Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mschuster91 303 days ago
Digikey is nuts anyway. I ordered less than 100 euros worth of stuff (but still free shipping?!) for a ham radio DATV receiver kit from them and the package showed up like 30 hours later. From the US to Germany. And given just how freaking many components it was, handling of all these single-piece mini packages is insane.

I seriously wonder if Digikey lost money on that order, shipping alone must have cost 20-30€, and on top come all the antistatic bags, handling costs, payment costs.
3 comments
blackguardx 303 days ago
The Digi-key situation is funny. Going forward, ordering from Digi-key will be cheaper for europeans than for folks in the US. Digi-key operates a bonded warehouse where they don't pay tariffs until it gets shipped to a customer. ICs that are sent from China to Digi-key and then to europeans will pay no US tariffs and often with free shipping deals as you mentioned.

Digi-key never offerred free shipping for US customers and now we will have to pay these high tariffs too.

link
crote 303 days ago
Digikey pricing is designed around it. They give some really serious volume discounts: they'll happily charge $0.10 / unit when you're buying 1 while charging $0.002 / unit when you're buying a whole reel of 10.000. Similarly, they charge a $7 reeling fee if you don't want cut tape.

Combine that with a stupidly efficient order picking process, and I wouldn't be surprised if they basically break even on small orders.

You've got to remember that those small one-off orders are almost always for industrial prototyping. You don't need to make a lot of money selling 5 units for a hand-assembled prototype when you know you will be selling them 500 units for the initial automated run, or even 50.000 units for the final production run.

Additionally, there's a lot of value in being a one-stop-shop: they might not make a lot of money on small-quantity low-volume items, but if an engineer can purchase their entire BOM from you at once, she is unlikely to go looking for a competitor to save a few bucks on the higher-margin items.

link
kjs3 303 days ago
the package showed up like 30 hours later

Or...they have a warehouse in Germany?

all these single-piece mini packages

Automated pick-and-package.

link
CalChris 303 days ago
DigiKey itself only ships from Thief River Falls. But they also have direct shipping from European suppliers to European customers (Marketplace). So I'm just gonna guess that those parts had to have been shipped from a European supplier.
link
mschuster91 303 days ago
Nope. Thief River Falls, showed up as such in parcel tracking.
link