Ecnerwal wrote:
They also take it upon themselves to
> collect sales tax for states they don't operate in - for the (small)
> volume of business I do that basically means double-paying, since the
> paperwork to track it all is a time (thus money) sink far larger than
> just handing the state the "safe harbor amount" for online purchases.
I have given all the major distributors my state tax exemption number,
only Allied has a problem, they always bill em for the tax, and I pay
only for the parts plus shipping, with a note that my tax number is on file.
They have a button on the order screen for "tax exempt" but it doesn't
work. Of course, if you don't have an exemption #, then you have to
pay taxes if they want to charge you. I hope you don't live in Indiana,
where they think they have the right to charge me sales tax when I sell
products to England, even though I have no presence in Indiana and only
sell something to a state entity once every 10 years. They are completely
nuts.
> I certainly prefer Mouser's online catalog to Digi-Key's - Newark was in
> there for a while but has not been worth following up on for the past
> few orders either.
>
Gee, I really like Digi-Key's, and use it for all sorts of parts search and
data sheet searching. I think their parametric search is the only one that
really works well. But, every distributor has really good pricing on
SOMETHING, and if you are ordering more than a few, it pays (literally!)
to check them all. Allied and Newark are good for IR parts, Newark
has good prices on small cabinet parts, Digi-Key is the only source for
Xilinx as Avnet won't open an account for me so I have to prepay by
credit card. Mouser has the best stock and prices on oddball capacitors,
from SMT up to big snap-lock electrolytics.
Anyway, I have seen variation in prices up to almost 2:1 in the most
extreme cases, between the major distributors. Other stuff, they will
all list the same part at $2.01, exact to the penny! But, in many cases,
one of them gives a better volume discount, so the single or 10-piece price
is about the same, but the 100-piece is quite different.
Jon