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by google234123 692 days ago
For a hobbiest, ebay or aliexpress is cheaper. Straight from china.
3 comments

Yes. Aliexpress is cheaper, but they have the sample problem with counterfeit and mislabeled products. Furthermore, they also manipulate ratings and comments. I got an electronic filter from there that was seriously mislabeled and sent in a comment and rating based on that. It never appeared on the product page.

Amazon's electronic parts are a complete shambles of junk. Take, for instance, this page which is selling "Germanium Schottky diodes", a thing that does not exist. They have a part number for a Germanium diode, but are apparently selling a silicon based Schottky diode instead. This is simply fraud, but only different from vats of other frauds on the site because it is so blatant. Yes, the Amazon parts are typically more expensive than the Ali parts, but there is very little reason to use either one.

If you actually want to receive the part you ordered, go to Digikey or Mouser. The prices will often be better as well.

Only if your time debugging has no value.

If you are doing everything in China, you should at least go with LCSC (https://www.lcsc.com/) as they are bargain but generally not completely counterfeit.

Note: That "generally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'll use LCSC for hobbyist stuff or prototypes. I'll generally use Digikey/Mouser/Arrow/Future/etc. if I need intermediate production (up to about 10K units). Once you get above 100K units, you can utilize Chinese suppliers again as you have an on-site representative managing everything at that point.

They're okay most of the time for non-critical hobby tinkering, but counterfeit/clone/approximate parts are very commonplace on those platforms.

The advantage that specialty electronics distributors have is that they have supply-chain relationships directly with first-party manufacturers. A part with a manufacturer's name on it will come from that manufacturer. By contrast, marketplace-type sites don't care about an item's provenance.