When I was watching the video, I saw that the website showed a total time of 5 to 8 days, and Dave had configured the request to be for a 7-day delivery. I didn't have to read the footnote on the pcbshopper website to know that displaying an option that could take anywhere from 5 to 8 days when you need the board in 7 days is
outright lying. To criticize this decision is puzzling to say the least, worst-case time is obviously the most valuable metric if you need the board within x days. But maybe that's just because I'm an engineer and I take the principle of designing for worst case too far.
Then add a "realistic" estimate of board delivery based on historical user feedback.
!!! What do you think the chances are of random people regularly back-calculating and reporting delivery times? What's in it for them? And what are the chances of their numbers being accurate? And how do you factor for Rural vs Urban, Domestic vs Business? This is a wildly impractical idea, predicting
actual shipping times is a problem that is not at all specific to pcbshopper, and one that is completely unsolved at that.
(b) Minor spec changes when you are pricing can make a big difference to the end price... You might see that it saves $40 by waiting an extra day.. This all gets hidden..
"Hidden"? Just try increasing the number of days and see! I'm sure pcbshopper could send out a bunch of extra requests with various parameters relaxed in order to provide such information, but you can see how long it takes to scrape all the websites already. Multiplying that by dozens of config permutations would make the website unusably slow, and we haven't even discussed how to
display this information yet.
See, it turns out that it's easier to criticize than it is to create. I feel bad for Bob who has put a lot of effort into producing an undeniably useful website (even if you're of the opinion that you've "grown beyond" pcbshopper, it's
obviously tremendously useful to newbies at the
very least), and all he seems to be getting back is incorrect criticisms and/or demands for wildly impractical features.