[jbay808]

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.

[as-j]

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.

[robk]

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

[xxs]

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.

[ZeikJT]

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