Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

Wow I am going through the same thing as the author right now. I recently placed an order with Mouser doing side by side comparison shopping with Digi-Key. The last time I used Mouser was 12 years ago in my college days. I thought hey they were good back then let me just compare the prices and Mouser came ahead this time due to the shipping cost. I am just ordering replacement capacitors for an old PC motherboard that probably has just a few more years of intermittent use out of it so my highest priority was cost. Ok they delivered a little slow but thats fine, this is not a serious project. Now I am sitting 3+ weeks after ordering it and no indication if my package will ever arrive. The difference between this and Digikey was only 2-3 dollars. Big mistake I made there. Its disappointing to see given I had fond memories of Mouser 12 years ago.

It's not a secret but few people appear to know this: Digi-Key has an order process with free shipping anywhere in the US. Fill out their order form[1] and mail it in with a check and, as per their "terms and conditions"[2], shipping is free.

Great deal if you're not in a hurry. I've read that this is intended for hobbyists and others that need small quantities; Digi-Key started out selling to hams and other low volume customers 50 years ago and, apparently they still value this customer base.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/-/media/PDF/Help/Order%20Form/order-... [2] https://www.digikey.com/en/terms-and-conditions "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."

For small personal projects I have switched to LCSC in part because I can automate the BOM order when I generate the PCB gerbers all out of Kicad via gitlab pipeline. All I have to do is add the LCSC part numbers as an extra field in my Kicad schematic. If I order from JLCPCB I also get a shipping discount at LCSC.

Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland) so unless my order is larger it's not worth it for small project that don't need any guarantee on where the part came from.

When the cable guy came to add another outlet to my previous house, I watched what he did and chatted a bit about his tools. He was using Digikey tools. I then ordered identical tools.

For my later house, I installed all the cables and outlets myself, with the Digikey tools. All I can say is two thumbs up for them. Quick and easy, and not a single bad connection.

I did this because of my troubles soldering, which all went away when I tried using a professional soldering iron. Ever since, I look at what the pros use and buy those tools.

I’m still waiting after 7 weeks for a refund from Mouser. I ended up escalating to my business’s credit card issuer.

Ordered a $120 cable in which both vendors had recommended. It wasn’t what was required, so sent it back as an RMA, in all the original packaging.

Mouser refused to refund me, saying that there was a bag with my order number on it, and even though I sent back the original unopened product in its original packaging, that without the bag with my order number, no refund.

So they sent it back to me. I FISHED THE STUPID BAG WITH THE ORDER NUMBER ON IT OUT OF THE TRASH, and re sent it back in for an RMA. 5 weeks later, still nothing.

Ultimately it’s going to be 3+ months to get the money back from my card issuer. Mouser will never get my business again.

I also attempted to cheap out and choose the "UPS Mail Innovations" option in the past year. I'm not sure if it is still the case, but at that time you needed to open a dropdown to select the option (feels they tried to hide it). I waited the two week delivery estimate, then called support.

After a quick talk it seems that they have a problem where things shipped via "Mail Innovations" get stuck in a bin somewhere and get lost regularly. The support agent re-ordered all my stuff and shipped it overnight (all for free), and I learned not to choose the cheapest option.

Months later the first package arrived. I've haven't spent more then $200 on Mouser over the past 6 years, so it isn't a "I'm a big account" type of deal...

OP should have just called if they didn't. I don't think the call was more then 5-10 minutes and it looks like it would have saved a ton of pain

I've had crazy bad problems dealing with them. I ordered a part ($20 ish + shipping) and long story short, their fraud system went crazy and decided it was a scam order or something and cancelled the order. No email notification, nothing. I only found out after calling and calling and eventual some higher up explained why the order was cancelled. I was waiting two weeks and it wasn't even processed!

This happened a second time with the same item, and then eventually they _finally_ shipped it on try #3. Go with someone else until they prioritize customer service.

I have had excellent experience with Digikey's customer service. They always answer the phone and resolve problems quickly. I've recently been using Mouser because their warehouse location means that the "standard" UPS option (@7.99) ships overnight to us in Houston. I greatly appreciate the fact that they autodetect the proximity and so actively block me from accidentally paying for upgraded shipping...

I am curious about whether the author tried a voice call. All of the data suggests only electronic communication...

The high margin makes sense if their account is mostly ordering low-volume. The margins on cut-tape, for example, are nuts. As a distributor they order in bulk at low per-unit pricing, and then when hobbyists buy onsies twosies they can charge low-volume pricing for a huge markup.

Doesn't mean they're making a lot of money on those types of orders.

(That isn't an argument against the author's complaints, just providing hopefully interesting info).

Off-topic: I clicked through to the author's Sir Box-a-Lot project (https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/sir-box-a-lot/) and immediately fell in love with the micro rocker switch they used for the power switch. A 7mmx3mm rocker power switch. https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/295/GW-1663576.pdf What an absolute beaut.

I just reached out to Mouser for a second time for an Economy Shipping order that never arrived. I picked the slowest option as I was also having a PCB fabricated for those parts.

That PCB arrived a week ago and the tracking still shows nothing at all.

This does not inspire confidence.

Good to know, thank you. I usually go with Digikey, but occasionally order from Mouser. I'll keep this in my mind for future ordering.

I'll just add in that I've placed around 30 orders with Mouser over the past few years and have never really had any trouble.

I only ever order UPS 2nd day, because FedEx loves to find excuses to not deliver packages and UPS Mail Innovations usually makes packages disappear, and I don't really see a good reason to save a few dollars for the package to take 5 times as long to arrive.

The only time I had an issue was receiving the wrong color of LCD once. I can't really place too much fault on them, the manufacturers part number was very hard to read and differed by an easily mistakable letter. They gave me a $60 refund and I didn't even have to send it back.

FWIW, I was doing a lot of electronics stuff last year in particular, and made dozens and dozens of parts orders with Mouser, Newark, Digikey and Jameco all throughout the year (in addition to stuff from Amazon, Sparkfun, Adafruit, etc). And I don't recall any specific degree of trouble with anybody in particular, including Mouser.

I did have one semi-annoying experience with one or the other of (Newark|Mouser), but I can't remember which one it was now, but it wasn't anything shipping related. It was a billing issue. I don't even remember all the details now, but I did have to spend quite a bit of time on the phone with customer service, but things did get squared away in the end. It was the kind of thing that I was fairly pissed about at the time, but in all honesty, looking at it from a "law of large numbers" perspective, you expect a few gaffes here and there when you are talking about companies that operate at that scale.

All of that said, after reading this, I might be a little more skittish about ordering from Mouser in the future. But at least so far, nothing has happened to me first-hand to put them on the "don't use" list.

EDIT: just for context, I ordered from Mouser 18 times last year, and have ordered from them twice so far this year.

Jameco is a smaller distributor, but they have great service.

If you’re in the Bay Area you can even go and pick up your order from their warehouse and avoid any shipping costs.

Trying to buy from either Mouser or Digikey from Europe is very misleading. They have European shops in European domain. But when you are going to pay. You get smashed with a ridiculous delivery price and the uncertainty of how much customs will charge you...

Wish we had a good alternative rather than having to get components in ebay/aliexpress.

In college, I ordered a few dollars worth of chips from Digikey but I couldn't find datasheets. The Internet was not a thing yet. Without asking, they mailed me a 100 page photocopy. I'm still a customer. Never issues, which is more than I can say about lots of large companies. Digikey just works.

Even if it's cheap, never go with an untracked shipping option if you're expecting any kind of quality of service.

It sucks that mouser added it without really considering the implications. Any time I've used untracked shipping, the carrier loses it or gives 0 shits about how they handle it.

I've used Mouser every other month for the last couple years, using the $120+ CAD free shipping option, and I've always gotten it the next day with genuine, working parts.

I also order from LCSC, but from my 4 orders (~20 parts), I've had several fake parts with hard-to-debug issues that have wasted days if not weeks of dev time. I decided that my time was more valuable and I only order from Mouser now.

As of my order last week, Mouser no longer offers economy shipping.

Most of my orders from Mouser are things that are out-of-stock at Digi-Key. Maybe this is how they lose and join the also-ran, only-for-big-companies distributors like Allied and Newark.

Experience from irregular customer (hobby and education) is that Mouser has not been so bad here in Europe. At least not yet. Haven't used Digikey much because it meant dealing with customs. Haven't checked lately if this has been changed. I've worked professionally with Arrow and it has been nightmare. China just isn't worth of effort – dubious quality with long shipping times. But probably most of the time I've used Farnell (https://www.farnell.com/) and it has been good enough for me.

It would seriously disappoint me if Mouser or Digi-Key went downhill. I settled on Mouser for my business years ago because they had more "consumer electronics" stuff, e.g., audio connectors and potentiometers. To the point where I designed my products around parts that they were the exclusive distributors for.

So I'm hoping these are one-off issues and not trends. So far I've had no issues myself.

A bigger problem has been the general scramble for available chips of some specialized types. I appreciate why the engineers prefer designing around generic parts when possible.

Mouser is another middle man, I keep trying buying from manufacturers directly. While some don't accept small quantities and others refer to their preferred retailers it's worth it. The big distributors are expensive. There is no big deal saving 1/4 not buying from Mouser. As a distributor Mouser's fine, all of my orders arrived as expected. On other hand shit happens from statistical view alone when Mouser processes millions orders. Maybe sometimes an application engineer would be helpful, but support forums work out well (for me).

Hmm, I've had only one experience but it was positive. Last year I had a CrowdSupply order fulfilled via Mouser, it arrived reasonably fast and there was no hassle with customs (I'm in EU).

You can get a business account with Mouser/Digikey and then they just become another distributor. Your login gets discounted pricing (it's not much though) which is good for quick prototypes, and you can sometimes get an account manager to negotiate and troubleshoot directly.

I'm not sure how you qualify but you get to the point where you just RFQ to an email address and don't use the webpage. You don't need to be a $million+ purchasing outfit. They'll also schedule orders etc. at least I've seen Mouser do it.

Mouser is quite good on automated notifications - most importantly if anything in your order has changed (99% of the time it's a delivery date). Most of the other distributors do manual back orders in excel.

But their website is filled with annoying quirks. Here's such a basic use case: 1. Bring up a list of items from a search, say 100nF 0402 caps. 2. Sort by price low -> high (you'll see the icon, click that it'll work) 3. Now type in a quantity of say 100000 and find the best price on this part... yes the icon disappears when you fill in the quantity input field.

Download the CSV doesn't give price breaks.

Amusingly I just went to the digikey website which implements this functionality and.... something is broken. Can't even apply a quantity to a search. Also getting some strange loading page with a countdown clock... anti bot?

My tactic with Mouser was just buying enough stuff at once to get free shipping (iirc >50EUR). Even got one in like 4 batches during pandemic which gotta gut into the profit marigins...

I’m surprised they accidentally sent you your sales data. Honestly a 50% margin is nothing. We were connected with a FAE who started offering us direct sales in low volumes. Most of those parts had a 80-90% margin on digikey.

The problem is now there is invisible price colluding, you can upload the same BOM to digikey and mouser and the prices are within 5%. If you did that 5 years ago individual parts would have 20% swing. There isn’t any point shopping around any more, everyone is gouging. In our ERP we have prices going back 10 years, some parts have gone up staggering amounts.

Digikey were always the more expensive normally, but in the last year prices have gone up another 20% but they offer a discount to high volume customers. It’s funny the difference between “my price” and the normal list price has been as high as 75%.

For what it’s worth, the last RMA I did with Digikey didn’t go through. It was $5O in spacers that they miscounted, not a deal breaker but I had to put another order in for the missing spacers as it was easier than dealing with support. I didn’t realise ignoring RMAs was an option!

My biggest practical issue with Mouser at the moment is they removed the ability to sort by quality available. Do they even realise the biggest struggle at the moment finding available parts to complete a design?

(deleting Mouser from supplier list)

I've thankfully not had a bad experience with Mouser, they're generally just fine for us. I do spend a bit more than OP though, so maybe we're in a different service bracket.

I used to prefer Mouser because I thought their site was slightly easier on the eyes, and I felt they were basically interchangeable with Digikey.

A few years ago, I needed about 60 of a very specific, shouldered washer that only Digikey had. It was Friday afternoon and I needed it in Boston ASAP.

I called their support for the first time, with low expectations.

Within a couple hours, they were prepared to put a man from their warehouse on a plane to personally fly these parts to the nearest airport. It wound up being too expensive for the project, but their facility leadership burned multiple hours trying to help solve this problem for me, and I was a very small customer at the time.

After that experience, Digikey gets the lion's share of my orders, which have grown considerably over the years, and they continue to have incredible support, every single time.

They are our first place supplier and we only use alternatives if there is a stock issue, or the price difference is massive.

I've had other vendors try to tell me that Digikey charges too much. But when I get those same vendors to price our BOMs, Digikey is less expensive, has more stock and is far more efficient (e.g., I don't have to call and wait days to place an order and I don't have to order a lifetime supply of everything).

I heard the CEO on a podcast (Adafruit or Pick Place Podcast?) maybe last year sometime, and he came off as a genuine, nice human being.

Unless they somehow flip 180 degrees, Digikey has earned my business.

As stated near the beginning of the article, there aren't a lot of options. Designs add inertia to changing parts. If a part is available on Mouser, but not Digikey, what should the author do? These realtors cater to people and small business who can't commit to the order quantities needed to buy direct from manufacturer; they have leverage.

These days I don't get to choose - I will order from whoever has the part in stock, price don't matter.

How do people on HN feel about Arrow Electronics?

https://www.arrow.com/

I don't see any mention of them ITT yet.

I've used them a bit in the past for a project I was involved with.

They were not the cheapest but they seem pretty ok from my experience.

Definitely done recommending Mouser. I haven't ordered for a long time but any time people mentioned trying to find parts I'd find them there and send them the link or just tell them to search there for them. Not risking giving people bad recommendations.

I very often choose between the Digikey and Mouser. I guess I won't burn myself on Mouser again. Having these issues as a hobbyist is one thing, were deadlines don't really matter. But I won't gamble with it in my job.

Aside from anything specific to Mouser,

How does a large business keep its (usually commission-oriented) sales organization from reverting to such completely pathological and short-sighted behavior for "small" customers?

I put "small" in quotes, because it's entirely likely that today's college student will be next year's engineer recommending parts for new designs.

Digi-Key never seemed to lose touch with their origin selling to radio hobbyists.

I was on an engineering team in college that built full-size racecars (the competition was called Formula SAE). Digikey offered us a 10-15% discount, depending on the parts we were buying, and Mouser offered a 3% discount (at that point, why even bother?). Digikey's discount was easier to use too. Occasionally Mouser had something that Digikey didn't but I tried to order from Digikey as much as possible.

On one particular item - high power, high voltage small form factor DC-DC converter (that was few years ago) the price was around $300 on Mouser / Digikey vs $25 from Aliexpress. I needed 125 of those. Make a wild guess where did I buy from. And no, I did not get scammed. The converters are still merrily chugging along.

Wow, I haven't ordered from Mouser in years honestly, if I remember correctly, they had started using $60+ FedEx services for international shipping for a while.

Mostly for hobby use, it's a mix between Digi-Key and Newark for me. Newark's website really isn't on par, but pricing can make it worth ordering both places.

Interesting. I've actually seen some increased delays from them as well, though I don't think I've encountered a situation that would require talking to them. I have had situations where I needed to reach out to Digikey to resolve issues and I would say my experiences with Digikey were good.

This doesn't excuse awful customer support, but I wonder how the author is so sure that this is caused by Mouser warehouse black hole instead of UPS one. Maybe they handed over packages to the UPS but they vanished there before they were scanned.

I wish there was an electronics supply company as good as McMaster Carr. Those guys also have a huge inventory but are always fast and on the ball.

Is there anyone with a decent inventory on the east coast so I can get ground shipping faster?

Honestly the author would be better off ordering from AliExpress. I pretty much use DigiKey exclusively. Zero plans to use Mouser, especially now.

Wonder if they had management change recently? These kind of mishaps happen when CEO is replaced by the dumber one.

I love how Digi-Key is this huge company and they're based in little tiny Thief River Falls, MN

FYI HN is a big fan of https://octopart.com/ for shopping your parts list.

The margins are product only, excluding any cost for storing, packing, sending, printing invoices, collecting money, talking to customers, etc.?

If those are all in small orders of a few $0.01 items, cost might exceed the the margin?

"I had a bad experience with the cheap shipping, guess I should keep trying it until I hate the company *