Farnell/CPC/RS carriage/minimum order

In article , Theo Markettos writes

All 3 state their delivery charges in the Terms section linked to from the bottom of their home pages.

Ah thanks. I was foolishly looking in the 'Help' sections and hoping that they would actually be helpful :(

For the record:

Farnell/CPC:

RS:

Theo

In message , Theo Markettos wrote

For CPC it's GBP45 excluding VAT so it's more like GBP53 for free postage. (I believe that the small order charges are also excl. VAT)

Ah, looks like it might be time to smile sweetly at Rapid (though they always make reaching the order threshold so much harder, darn those low prices ;-). They also seem to have gone Polish, randomly:

But note that Farnell non-account customers have to pay by credit card, and there's a £20 minimum order value (ex VAT). Look under 'Services and Help' at the top, Delivery Options, and scroll around a lot.

Rapid has poor service,take orders,and when you ask them where it is tell you it`s on back order. Farnell seems to keep everything I want in the States and charge a surcharge for it. CPC=3Dnon league. RS,not perfect,not cheap but always seem to have what I want and I think the postage is free. For general electrical stuff C.E.F. is never beat on price for me.All these online retailers pushed on here always seem very expensive to me.

If the P&P is likely to be a significant proportion of your order value, bitsbox.co.uk only charge £1.50 per order, which is a much more honest reflection of their true costs.

True costs will vary depending on the carrier, of course. Bitsbox is good

That's never been a problem in the past, but I haven't ordered for ages. Quite a bit of stuff on their website seems to be out of stock though.

Are you sure about that? Their website seems to suggest it's 4.95 for any private orders, or they might charge that for account orders under 20 pounds.

At the moment I'm looking for traceable parts: in other words I don't just want any capacitor, I want something with a part number I can use to look up the datasheet (because I need to run them at 2GHz). So generic suppliers won't do. The other option is eBay, if the sellers are good enough to put the part number on the listing (rather than a single blurry picture of something that might perhaps be a component). But that only works if you can get all the bits from one place.

Theo

Have you looked at Digi-Key

Only snag is 12 quid shipping if under 50 quid order. Order on day 1, delivered on day 3 (excluding weekends). You have to pay the VAT to the UPS man on delivery - it all comes from the USA.

lose the contents of my basket. I build up things in baskets over time as I consume them, and then order if something I need runs out, or the basket gets to a reaonable size. On many occasions, Rapid have simply lost the whole basket, so they don't get the order. Furthermore, I don't even start building up a basket anymore - they only get an order if I can think of enough things to buy from them on the spur of the moment.

In message , Andrew Gabriel wrote

Doesn't the basket content get stored on your own machine as a cookie? You may be deleting it as a result of clean up, disk optimisation or running something like Ad-aware or a virus checker.

I'd temporarily forgotten about them. I hope they make some inroads, would be good to shake the market up a bit.

Ah. I thought they were shipping from the UK, though that delivery doesn't sound so bad. Pity they can't pre-qualify the VAT - various other US suppliers can (to the point of adding VAT to an order that would ordinary scrape through the 'under 18 pounds' limit). Do you just pay the VAT, or any additional fees to UPS (like you do with Royal Mail)? What happens to business orders if not VAT registered... does Goods Inwards have to wave a credit card?

Theo

I haven't used them for a few months, but I just handed cash to the UPS guy on the doorstep.

No idea!

Sorry...no additional fees. When I used the other one (Mouser) there was about 8 quid extra to pay.

They might do this to prevent stock being reserved but never actually bought.

But they could let you set up a wishlist which you could then add to an order easily.

Owain

I think CPC do this by letting you put anything in the basket, stock levels notwithstanding. You just have to check the 'in stock' column before checking out.

None of that. But I have several different computers I run browsers on, so if I login on a new one and there's no cookie there, that might explain why the basket is lost. Certainly not come across that with any other shopping basket.

No additional fees -just the VAT, but the vat is on the goods plus the notional value of the 'free' delivery. Yes you pay on delivery unless you have a UPS deferment account.

BTW Mouser are also now doing free delivery over £50, and are usually cheaper than both Digikey and Farnell. Mouser also offer Fedex, who I think send a VAT invoice later rather than collecting on delivery.