Digikey lost my saved carts

[apelly]

Meh,

My cart (actually multiple carts) were there for some months. Logging in is a requirement for multiple carts.

Something made them go away.

It will not happen again.

I'm a bit surprised nobody has shared their ordering secrets though. Copying/pasting stuff into a spreadsheet is quite a pain in the arse. Do people just use their relevant BOM export tool from their design package?

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Copying/pasting stuff into a spreadsheet is quite a pain in the arse.

Yes

Do people just use their relevant BOM export tool from their design package?

Yes

Bring it into a spreadsheet, move the columns around with separate manufacturers part and digikeys part,  compare against what you have in stock, subtract the difference, add other stuff projects to the order, up each to a reasonable buy amount, get quotes from the distributors ( I don't really bother normally, just digikey).

I save this purchase order in with the design as a sub folder.
The hard bit for me, if I lose it, is losing the part numbers. Especially the worry that you may later order the wrong part.

I don't see an easy way, even if you have a stock control database.
Not for me anyway, as a one man band.

[posplayr]

I know the thread is old, but  I'm posting to this same thread because it seems to have happened to me as well. I have read many of the posts about having your own backup and while I can understand that, I also understand that the Digikey website is intended to provide persistent storage of your orders.

I have several previous orders and carts (going back several years) I had created are all still available on the website.

I posted a picture of the Digi Key website that you use to manage a cart; there is no way to save the information you have maintained other than the implicit saving that it does itself in your cart. The only way to get anything out is a "share" which is limited to quantity, part number and customer ID. So it would seem the BOM upload is simply an import method to accumulate parts into CARTS which is the basis for orders. Several BOM's could be used to produce one order.

It would seem clear that they intend for you to use the website as a persistent and secure workspace for your orders and after you order it becomes a permanent record that you can refer to in the future.

I'm using KiCAD and have been maintaining parts information in the schematic so all is not lost except for parts I was maintaining that were not in the schematic.

I emailed the webmaster under  "Problems With Digi-Key Web Site", I will see if they can restore the cart. If you call Sales support they are clueless and could not answer the most basic questions without going to ask and even then I had to put the words in their mouth to get the answer I was after. Basically the sales supports recommendation was to only upload BOMs and to not store them on line which is counter to the way the website it is designed. They also recommend using Internet Explorer and not Chrome which is yet another rabbit hole recommendation. I have been using Chrome for several years now.

There seems to have been a significant upgrade to the website coincident with the lost of my cart. The login is a popup now. What I'm hoping is that this was a transient due to a web site upgrade and that they can simply restore the cart and everything will be back to normal.

I do not maintain my schematics on the Digkey website, but I would like to not be in fear of losing anything I type into that website as it has worked very well in the past. I use DigiKey part numbers and links as a main BOM reference because of the ease of ordering parts.

Will update if I hear back from the Webmaster.

[posplayr]

Well I think I found out the answer to my question. When you save to a Shopping Cart, that cart is anonymous unless you give it a name. While you have an anonymous cart it seems to persist as long as you are logged in which can even be maintained when my Windows machine shuts down and I restart it.

The big deal seems to be that you need to "Save " the shopping cart (it is at the top of the shopping cart) and give it a name and then you can recall it.

I don't have to do this in Amazon or ebay where I also maintain running shopping carts under my login that exist on multiple computers.

Apparently there is no default behavior to save an unnamed shopping cart that has information in it, they assume because you did not give it a name that you don't care about 50+ items in the shopping cart and it is deleted.

Some of this information is simply based on my inference of observation as I could not get an answer yet that did not involve "did you use the BOM upload manager" which I have not done yet.

This is simply a matter question of "How do you save manually entered shopping cart items?".

The answer is at the top left of your shopping cart is a "save button" and a box to give it a name.

FYI, when I finally get to a finished schematic and layout and when my my KiCAD generated BOM is complete I will probably auto generate and upload the BOM to the Digikey BOM Manager, but I'm just not there yet.

[KL27x]

You mean that some companies retain a cart for more than 30 minutes?

With Mouser, you can not only save your carts and/or projects. You can also give parts your own internal identification numbers/names/pcb designator. You can email your carts and/or projects to yourself or other people in case you don't trust them to keep your info. You can give permission for other parties to view your projects, only; or you can give them permission to edit the contents.

And yeah, your default cart is saved, even if you don't explicitly save it. Well as long as you are logged in while editing it. I've never lost a cart, anyway.

Whenever I am ordering components unique to a specific project, I will save the carts and put them into a project if multiple carts. When the parts arrive, I can put them all together with the name and date of the project/cart. So I can ditch the bulky packaging, for instance, and just give a small handwritten label to each component. "22uF 1206," and the fact it is part of the "[xxxx] project" means I can look up the project/cart name on my Mouser account to find the actual manufacturer part number and datasheet.

Mouser has an amazing website. They don't sell everything, but most of my admittedly simple projects are covered by Mouser. Usually I make my BOM just copying and pasting into Excel from my Mouser project/cart. Units per, designator, part number, description, can all be put in a Mouser project. Everything you need for a BOM; it might be a pain to copy/paste, but you also get links to the full datasheet, lead-time/stock, and current price. And a search bar to check for the latest and greatest (and cheapest). This is why Mouser is my first option.

[posplayr]

The ability to save your own cart information local to your own machine would really be nice. At Digikey,  there is no way to download anything but a qty, ref number and Digikey part number so you can share it.

To do more I created a separate account created the BOM/Shopping Cart then gave the login information to the other party. Brute force but it worked.

Right now I'm probably about 80% DigiKey and almost the rest in MOUSER. A few odds and ends on special things with the lowest cost supplier from findchips.com but only on expecive parts, usually I just go with Digikey as a default if they have it.