What happened to Digikey $30 FedEx Intl. Priority?

[JamesAus]

I was just placing some Digikey orders (Yes...more than one, don't want them held for ransom at customs), and noticed that there is no longer an option for FedEx prepaid, the only prepaid option is UPS Saver or something the like. When did all this come about? I also did some sums on the AUD pricing, which I'd never really used before (because in the past it always seemed as though they added a ridiculous premium that in no way reflected true exchange rates). Total for an order to my door including US pricing, current exchange rate, CC foreign currency fee & $30 shipping it worked out to AU$945, Placing the order in AUD to begin with worked out to AU$946. I'm pleasantly surprised. Wonder what will happen when the exchange rate is more in our favour again?

[echen1024]

How did you manage to purchase $945 worth of stuff at Digi-Key? Does SWMBO know?

[Macbeth]

I was just placing some Digikey orders (Yes...more than one, don't want them held for ransom at customs), and noticed that there is no longer an option for FedEx prepaid, the only prepaid option is UPS Saver or something the like. When did all this come about? I also did some sums on the AUD pricing, which I'd never really used before (because in the past it always seemed as though they added a ridiculous premium that in no way reflected true exchange rates). Total for an order to my door including US pricing, current exchange rate, CC foreign currency fee & $30 shipping it worked out to AU$945, Placing the order in AUD to begin with worked out to AU$946. I'm pleasantly surprised. Wonder what will happen when the exchange rate is more in our favour again?

I've often wondered what Dave's policy is on 'unsolicited' international mail - I mean, it comes with customs duty and VAT or whatever the Australian equivalent is (and I know Australian customs are supposed to be really serious about their jobs, more for the environmental pollution stuff which I agree with, than anything else).

I'm recently annoyed that my Chinese sources have started using commercial shippers such as UPS/TNT, etc. Not so much with the customs, but the importers who deem it necessary to charge £20 to "process" (ie. delay) my package, because it has £0.50p in VAT to pay. I prefer the post office slow mail EMS or whatever. It ends up just as slow but without the scumbags who have automatic customs clearance charging £20 +++ just to deliver a parcel.

Knowing how on the ball Australian customs are - Just how does he accept all his "junk" mail for Mailbag Monday / Teardown Tuesday, etc?

[EEVblog]

've often wondered what Dave's policy is on 'unsolicited' international mail - I mean, it comes with customs duty and VAT or whatever the Australian equivalent is (and I know Australian customs are supposed to be really serious about their jobs, more for the environmental pollution stuff which I agree with, than anything else).
Knowing how on the ball Australian customs are - Just how does he accept all his "junk" mail for Mailbag Monday / Teardown Tuesday, etc?

Australia has a (generous) $1000 limit for customs. Anything under that (inc postage + currency conversion) just gets passed through.
Stuff coming by courier is always more stringently enforced by the courier companies, than by Australia post with regular mail.

[digsys]

Australia has a (generous) $1000 limit for customs. Anything under that (inc postage + currency conversion) just gets passed through.
Stuff coming by courier is always more stringently enforced by the courier companies, than by Australia post with regular mail. 

Plus, if it is a true gift, donated/ free sample etc, they don't charge extra either.

[don.r]

've often wondered what Dave's policy is on 'unsolicited' international mail - I mean, it comes with customs duty and VAT or whatever the Australian equivalent is (and I know Australian customs are supposed to be really serious about their jobs, more for the environmental pollution stuff which I agree with, than anything else).
Knowing how on the ball Australian customs are - Just how does he accept all his "junk" mail for Mailbag Monday / Teardown Tuesday, etc?

Australia has a (generous) $1000 limit for customs. Anything under that (inc postage + currency conversion) just gets passed through.
Stuff coming by courier is always more stringently enforced by the courier companies, than by Australia post with regular mail.

This seems to be the case with most national mail carriers which is why I prefer that method. I'm usually not in a rush so if its slightly slower that's OK. Its usually cheaper too.

[Macbeth]

've often wondered what Dave's policy is on 'unsolicited' international mail - I mean, it comes with customs duty and VAT or whatever the Australian equivalent is (and I know Australian customs are supposed to be really serious about their jobs, more for the environmental pollution stuff which I agree with, than anything else).
Knowing how on the ball Australian customs are - Just how does he accept all his "junk" mail for Mailbag Monday / Teardown Tuesday, etc?

Australia has a (generous) $1000 limit for customs. Anything under that (inc postage + currency conversion) just gets passed through.
Stuff coming by courier is always more stringently enforced by the courier companies, than by Australia post with regular mail.

In the UK it used to be something like £50 or so, but they now have a particular "gotcha" - anything that involves the mysterious "internet" no matter what, is only allowed if it is £15 or less. Genuine gifts can get through if less than £36, but not if "internet" gifts. It is utterly ridiculous. Not so much for the actual VAT, but for the couriers who are allowed to charge whatever they want even though I have no contract with them. It pisses me off I have a bill for £20.50 because a recent import went through TNT and suffered 50 pence VAT.

I have always found EMS / Parcelforce slowmo regular parcel post delivered by the postman never seems to have this kind of extortion. I have also found so called "expedited" delivery using TNT/UPS/DHL etc from China is generally NOT trackable even given the number, and also just as slow as regular post - because the chinese box shifters pretend they have stock when they don't.

Anyway - keep up the Mailbag and Teardown stuff. Always entertaining 

[digsys]

... I was just placing some Digikey orders ... $30 shipping ...

Having dealt with Mouser, Digikey and Newark for a while now, they keep changing the rules !! and it's annoying. Mouser used to
have an exclusive agreement with X-ON, so you paid 20% more IF you bought from USA, unless you had a (friends) local address,
but then they screwed you on shipping. So I opened a freight forwarding account. Then Digikey had a flat $30 rate to OZ with no
price markups (still do), so I switched. I emailed Mouser and told them good riddance :-)
Then Mouser switched to a flat $30 rate and said I can have USA prices. And it goes on and on ... Digikey have been the fairest so far.

[peter.mitchell]

Hmm thats weird, i get free shipping on orders over $150 from Digikey, FedEx Intl Priority.
Not complaining.

Also, Australian customs are no way near as strict as one would initially assume. I have ordered endless amounts of stuff that would either be illegal, or I would have to pay excess on, but nothing.

[JamesAus]

Free shipping on orders from Digikey and Mouser only applies if you purchase in Australian dollars. Generally speaking (at least up until now) it's been way cheaper to cop the shipping charge and pay in USD. Also I'm pretty sure that AUD free shipping thing has always been over $200, not $150.

For small orders where I'm not going to meet that free freight point and it can be got from Mouser it is sometimes worth using x-on, although almost guaranteed to take twice as long as ordering direct from Mouser. Also a good option when you want to order something from Mouser but you know it can't be shipped direct to you, or freight is going to cost a fortune

As for the customs thing and paying taxes. Yes, they do police it, although probably more so if you use one of the larger international couriers (not postal services) where they do customs clearance in-house. Once you go over that $1000 threshold it does get delayed, you do get phone calls, and you do have to pay.

[microbug]

Why doesn't anyone use Farnell? In the UK they provide free one-day delivery for orders over £20 or for those under it's £3.50 (or thereabouts).

[Psi]

A while back i asked digikey about the NZD prices on their NZ website and how the NZ-USA exchange rate comes into play.
They said all the prices are updated at the start of each month using whatever the exchange rate is on that day.

[Bored@Work]

Why doesn't anyone use Farnell? In the UK they provide free one-day delivery for orders over £20 or for those under it's £3.50 (or thereabouts).

And at one point even you will learn that the British Empire is gone and Farnell does different things in different parts of the world and the whole world is not like the UK. For example, Farnell outright refuses to sell to individuals in my country. Despite all the Farnell/Element14 wank about "for engineers and hobbyists" Farnell just does not want to take my hard earned money at all.

Being a hobbyist at night and an engineer at day I of course get my little revenge by preventing my employer from buying from Farnell whenever I can. If my hard earned money is not good enough for them, they aren't worth to get money from the place where I earn it.

[Psi]

I use the farnell NZ site on occasion. They do free next day shipping on orders over $45.
However there is no NZ farnell warehouse, all orders ship from AUS.

RS however, has a local trade counter in my city which i can go buy things on the spot.
They also do free next-day shipping on any value order, even a $0.05 smt resistor

For 95% of the stuff i get farnell and RS are more expensive than digikey and i do orders over the digikey free shipping limit (NZ$125) quite often. So as long as its not urgent i use digikey.
If it is urgent, then RS is better due to having an actual shop near me.

 

[mikeselectricstuff]

In the UK it used to be something like £50 or so, but they now have a particular "gotcha" - anything that involves the mysterious "internet" no matter what, is only allowed if it is £15 or less. Genuine gifts can get through if less than £36, but not if "internet" gifts. It is utterly ridiculous. Not so much for the actual VAT, but for the couriers who are allowed to charge whatever they want even though I have no contract with them.

Nonsense -  how exactly would they know how an item was ordered?
The limit is £18 for goods, £36 for gifts (ISTR it's actually defined in Euros so varies a bit), regardless of origin (outside the EU of course).

[JamesAus]

In the UK, Farnell pricing is very reasonable, but here it's a very different story.

Reasons I'd use Digikey over Farnell / Element 14
The Digikey parametric search is FAR superior to any other I've seen / used.
Digikey pricing is "You get what you see". Farnell / Element 14 pricing is just an over inflated guide, real pricing can only be had in large quantities, complete BOMs etc, and getting a quote from your account manager.

Because of the above reasons I'm far more likely to use components in a design that meet specs and are stocked at Digikey in large quantities, at reasonable prices. Of course once manufacturing is handed over to a turnkey supplier it's quite likely the entire BOM is sourced from Farnell anyway (at the real OEM prices).

It really doesn't end there either. I'm not advocating Digikey as being the best, or a one stop shop by any means, but they certainly do a pretty good job of making life a little easier than most. Some items at Digikey / Mouser are actually quite expensive. Connectors of pretty much any type and PCB mounting hardware / standoffs etc can be sourced significantly cheaper through other distributors, even in less than full pack quantities.

[TMM]

Why doesn't anyone use Farnell? In the UK they provide free one-day delivery for orders over £20 or for those under it's £3.50 (or thereabouts).

Element14-AU/Farnell do free shipping for orders over $50. I have had terrible trouble with their Australian warehouse mucking up my orders however. The staff who stock their warehouse must be incompetent because i have received the wrong components at least 10 times now and about half of those they resent exactly the same wrong component a second time... You'd think after the first time the person picking the parts would check that the component looks somewhat like the picture on their website. To add insult to injury they have now started insisting that when they send the wrong part they do a chargeback and then re-charge the exact same amount again before shipping the replacement... requiring the customer to ring them up to provide their card number over the phone. 
Absolutely no troubles with items arriving from US, UK or Singapore warehouses however, so now i make a point of it by only ordering from element14-AU when i can't get what i need anywhere else, and then preferentially ordering items from the international warehouses.

RS Components do free shipping on any order but the shipping is factored into the price of every item so it only works out for more expensive stuff. If you just want a few resistors or something the pricing is ridiculous. If i need something small that i can't get at Jaycar (aussie brick-and-mortar electronics shop) i'll usually buy from RS Components.

[tszaboo]

At work I'm really shifting towards ordering from Digikey, for one single reason: Packaging. Farnell orders come with that "environment friendly" degradable bag, which is ridiculous, no sealing, bulky, and if you happened to put this on the shelf for a year, it already starts to degrade. Not to mention, I've tried at least 10 times to tell them to write on the bag OUR component number. If I have a BOM for 150 different component, I have to manually write on every single bag what is our component number, and it takes like 2 hour. Digikey is able to print this by default, why cannot they do this? Not to mention, when I get something in 3 different bags from Farnell. After a while it is really PITA.

[baljemmett]

In the UK it used to be something like £50 or so, but they now have a particular "gotcha" - anything that involves the mysterious "internet" no matter what, is only allowed if it is £15 or less. Genuine gifts can get through if less than £36, but not if "internet" gifts. It is utterly ridiculous. Not so much for the actual VAT, but for the couriers who are allowed to charge whatever they want even though I have no contract with them.

Nonsense -  how exactly would they know how an item was ordered?
The limit is £18 for goods, £36 for gifts (ISTR it's actually defined in Euros so varies a bit), regardless of origin (outside the EU of course).

I believe there was a recent change which removes that £18 minimum for all goods coming from the Channel Islands, so that all such packages now attract VAT - this was specifically to target the UK-based online media retailers who operate their warehouses offshore and send individual CDs/DVDs/etc. to stay under the £18 limit.  Everything else remained unaffected, as you say...

[Macbeth]

In the UK it used to be something like £50 or so, but they now have a particular "gotcha" - anything that involves the mysterious "internet" no matter what, is only allowed if it is £15 or less. Genuine gifts can get through if less than £36, but not if "internet" gifts. It is utterly ridiculous. Not so much for the actual VAT, but for the couriers who are allowed to charge whatever they want even though I have no contract with them.

Nonsense -  how exactly would they know how an item was ordered?
The limit is £18 for goods, £36 for gifts (ISTR it's actually defined in Euros so varies a bit), regardless of origin (outside the EU of course).

Nonsense? Yes I agree it's nonsense, But it is still a fact! Straight from the horses mouth.

[mikeselectricstuff]

In the UK it used to be something like £50 or so, but they now have a particular "gotcha" - anything that involves the mysterious "internet" no matter what, is only allowed if it is £15 or less. Genuine gifts can get through if less than £36, but not if "internet" gifts. It is utterly ridiculous. Not so much for the actual VAT, but for the couriers who are allowed to charge whatever they want even though I have no contract with them.

Nonsense -  how exactly would they know how an item was ordered?
The limit is £18 for goods, £36 for gifts (ISTR it's actually defined in Euros so varies a bit), regardless of origin (outside the EU of course).

Nonsense? Yes I agree it's nonsense, But it is still a fact! Straight from the horses mouth.

Like I said - your claim that internet purchases are handled differently is nonsense.

[Macbeth]

Like I said - your claim that internet purchases are handled differently is nonsense.

Ok, so why do HMRC have a page specifically about "internet" purchases? Title: Buying from abroad on the Internet - what to look out for

It clearly states that "gifts" procured from "internet" will be taxed at £15+ for VAT, rather than £36. Also no mention of your £18 valuation either. Ok, I don't know how they are to prove that something is a special occasion gift from a foreign family member vs. an internet sourced import from Shenzhen other than blind obviousness, but there you go. I don't need to respond to this as I have gave the HMRC links and you can argue with them on the matter.