# DIGIKEY How to Order



## kethd (Oct 19, 2010)

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!


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## JamisonM (Oct 20, 2010)

Can't say I've had any problems ordering from Digikey. I'm an individual and order online. I had no issues with the few orders I placed nor with their shipping cost. Also didn't have any problems registering. I've got one of their catalogs, but I don't order from it as its for quick reference though I'll admit I'm faster looking up something on the their site. I think that's how most do it though. Mail orders are becoming, if not already, a thing of the past. I remember when I yahoo still had their own auctioning service. I used to bid, win, and send a money order. Heck, I even did that when I first started using ebay. I had to make sure before I bid that the seller would accept a money order. Then one day, a seller refunded me some money via paypal. That money stat in the account for the better part of 5 years or more. Today, I use that account to do most of my buying and selling. Honestly, it's just plain convenient. Ordering from a mail order catalog doesn't compare except in ship time. Besides, like you say, just get a cart going online, print it out and send it in. I have to ask though, why not just order online if you have the ability?


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## kethd (Oct 20, 2010)

"a guide for extreme penny-pinchers who are not in a hurry"

Just unwilling to pay an extra few bucks to buy a part that only costs a few bucks...


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## JohnR66 (Oct 20, 2010)

No problems here either. My first order was a year ago for some Cree 5mm LEDs to try out. Setting up was just the usual information plus email & password. I have ordered a few more times since. One order had several LEDs, diodes, transistors and ICs. All this stuff is light and USPS first class was $2.6-something. Delivery took two or three days.

I bought some things off ebay that I could not find elsewhere. Many good sellers, but shipping is often high. It is hard for them to complete due to the increasing final value fees. Lots of junk on ebay too. I bought some audio power amp ICs that I believe were fakes. One was DOA. Most of the LEDs are garbage. Short lifespan and way overstated light output. The 55,000 mcd "super bright" white 5mm LEDs test out on my meter at 15,000 mcd with a short life. The Crees and Nichias I tested were right in their specified bin.


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## SemiMan (Oct 20, 2010)

When you go to work you expect to get paid I assume?

Well the people who work at Digikey expect to be paid as well and the same goes for UPS, etc. It costs money to package up your parts, put them in a box, etc.

Frankly I am amazed that in Canada I get flat rate $8.00 shipping from Digikey and it's at my door tomorrow. I still comparison shop between Digikey, Mouser, and Newark as well as some others. I have paid more for shipping but often saved it in part cost.

Digikey uses cookies for short term storage but you can absolutely link orders/bill of materials to accounts. I do it all the time. It will even populate with my shipping address to save me some time.

FYI, stamps and checks cost money so you are not saving as much as you think. Yes you may get checks included with your bank account but then odds are you are paying a service fee on that account so we are back again to it not being free.

Semiman


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## kethd (Oct 21, 2010)

DigiKey chooses to offer free shipping in certain situations. That is very nice and generous of them. It seems like it would be more convenient for them and for their customers if they allowed completing the regular online order process and sending in a check. They'll decide what they want to offer, how.

Amazon offers free shipping in many cases, for orders totalling over $25. This is reasonable and nice, rewarding the efficiency of multiple items in one shipment and slow economical shipping.

Newegg offers free shipping on many "sale" items, in a crazy way. Shipments cannot sensibly be combined with non-sale item: in many cases, it is cheaper to order items separately than together in one shipment. To add insult to injury, their free shipping is wonderful, often arriving overnight, but their cheap-paid shipping is terrible, taking a week of circuitous dawdling. This is marketing gone nuts. The Amazon approach is much better.

DrillSpot chooses to sell a box of a hundred screws for $2 with free shipping. I felt guilty getting just one box, and bought three items. Drop-shipment was from Grainger, two separate shipments from two distant states (even though there is a Grainger in my city). It seems like they spent more on shipping than I paid for the order. I do not understand their business model.


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## SemiMan (Oct 21, 2010)

kethd said:


> DigiKey chooses to offer free shipping in certain situations. That is very nice and generous of them. It seems like it would be more convenient for them and for their customers if they allowed completing the regular online order process and sending in a check. They'll decide what they want to offer, how.
> 
> Amazon offers free shipping in many cases, for orders totalling over $25. This is reasonable and nice, rewarding the efficiency of multiple items in one shipment and slow economical shipping.
> 
> ...



DrillSpot makes a ton of margin on screws. 50% likely more. It is also a box of screws, not 23. Amazon is putting a high margin single book or 3 into an order.

Digikey is breaking down reels, etc. into single orders, stocking 400,000+ line items, picking them accurately, ensuring they use proper static safe packing, ensuring order accuracy, etc. There is a notable difference between what Digikey does and what others do and not to mention margin differences on the parts they sell. It is also about the model that the rest of the industry follows. Digikey has generally the lowest shipping costs in their industry. Why would they make them even lower?

Semiman


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## sigmo (Oct 22, 2010)

*I really like Digi-Key*

I've used Digi-Key since they actually sold the "Digi-Key" keyer! That was long before the internet, and for all these years, I've felt that DK was one of the best suppliers of small quantities of electronic components - ever. Vastly superior to their competition, especially back in those days.

Seriously, they had this "mail order" thing down long before other suppliers had a clue of how to make it easy and efficient. Now, there are a number of good electronic parts suppliers who have obviously "gone to school" by studying DigiKey's system, and many of them are quite good. But DK pioneered it, and had it down long before the others.

I wasn't even aware that they offer free shipping on pre-paid (by check) orders. That's pretty interesting.

But I can't really imagine ever making use of that feature because I can't imagine wanting to wait to actually mail in a check for an order these days. It's great that they offer this, I guess, but is it really worth the wait and hassle to mail in a written order and check? Holy cow. I haven't written a check for anything for years, much less mailed a check to a mail-order supplier.

I still use DK frequently, but I order on-line using a credit card. It's almost always flawless service, and when they make a mistake (which is extremely rare), they always make it right with no hassle.

I suspect that they lose money on any small orders that are shipped free, especially since they've got to manually enter the order from a printed form AND physically deposit a check. All of that takes time and money. So it probably would be to their benefit to keep this process a bit clunky to discourage people from using it.

I guess you can think of your hassle hand-filling forms as payment for the free shipping and service you're getting.

Thumbs up to DigiKey. :thumbsup:


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