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Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Sort of like how in the mechanical world you just order from McMaster-Carr.

Yes, actually a lot like that, because in the mechanical world you'd order from either McMaster-Carr or Grainger. They're largely equivalent in broad strokes, no one would fault you for favoring one over the other.

In 2015 that was the exact same situation for DigiKey and Mouser. Small differences, both have great selection, great service, competitive prices.

This would be like either Grainger or McMaster-Carr just shitting the bed. It would be shocking to hear a consensus of serious mechanical engineers saying "When people order from Grainger, that's a huge red flag for me."

It's also interesting because all four of these companies cater to professionals. And as a professional you never want to be talking to customer service, even if it costs you extra.

I don't think I know how to contact Mouser CS, because I've never had to. And I buy a lot of parts. Enough that we've spent more on overnight shipping this year alone than the article's entire spend. I'm guessing that's related!

But I do know how to find Digi-Key's customer service, and I'm growing increasingly annoyed with them as a company. Not dropping them or anything rash. Just... annoyed. Their continued misadventures with their same-day shipping deadline have cost me a lot of money. So yay! Parties all around!

For all of these 4, your customer service is your sales rep.

Mouser customer service (at least 5 years ago) as a big purchaser (University) was excellent. They would do things like screw up an order and then send the replacement free of charge, even for $300 parts. But then the uni order book was probably hundreds of thousands if not millions a year, so it's nothing on their margins.

> They would do things like screw up an order and then send the replacement free of charge, even for $300 parts.

This is supposed to be impressive? What would be impressive would be not screwing up the order in the first place.

Ah I misspoke - in this case it was our fault. We accidentally ordered a camera with the wrong serial interface and Mouser just shipped the right one.

For most design MEs I think Grainger is actually a red flag, in the same way digikey is to mcmaster, grainger, MSC, etc. are to Mouser etc.

It's of course different for ops, manufacturing and facility folks, thats mainly grainger, uline, MSC, etc.

For design McMaster, Digikey and Misumi are thr core go-to's

For ops and facility maintenance it's different

Grainger has a local rep and that makes a big difference for us. We are always biased towards local support, even when there is a reasonable price differential. It can save your bacon if you have any questions/problems before or after the sale.

It swings back and forth.

For a while, it seemed like DigiKey was doing some very shady crap with pricing. There were a couple times where I noticed that DigiKey was charging me MORE on certain components upon logging in. I dropped DigiKey like a hot potato for that and was quite vocal about it to the account manager as to why they were not going to get $250K+ of annual orders from us anymore. Mouser got all the business.

Sad to hear that Mouser is completely screwing up shipping--looks like it's time to go back to ordering from DigiKey and see if they've quit playing stupid games.

3 weeks? You would have gotten them faster directly from China and probably for a lot cheaper.

The only reason for me to order from a US based company is faster shipping.

Depending what you're ordering, in my experience Chinese sellers on AliExpress can have issues with counterfeits or with chips obviously removed from old boards being sold as "new". If I want to ensure genuine parts I'll go to Farnell, RS, Mouser, or DigiKey.

Yes, holy shit. Empty IC shells are super common in counterfeits. If they aren't counterfeit then QC is a nightmare, if you need consistency and spot-on values, they're dire.

> The only reason for me to order from a US based company is faster shipping.

You don't see any service and support benefits? Component QA benefits?

(Relevant to your comment and general experience, not so much the specific company in the post...)

> You don't see any service and support benefits?

Read TFA?

TFA is talking about an issue with a specific company. It doesn't invalidate what themodelplumber is saying.

> The only reason for me to order from a US based company is faster shipping.

The primary reason I will always prefer to buy electronic parts from Digi-key (or similar) or directly from the manufacturer is that I'm substantially less likely to get counterfeits.

What's the best place to order form china?

lcsc.com. But keep in mind that their prices for Western companies ICs is often worse than DigiKey/Mouser. The passives and connectors are a lot cheaper.

I agree, the few times I've used LCSC it's been a perfectly fine experience.

But LCSC parametric search is worse, and their product photos and data are often wrong. Mouser/etc have decent parametric search which, for me, makes them the best place to find parts. LCSC has so much garbage data, a bad UI, multiple languages, etc. When I need a cheap, china specific part I usually just have to resort to manually searching through the 1,000 or so parts by hand. About as much fun as one imagines. And then their website starts throttling you for opening too many PDFs. SMH.

For certain parts, https://github.com/yaqwsx/jlcparts can be useful to find what you need quicker.

Honestly? Amazon.

And back in the peak covid days they asked for donations to keep them alive and operational. They wanted the community to support them based on goodwill and now they seem happy to burn that goodwill to the ground.

Do you have a source for this? I am on their mailing list and order fairly often. I don't remember any requests for donations or any point where they were about to go out of business during covid.

I don't anymore. They were asking for donations about 2 years ago.

A $4BN/year revenue corporation, the seventh largest electronics distributor in the world according to Wikipedia, asking for donations...wonders never cease.

....they're owned by Berkshire Hathaway. So, basically people were 'donating' to Warren Buffet. Nice.

Is that real? Do you have a link?

Huh? Mouser has never asked for donations. Are you thinking of OSH Stencils?

No it was Mouser. One of the few places I order electronics parts from. Digikey and Jameco did not.

It’s funny, when I was randomly picking a parts website in school (electrical engineering), Digikey gave me much better vibes. I mean look at their websites!

One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.

> One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.

1. I'm not sure why you think UI and design are not engineering concepts. If people can't figure out how to use your product then it's useless.

2. These sites are almost exactly the same

https://www.mouser.com

https://www.digikey.com/en/products

The home pages have a search box & drop down menus at the top, product menu on the left, carousel in the middle. Then some featured products, some featured manufacturers and a footer.

https://www.mouser.com/c/electromechanical/relays-contactors...

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/solid-state-relay...

A product category has a bunch of combo boxes for filtering plus a table showing results. The results tables are almost exactly the same except Mouser freezes the left columns. Both have a lightbox popover for the product image.

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Omron-Electronics/G3VM-...

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-electri...

Product pages both have photo, specs, number in stock and pricing. The only thing possibly offensive about Mouser's is that the sections on the pricing page are collapsed.

If nothing else, Mouser has one enormous usability flaw (which has been an issue for years): you can't sort by price.

Or rather, they will let you sort by the "pricing" column, but the effect is to sort parts by their unit price at whatever the minimum quantity for that part is. But some parts are orderable in single quantities, and others only in large trays or reels.

Even if you manually filter out those packaging types, it can often be the case that part A is cheaper than part B at qty 1, but significantly more expensive at (say) qty 20. So you can't actually do price comparisons without paging through the entire list, which may be many hundreds or thousands of pages depending on what you're searching for..

Digikey does the much more sensible thing, which is to let you enter the quantity you actually want, and sort items by what their unit price would be if you order that quantity. Mouser has a similar box to enter the quantity, but it only affects the display of each row, and not the actual sort order.

The big problem with Mouser is that you can't sort by quantity in stock. That's a very useful cue, one that DigiKey has always supported, and it has absolutely resulted in sales going to DigiKey over Mouser when in the planning stages of a new project.

I will heavily second this opinion. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I do prototype some electronics that eventually become products. One of the most important factors to me when selecting an individual component is that it will be available in volume in 6 months time and I don't know of a better way to estimate that than to look at the current quantity on hand. If I'm comparing two similar looking parts and one has 8000+ on hand and the other has 68, then I'm going for the 8000+ part.

They even both have a near identical locale selector, with two big flags, when you visit from a Canadian IP. Makes me think one... drew inspiration from the other.

Can you offer some examples? I just went to each site, and compared their home page, product listing table, and product page. They are so comparable in design/UI (to the point that it feels like any time one makes any change, the other probably follows suit) that I have no idea which one you consider to be afflicted.

Not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Mouser and Digi-Key are nearly identical in terms of UI. Search functionality on top followed by products & manufacturers and a list of products on the left.

I'm with you on that second point though - both websites look like they were designed by hardware engineers rather than "omg-UI-UX-is-so-important" SWEs.

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