Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I live outside the US.

Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS will gladly sell me 4000 of those capacitors.

For a hobbyist outside of the US, AliExpress is often the only realistic source aside from the local RadioShack equivalent which probably doesn't have what you need.

View on HN

I hear you, and even in the US it is a problem in Hawaii and Alaska. I live in the former and just yesterday was look at a part that was 8oz total and the site added a $100 HI, AK surcharge on shipping!!! This is mostly a UPS problem as for many suppliers they give great 48 state rates but anything else is horrible.

Now I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if I could get the shipping rate upfront but it seems 80%+ of sites won't give you a real rate until you have almost completed check out which takes a lot of time. The funny thing is if they have a phone number you sometimes can get them to ship it more reasonably if their system has the flexibility to do that.

This is where ebay is a godsend as a lot of sellers will have the odd part around and work at having cheap shipping. But it is caveat emptor.

Somewhat unrelated, but how do you like living in Hawaii? I visited once and it was beautiful, but I'm not sure what it would be like living there long term.

A lot of the time, these struggles are invisible to those living in the US. It's similar with McMaster-Carr; typically an American hobbyist will ask why one would look anywhere else for hardware parts, not knowing that (at least for many years) they would only ship to corporate partners for orders outside the US.

This is the situation https://raptorsupplies.com specializes in, Getting high quality parts at relatively small order sizes shipped easily overseas at reasonable prices

I am not sure what you suggest - I tried finding something random and trivial: a decent 100uf, 400v capacitor (needed for a switching power supply primary) - zero. z0107 (low powered triac, 600v, 0.8A) - nothing. bt134 (another popular triac) - nothing. BQ24735 (Battery charger control chip) - nothing. 2n7002 (N-ch mosfet)...

I can safely say the site is not usable for electronics. It returned valves, pipes,nuts - pretty much useless for anything in Europe, being non-metric.

I think they were talking about the McMaster-Carr situation, since that is what they generally supply.

Depends on the country of course.

Last time I made heavy use of Digikey was in Australia and it worked really well. I'd order on Thursday and it would arrive by ~Monday, which was pretty awesome. You're right shipping, I remember correctly, was $20-$30, but on $200 of parts it was a small cost.

But as I said, this was done in my professional life, so I didn't blink an eye at it. Hobby world I get is different, but also the cost is frustration as opposed to 1000s, 10,000s of badly built boards.

Digikey has free shipping for any order over (I think) $50. If you're trying to buy an individual capacitor then of course they're going to ping you for the extra time taken to ship. No-one can make a profit sending a $0.20 part individually.

I've never had any trouble getting individual parts from RS either.

At least they're willing to ship to you. I can't order anything at all from these larger suppliers, most of them decided that my country does not exist (you can't find it in their lists). Of course, one can always order through an intermediary, with their 80$+ shipping.

Hmm don't know where you are but farnell has at least an european site and european warehouses that ship individual items locally.

Disclaimer: I only ordered full boards from them so shipping seemed reasonable. No idea about ordering one small capacitor.

> tells me that they only ship to companies

You often just need to fill that form entry, and not have any sort of official company. Things like Self, or your name again will work just fine. I have a fake company name that one day I'll need to actually register, but in the mean time is used whenever someone is willing to take my money, but not provide service without a company name.

For someone in a country with VAT (e.g. Europe) this trick typically does not work since billing is different for companies vs. individuals.

Pretty much not applicable, as "company" requires a valid registration number for the invoice. Selling to individuals in the EU, outside the member state the company has been registered, is somewhat problematic. Currently it does require VAT to be charged at the recipient's country - unless the total yearly revenue from the said member state is low enough (say 35k euro). I have heard there are some 'discussions' (some EU commission) to ease the process but for now that's just rumors.

Flip note: US companies selling to customers in the EU do require EU VAT number as well.

Overall living in the US and applying the same rules/advice to people not living there tends to be wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com