General > General Technical Chat

Completely hopeless distributors these days

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nali:
Didn't you have a whinge a while ago on the same subject? Yes, here is it https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/distributors-are-so-thick-nowadays/msg3077330/#msg3077330


--- Quote ---The good old days of Macro Marketing and their smart girls :) That was almost 30 years ago and it's been doing downhill since.
--- End quote ---

You may be surprised to find the industry has changed a bit in 30yrs :box: Distributors have hundreds of thousands of line items and use part numbers, deal with it!

There are a few other manufacturers of 32.768kHz xtals, mainly Japanese e.g. Seiko/Epson, Kyocera, Citizen which is not too surprising considering their main use really.

peter-h:
"hundreds of thousands of line items and use part numbers, deal with it"

You miss the point completely.

Try it with resistors.

For example 2k2 0603 1% will have at least 10 and probably nearer to 100 part numbers.

Of these, probably just a few % actually exist, and most of them will be say £0.01 each, while the "right price" is around £0.001.

The bottom line is that distributors have nobody these days who knows anything about components. I wonder what their "staff training" involves?

I would have added my post to that old thread but could not find it.

TMM:

--- Quote from: Kerlin on July 09, 2021, 03:35:50 am ---I often have this conversation with our local slack Australian distributors.

"I would like to order twenty of part no 12345"
"We don't have any at the moment, but we can get them in three weeks"

HEY distributors note -
The reason that you can make a markup is because you keep stock.
That is how you make your living eh? its called offering customer service which is big thing in America.
It used to be that having a distributorship was an excuse for making a living, NOT SINCE TWENTY YEARS AGO.
When you don't keep stock then I do often order it on the net too and often get direct it to me quicker than you can.
I also have used overseas buyers/mailers to beat distributors.

--- End quote ---
This. If i'm ordering things at work, if the local distro is only a little bit more I'll still give them some business even are just backordering it, as I get the benefit of dealing with someone local for warranty. If their markup is huge and the items aren't in stock I'll go around them.

For private stuff I'll just grey import - my private time isn't worth nearly as much $, happy for it to come via the slow boat and then attempt to fix it myself instead of sending it overseas for warranty (if warranty is even honoured by grey importing).


--- Quote from: peter-h on July 10, 2021, 08:58:06 am ---"hundreds of thousands of line items and use part numbers, deal with it"

You miss the point completely.

Try it with resistors.

For example 2k2 0603 1% will have at least 10 and probably nearer to 100 part numbers.

Of these, probably just a few % actually exist, and most of them will be say £0.01 each, while the "right price" is around £0.001.

The bottom line is that distributors have nobody these days who knows anything about components. I wonder what their "staff training" involves?

I would have added my post to that old thread but could not find it.

--- End quote ---
This is pretty much a given in this day and age.
I would say the vast majority of customers buying 0603 resistors have done their research and know exactly what they are looking for. They will seek out the cheapest distributor who stocks the product with the specifications they need. This is different to say selling a wifi router or a laptop computer where are significant percentage of customers won't know what they need without some assistance. Even in the latter case there exists a market where there is little to no sales support. The computer store I go to looks like a 3rd world warehouse, cardboard boxes and crap everywhere, their counter is a folding trestle table, half the employees can barely speak english, but I go there because I know exactly what I want and they have it in stock for the cheapest price. I wouldn't ever send non tech-savvy friends/family there however, I'd just direct them to Dell where they are going to pay 50-100% more but get the service they need.

If you're a distributor and you're paying for all your salespersons to be EE-educated, some other distributor is going to undercut you by employing salespersons who don't really know about what they are selling, but can tell you that they can get A qty of  B manufacturer C product code D lead time for E price and their computer tells them that X Y and Z products are similar alternatives based on the parameters entered into their distributor database.

peter-h:
You don't need to be EE-educated to know the basics about components.

I've done this with people working for me and it takes very little training. Basically you need somebody with a reasonable brain; they can learn different kinds of resistors in the same way as they could learn different kinds of screws if working for a fastener shop. It is just a willingness to learn a bit about the job one is doing. It makes life a lot more interesting, too. Most people hate their jobs these days and this is a way to make it a lot less tedious. Not a fashionable idea these days, I know :)

The resistor example is actually a good one, because a particular P/N, say 10k 0805 1% P/N XXX might be 0.0012 (50k+) one day, and if you reorder that same P/N 6 months later it might be 0.0150. That is about 12x more expensive. I can't tell you why this happens, but it does. The pricing on these very cheap parts just varies pretty randomly. Maybe the distis do this in the hope that the customer won't notice. If you look at say mouser.com, which has a very good clear website, you see these huge wild variations with passives. It makes one wonder who pays 0.015 for a resistor, but clearly some do. Just looked and I see them for 0.003 to 0.153! And the 0.003 is still 3x the price it should be but you have to use another source for that, and it will probably be a Yageo part.

If one is building less than say 100+ then one can get everything from Mouser or Digikey, or even Farnell or RS. Well, except pricey stuff like £10 CPUs which will be a lot cheaper from a disti. But for 1k+, no.

Distis do make a nice margin, BTW. I have seen some real volume pricing which big OEMs get. I have a big customer which buys from the same distis I buy from, but in much bigger volumes (probably 100k-1M). Look up the price of a HCNW4503. I buy them 5k-10k, and normally pay about £0.60. Just very rarely I got them for £0.40. Now guess the disti's buy price. I can tell you because I have seen their bottom selling price: £0.28! So they buy it for less than this. Even allowing for manufacturer price support, the margins are huge. If you buy from say Future, Avnet, Arrow (Arrow is pretty well dysfunctional here in the UK), etc, 1k+, they are making at least 50% gross margin.


tooki:

--- Quote from: peter-h on July 08, 2021, 11:01:47 am ---Q: "Do you have any 32768Hz SMT crystals?"

A: "Is that the part number? I cant find anything for it. Thanks"

XXXXX
Inside Sales Executive
Future Electronics EMEA

 |O

--- End quote ---
Why would you not just go on their website and navigate to the crystals and select “32.768kHz” and “surface mount” in the parametric search? That shows me they currently carry 108 types, of which 9 are in stock. Took me a minute to do.

As nice as it would be to have very salesperson be an engineer, that’s just not realistic: who would go through that education only to work a low paid call center job? If a company did decide to have highly knowledgeable technical people doing sales, then they’re gonna have to pay them high salaries, and that’s going to mean that the product prices are high. (Or, like many do, that those staff are reserved for highly profitable huge-volume customers. As in, millions and millions per year, if not per month!)

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