[mmac_]

You can get a business account with Mouser/Digikey and then they just become another distributor. Your login gets discounted pricing (it's not much though) which is good for quick prototypes, and you can sometimes get an account manager to negotiate and troubleshoot directly.

I'm not sure how you qualify but you get to the point where you just RFQ to an email address and don't use the webpage. You don't need to be a $million+ purchasing outfit. They'll also schedule orders etc. at least I've seen Mouser do it.

Mouser is quite good on automated notifications - most importantly if anything in your order has changed (99% of the time it's a delivery date). Most of the other distributors do manual back orders in excel.

But their website is filled with annoying quirks. Here's such a basic use case: 1. Bring up a list of items from a search, say 100nF 0402 caps. 2. Sort by price low -> high (you'll see the icon, click that it'll work) 3. Now type in a quantity of say 100000 and find the best price on this part... yes the icon disappears when you fill in the quantity input field.

Download the CSV doesn't give price breaks.

Amusingly I just went to the digikey website which implements this functionality and.... something is broken. Can't even apply a quantity to a search. Also getting some strange loading page with a countdown clock... anti bot?