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

On Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 10:32:42 PM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@tubes.com wrot e:

Newark might work.

The Farnell/element 14 business model does seem happy to ship small quantit ies.

I've not bought stuff from Newark in the US, but the Australian branch seem ed happy to ship a small order. In the Netherlands they will only deal with businesses that are registered with the local chamber of commerce (Kamer v an Koophandel) which doesn't take much doing.

Newark does have pretty comprehensive catalog. The UK and Dutch organisatio ns were well aware that selling small quantities of stuff to be used in dev elopment could be a precursor to much larger production orders, and equally aware that most of the time it wasn't.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

a scritto:

digikey has a shipping cost estimator:

and if I remember correctly over 50 or 60$ the shipping is free.

Bye Jack

I have these links bookmarked

But I mostly use ebay and I always check the North America Only box, because I hate the Chinese "maybe/someday" shipping policy. It's not fair to the rest of the world. I've had stuff shipped from England with no problems.

Farnell/element14 require a tax registration here in India too. The difference here is that registration takes some doing and the concerned government agency demands reports of anything bought from outside the state AND quarterly reports of sales, stock, etc. Not worth the hassle for a hobbyist or a pro who's not engaged in direct trade.

Besides, their prices are unbelievable - anywhere from 5 to 50 times those at brick-and-mortar shops.

OP, you could try the Chinese version of eBay

If you're not in a hurry, most items are available with free shipping.

I have placed small (around $ 25) orders from Mouser and Digikey with no problem. I believe it is Digikey that only charges about $ 4 shipping for very small orders such as up to 8 oz shipped by the USPS.

If you do go to ebay for the parts, watch out for the China places. Some are good and some send junk parts.

I'll add Allied Electronics to the list

Also for odd parts and such try Electronic Gold Mine

Avnet was a good place to order from but they have really messed up their web site now, but they did have $9 fedex ground shipping.

I think Mouser still has $8 USPS shipping for small orders.

SparkFun has been mentioned in another post. Lots of great experminter boards and break out boards.

I would start with Digi-Key. IMHO they have the best search engine. Once I find the part(s) I plug them into other web sites to check availability, price and shipping cost. It also depends on where you live. I'm 4 hours driving distance from Mouser so normal UPS ground is "next day" for me.

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Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

I agree with you regarding EBay sellers, but...

You're wrong to discount Aliexpress. You get access to thousands of vendors (same as EBay) but none of them see your credit card, and until you approve of the product *as delivered*, they don't get your money either. If you receive nothing, or they ship the wrong thing, or even if it's demonstrably faulty, Ali mediates a resolution. The most common resolution is that you bin the item and get your money back.

For China Post shipping of small items (3 cigarette packet size) you get free shipping... my orders are often under $20... no Western supplier will do this for you.

This does not happen with Aliexpress.

Ouch. I haven't had a problem with a $100 order, only small ones.

For example, one vendor shipped a dangerous illegal "power saving" device (small capacitor and an LED) with a European socket, when I had ordered a 12V 3A power brick. Duh. It wasn't hard to convince Ali that it belonged in the bin, and I got my money back. A battery pack for a hand-held transceiver never arrived, though tracking said it was in a warehouse somewhere... after six weeks I got my money back. Another order for five magnets shipped one, so I got an 80% refund. Three problems in perhaps 60 orders...

So yeah, you can have problems... but none so far has cost me anything.

Yep, Amazon is good. They just don't have many of the things I want.

Clifford Heath.

I buy a lot of stuff from Digi-Key. They do have a minimum order, but it is not that bad. These days, if you buy a few chips as well as passives, you are pretty likely to go above their minimum (I think it is still $25). Their single-piece prices are not really steep.

Mouser is also pretty good.

Jon

No way! I've made $2000 orders with them on open account, and they still charge for shipping. Maybe they give you a break for a credit card order, but I doubt it. They even charge to ship backordered items, which Mouser will cover for free.

Jon

I buy stuff off Ebay and Aliexpress. Mostly stock items, so the long delay is not important. The shipping times vary a lot. Some things show up ins ide of a week, and other things take well over a month. It is worth checki ng both Ebay and Ally, Ally usually has the best price, but not always.

Dan

I dont buy anything from China. (or any place outside of North America). It takes too long to get the items, if the stuff is defective, I'm stuck with it, and I do not trust giving out my credit card info. I only buy from the US and Canada. When I am on ebay, the first thing I do is set their filter to US Only. Otherwise my page is flooded with China items. Sure, I could often save a dollar or two buying from China, but it's not worth the hassle.

The one and only time I bought an ebay item from outside the US, I bought something from the UK. The order got all screwed up, and it turned into a huge hassle. I lost money, got an item I did not really want, and the seller lost too. I made a point to never buy from outside North America again.

The only times I've had trouble with eBay orders is when I didn't follow up on keeping track of them. I find ebay sellers to be very responsive because they live and die by their rating. If all else fails (which it has sometimes) I dispute the charge on my credit card and have never failed to get the refund.

It's just not that big a deal normally. Having to wait over a month before filing for an "item not received" refund is a bit of a pain, but I only use this for things I don't need any time soon.

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Rick C

I don't believe that either Mouser or Digi-Key has a minimum order these days.

You're going to end up paying a few dollars for even the smallest shipment, but that's likely to be the case for any of the major distributors. From what I've seen, both Mouser and Digi-Key shipping fees are pretty much "market rate", and you can make your own choice about shipping format (trading off speed and cost).

If you want super-cheap shipping, "ePacket from China" seems to be the common choice... reportedly these are subsidized shipments, and they can take a long time to arrive (sent by container ship from China to the US and then dropped into the USPS system).

One big advantage to the big distributors such as Mouser and Digi-Key and Allied and Newark is that your chance of being sold counterfeit/recycled/relabeled parts is small. The risk is a good deal higher if you order from an eBay seller, from China, etc.

I don't see a minimum order. I added one surface mount resistor for $0.10 and I got as far as giving them a credit card number without any complaint. They have 1st class USPS shipping for $3.39 for orders up to

14 ounces.

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Rick C

I haven't shipped anything from the other online vendors, but Digikey and Mouser don't tack on overhead to the shipping charges (shipping

*and* handling). Other companies charge the shipping cost plus something for them to offset the cost of packing and handling the order.

"Long time" is usually 2 to 3 weeks in my experience. Sometimes it can be longer and sometimes they just disappear.

One part I was using went EOL and only one distributor had any inventory, which they had bought in anticipation of being able to charge big bucks. The "gray" market on Aliexpress is less than half the price, but I have no idea if these are real parts or counterfeits. The legit parts were made in an offshore fab and it is very likely they ran some extra which they sold on the gray market, but it's also possible some third tier fabs in china are making clones that won't work nearly as well. Even the back door parts made at the legit fab likely have not been fully qualified over temp and voltage. They would have little incentive to reject anything.

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Rick C

I could not disagree more with your assertions about AliExpress. If you receive goods which were either defective or not as represented you can get your money back but only if you ship the items back to the sender at your expense. On a recent $105 order with AliExpress, the shipping cost to return the item was $48. It took weeks of email exchanges with the sender before they were even willing to take back the item. My experience with Amazon is the exact opposite.

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OK, I buy a ton of stuff from Digi-Key, so I have not done a really small order in a long time. I guess their policies have changed, that's good for the experimenter.

Jon

DigiKey and (I think) Mouser got rid of their minimum order prices years ago.

But they kind of make up for it by charging more per piece as you order fewer pieces -- as an example, 0604 resistors are $0.10 in onsies, and about $0.12 for ten.

You might want to check Antique Radio Supply for the tube-specific stuff

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They'll have the tubes and sockets and transformers that DigiKey just doesn't carry. They may even have better deals on small quantities of the sorts of resistors and caps that show up in toob amplifiers than does DigiKey.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
http://www.wescottdesign.com 

I'm looking for work -- see my website!