My guess is this was about the time AD went from pin 1 dimples to the chamfered side on SO chips, and they had a little triangle on the pin 4 end, and somebody loaded their P&P backwards and scrapped the boards instead of reworking, after a batch failed tests. Then, somebody picked the reverse-biased parts off the boards and sold them as new.)

There are all sorts of horror stories with the grey-market dists.

Jon

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I can certainly understand that. Decades ago Newark was very nice to me. I gave them all the business i could afford at the time; i had to ride my bicycle there and back. All of the times i have dealt with them since has not been a problem. Just not very frequent.

?-)

I did recently get a 13 cent part from them, and some other stuff. they were pretty friendly when I phoned in the order.

The other thing that's obnoxious about all those distributors is most claim to carry all parts, but what's in stock is a different story.

It was never like that back in the printed catalogs day.

I'm not going to special orer 24,999 "spare" diodes, but thanks for listing a product you have no intention of actually stocking.