RS Components - sell only to businesses?

[Andy Hall]

So run off some headed paper on the laser printer.....

[Frank Erskine]

Although my employer had an account I always (when making 'private' 'cash' purchases) at the trade counter, paid by plastic and there was no problem. Actually, even for 'official' buying I preferred to use my official Barclaycard most of the time, to avoid the hassle of having to get an order number from the regional office!

It's virtually two years since I retired (early!!!) and I'm not sure whether or not the old 'official' account ('Delivery Point Code', ISTR) is still open...

As has been suggested previously, I think the problem is with the local authority, who might have issues with RS trading in a non-"retail park". After all though, money is money (even if plastically delivered!) - I've had no problems with either RS or Canford Audio, who are both officially 'trade only'.

[Adam Aglionby]

RS generally have advantage of actually having stock.

Theres always CPC as well, which are part of Farnell but bizarrely can have different pricing on things.

RS` web site is friendlier though always good for tracking down what you need and price checking on P/N with Farnell and Mouser,

though US based can be very competitive on some components even with the shipping. Gold compared against some semi`s isn`t worth that much by weight ;-)

General day to day like

Adam

[Frank Erskine]

CPC is really the 'consumer' end of the market. I have no problem with that; in fact it's very useful at times, but it does tend to towards Maplins plus quite a bit of white goods spares.

Farnell and RS are IMHO the best for real 'electronics' bits... in fact Farnell probably have the edge, but RS do have trade counters around the place... :-)

I still miss local "radio shops" from the 60s who used to have just about everything you wanted, be it a universal dropper, or a white-spot transistor for 17/6d...

... or a Wearite PHF2 for 3/11d...

Well it was cheaper than the PA2 at 4/6d, and just as good if you were prepared to mess about with the reaction circuitry a bit.

[mike]

Yes - I'm not really stuck for ideas on how to get around them - but I just wonder why the hassle in the first place. Actually Mr Taxman might get my piece of headed notepaper someday and wonder where this company of mine really is. After all the gov need the Vat from my £20 component. You're not suggesting I make up a false address of course :-)

[Andy Hall]

Either a hangover from the past or a planning restriction making it necessary not to operate as a retailer. Different organisations get around this in different ways.

Of course not, and even if the taxman did see this, you would not be defrauding him, so there would be no interest.

If you operate as a business and you are not VAT registered, then the seller charges you VAT which you can't recover - exactly the same as a consumer.

It is only if you do register for VAT and attempt to recover what you are charged that you come into their scanners. If you are not billing out any business with VAT charged then eventually they will look at the situation and de-register you. There are cases where a business may be legitimately claiming back VAT on purchases and not charging any or much on output anyway.

[Tim Morley]

Just use farnells :)

[Adam Aglionby]

Good old Browns in Edinburgh , a certain red haired chap whose answer to almost any component request was the ever friendly `NUP!` followed by a stare until you left ;-)

Adam

[Alan]

In message , Frank Erskine wrote

CPC is a million miles away from Maplin. Their paper catalogue is two thousand seven hundred pages with most of the white good spares not listed. You have to phone to get the white goods and equipment spares.

Farnell and CPC are part of the same organisation.

I can still remember Bi-PrePack (sp?) in a back street shop in the Southend area which had full page adverts in many of the electronic magazines where you could buy (mainly) reject transistors cheaply.

Around the same time Radio Spares (RS) were also known within my work place as Reject Spares. They used to over-paint the manufactures part numbers to put their own numbers on ICs. On removing the paint you would find that two items with the same RS number were from two different suppliers with different specifications.

[<me9]

That wasn't Mr C Sinclair, with MAT101s etc.?

[Ian White]

"Organisation" is putting it a bit strongly. The two companies share the same ownership but very little else.

Farnell are primarily a components company, competing head-to-head with RS. They deal mainly in the professional components market, and aim to provide stable supplies of named components from named manufacturers - the kind of things you can get a detailed data sheet for. Likewise, the manufacturers of these components deal in stable product lines that they aim to keep available for many years, along with spares where applicable.

I regularly send 100-line orders to Farnell, and find that almost every line is in stock. The rest I can usually pick up from RS, although some things are only available in the Farnell catalogue, which is why the main order always goes to them.

If components are temporarily out of stock from distributors like Farnell and RS, that isn't carelessness or penny-pinching. They hate it just as much as the customers do, because they lose custom - or at the very least, they will lose money on sending back-orders carriage free. It is a big part of any distributor's business to monitor sales of every product line, and to make sure that stocks are adequate to cover the forecast outflows.

But what they cannot cover is some customer (or their own warehouse staff) accidentally typing an extra zero in the "qty" box, or not understanding that they should have ordered 1 box containing 100 items - not 100 boxes. Over-orders by factors of 10 or 100 will punch big holes in the most careful stock flow forecasting, and are probably one of the main causes of temporary shortages.

CPC are in a very different business. Their traditional customer base is retail shops that sell consumer electronics and other consumer goods, and also doing repairs. At the lower end of the product market this is a totally different manufacturing model: factories produce short, intensive runs and then it's all over, re-tool and on to something completely different. That product may never be available again.

So a lot of CPC's catalogue lines are doomed to come and go, according to whatever is currently available. When a product line comes to en end, CPC's buyers will generally find something else to fill that slot... but it may not be quite what you thought you were seeing in the catalogue, and the stock code will be different too.

Because of these completely different business models, I would NOT want to see much closer integration between CPC and Farnell. I have accounts with both (as well as with RS), and strongly prefer to keep on dealing with them as completely separate operations.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I recently put in an order to RS which included some voltage regulators. The website said they were in stock, but the consignment arrived the next day without them - the delivery note giving a date for them to follow. Next day *one* arrived in the usual paper bag inside an A4 jiffy. Next day the rest... Makes me wonder if they have a fixed price contract with DHL.