Mouser shipping tip to save money.

[johngineer]

Just posting a recent observation, which has some regard to George's original statement:

"One thing I *do not* like about mouser is that they don't give you a real estimate of your shipping before you check out. They add the shipping charges when they bill your CC - you never really know what it's going to be. After a while you start to get a feel for what an order will cost in shipping - but there can be some real surprises."

I got really tired of this too. I'd place an order with Mouser and they'd bill my CC with the total + shipping estimate. Then they'd revise the shipping charge from the estimate to the real cost (sometimes up, sometimes down) and bill my CC again. The original charge would then be cancelled, but this might take 4 or 5 days if I placed my order at the end of the week.

I'm not sure if it's a new option, or just that I never saw it before, but recently I noticed that there is now a USPS shipping option at Mouser. I've placed a few small (< $50) orders using this option, and I've been pleasantly surprised. Not only is the shipping cost lower than UPS or FedEx, but in all 3 cases I received my order a day earlier than I expected, and my card has not been charged multiple times to account for discrepancies between estimated and real shipping cost. For large orders, this may not be optimal (if you can get free upgraded UPS/FedEx shipping by hitting some threshold, that might be better), but for small orders it's great!

[whitnasty1]

Actually, Newark is based out of norther South Carolina, around the Greenville,SC area. I live in Wilmington, NC which is on the NC/SC border, and I always receive my packages the next day from Newark with UPS Ground. I have always had great experiences with Newark, and they are my go to supplier. I am a design engineer at Sturdy Corporation in Wilmington, NC and we mainly deal with DigiKey, Newark, and Arrow Electronics, and Newark is still by far my favorite, except when ordering extremely large orders for production, DigiKey can sometimes have better pricing. I am not the most patient person on the planet though, so I chose to go with Newark 99% of the time. UPS Ground from DigiKey takes a while sometimes, and whoever said they were debating switching to USPS... I would advise against that, there is no guarantee of when your order will arrive, and I have ended up waiting a pretty good amount of time sometimes when using USPS, I personally will not use them anymore unless it is the only option available.

[Sembazuru]

For those of us in the mid-atlantic region, if you are looking for tools or mechanical stuff, make sure McMaster Carr is on your short list. Their prices might not be the best, but since they ship out of NewJersey I can get overnight shipping to northern Delaware with UPS ground. I've even gotten stuff delivered same day for orders placed in the morning requesting ground shipping. I was shocked (yet extremely pleased) the first time that happened.

I hope Lady Ada and her crew knows this. (Yes, kissing up to the teacher on my first post)

What!!?!?!?!???!?!??!! I got "Your message contains banned spam words. Please rephrase your post without the following words : J*rsey" (my edit) on my first attempt to post! I know it is part of the name of an extremely low-brow TV show, but come on. It is part of the name of a state, as well as the name of a region of England, as well as a type of cow. Someone needs to rethink some of the words in the spam filter...