How to order from Digi-Key
a guide for extreme penny-pinchers who are not in a hurry
Buying a few LED or other electronic parts for experimentation can be very frustrating. The parts may have low prices, but mostly they are only accessible over the Internet, and shipping/handling charges can more than double the real cost. Ebay parts are often the cheapest, but the selection is limited and the quality often dubious...
DigiKey is a "real" electronics distributor, first quality products and an immense catalog, that offers a very special deal: if you send them a pre-paid order with a check, in the US and Canada you can get parts with no shipping/handling and no minimum. You can get a $1 part or a $5 Bridgelux LED, no extra charge!
If you only want one or two parts, just look them up online, print out the pdf form, fill it out by hand, send in the order with your check, and you are done... Someday your parts will come.
But if you get sucked into a list of say a dozen items, ordering from them gets pretty tricky. It is easy to go online, click on things, and build up a nice shopping-cart list. The tell you how many they have in stock. The list seems to stay around pretty well and you can print it out with a subtotal, just attach that to the order form.
But if you want to get any more computerized than that, things don't work out well. Setting up an online account with them is a hassle -- you must be a "company", and it will take them a few days to process. They send you occasional emails containing no useful information about your account. There is nowhere online to get a good summary printout of your account information. Your shopping cart does not connect at all to your account -- it seems to connect to hidden browser cookies instead.
There seems to be only one advantage to getting an account, if you intend to order by mail. They have a pretty good search function, with parameter options, that often finds way too many matches. You can sort the matches many ways. But not the way you most want: by price. Very strange and frustrating. But if you have an account you can login and then they do let you sort by price, though they hassle you each time.
There seems to be no version of the order form populated with your address etc data, and the PDF they provide does not seem to have fields that can be filled in. It is possible to import the PDF into Open Office and fill in some fields as an overlay. All very awkward and tedious.
They do offer economical USPS First Class for small shipments; much easier simpler quicker to buy online and pay by credit card. I would have been willing to pay a couple dollars for shipment of my $32 order. But their shipping estimator is stupid. You have to key in a zip code each time and it only produces a giant generic grid of possible ship costs, depending on weight -- without offering any information about the likely actual weight of your items.
It is not clear if they are making this so difficult on purpose or by accident.
If you have found a better way to do this, please share!
a guide for extreme penny-pinchers who are not in a hurry
Buying a few LED or other electronic parts for experimentation can be very frustrating. The parts may have low prices, but mostly they are only accessible over the Internet, and shipping/handling charges can more than double the real cost. Ebay parts are often the cheapest, but the selection is limited and the quality often dubious...
DigiKey is a "real" electronics distributor, first quality products and an immense catalog, that offers a very special deal: if you send them a pre-paid order with a check, in the US and Canada you can get parts with no shipping/handling and no minimum. You can get a $1 part or a $5 Bridgelux LED, no extra charge!
If you only want one or two parts, just look them up online, print out the pdf form, fill it out by hand, send in the order with your check, and you are done... Someday your parts will come.
But if you get sucked into a list of say a dozen items, ordering from them gets pretty tricky. It is easy to go online, click on things, and build up a nice shopping-cart list. The tell you how many they have in stock. The list seems to stay around pretty well and you can print it out with a subtotal, just attach that to the order form.
But if you want to get any more computerized than that, things don't work out well. Setting up an online account with them is a hassle -- you must be a "company", and it will take them a few days to process. They send you occasional emails containing no useful information about your account. There is nowhere online to get a good summary printout of your account information. Your shopping cart does not connect at all to your account -- it seems to connect to hidden browser cookies instead.
There seems to be only one advantage to getting an account, if you intend to order by mail. They have a pretty good search function, with parameter options, that often finds way too many matches. You can sort the matches many ways. But not the way you most want: by price. Very strange and frustrating. But if you have an account you can login and then they do let you sort by price, though they hassle you each time.
There seems to be no version of the order form populated with your address etc data, and the PDF they provide does not seem to have fields that can be filled in. It is possible to import the PDF into Open Office and fill in some fields as an overlay. All very awkward and tedious.
They do offer economical USPS First Class for small shipments; much easier simpler quicker to buy online and pay by credit card. I would have been willing to pay a couple dollars for shipment of my $32 order. But their shipping estimator is stupid. You have to key in a zip code each time and it only produces a giant generic grid of possible ship costs, depending on weight -- without offering any information about the likely actual weight of your items.
It is not clear if they are making this so difficult on purpose or by accident.
If you have found a better way to do this, please share!
