General > General Technical Chat
Digi-Key has changed and it is not very good
tooki:
--- Quote from: ataradov on October 13, 2020, 08:18:49 pm ---Ok, I figured out the sorting issue. The parts that are sorted out of order because they sort by MOQ price no matter the quantity entered. So in case of 1111 pcs, they take the price of 1000 pcs as it is the closest price break. And what they show you in the list is the price for 1000 pcs. But the final order will also include 111 parts at a higher price.
So instead of completely removing the listings for items that don't fit the search criteria, they do this mystery math.
--- End quote ---
I don’t think so, since that’s not how price breaks work. Something in the algorithm seems to get confused when items are either normally stocked but currently not in stock or third-party (both resulting in the “active @ qty” instead of “price @ qty”), when the part status is obsolete or discontinued. It’s not a “mystery algorithm”, it’s a bug.
While I think the tone in this thread has become far too antagonistic and aggressive, especially since we already got a nice reply from a DK employee showing that they want to listen*, I do agree with the sentiment that this interface update was released prematurely. It definitely needed more testing, both fundamental usability testing as well as pure bug testing.
My last job before beginning my electronics training was in usability. Trust me, if a company is saying “we’d love to do 1 on 1 usability testing with you”, they’re interested in getting it right. It’s not an empty “we take it seriously (but actually we don’t give a shit)” response.
ataradov:
--- Quote from: tooki on October 13, 2020, 09:43:48 pm ---I don’t think so, since that’s not how price breaks work. Something in the algorithm seems to get confused when items are either normally stocked but currently not in stock or third-party (both resulting in the “active @ qty” instead of “price @ qty”), when the part status is obsolete or discontinued. It’s not a “mystery algorithm”, it’s a bug.
--- End quote ---
Yes, it is a bug. The issue is the same with 1000 qty.
--- Quote from: tooki on October 13, 2020, 09:43:48 pm ---got a nice reply from a DK employee showing that they want to listen*
--- End quote ---
We had so many good replies from Autodesk people before they completely gutted and killed Eagle. This is a very old story. Nothing will change, since engineers are not actually in charge of anything, they will do as told, even if they care (I have no doubt about that at all).
A simple thing that will resolve the whole marketplace issue is a setting in the profile to set the default state for the "Include" checkbox. This is trivial to implement if you actually want to be helpful.
tooki:
--- Quote from: ataradov on October 13, 2020, 09:24:00 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on October 13, 2020, 09:19:34 pm ---Probably because nothing you’ve searched for has any marketplace vendors. There is VERY little marketplace product in DK right now. You can easily verify this by clearing the “include marketplace” checkbox and noticing that the number of results remains unchanged.
--- End quote ---
The transistors shown above have 2 non-DK items. Can you easily spot them? Not really. You can if you are very familiar with the way DK names their parts. Like all transistors always start with "TRANS". But if you are not familiar with the naming scheme, you are screwed.
They are clearly doing the marketing thing where they pretend that the shitty behavior that will generate them some money is actually good. They clearly default to the settings that will show the most products regardless of where that what people actually want.
Also, what do you mean by this:
--- Quote from: tooki on October 13, 2020, 09:19:34 pm ---There’s no evidence that DK is allowing alternative suppliers of the same parts. Accusing them of scamming is a serious allegation, and there is zero evidence of this.
--- End quote ---
Again, look at those transistors, there are 2 different alternative suppliers.
And if I wanted to buy from NTE, I would buy from NTE. What is even the point of this whole thing? I can understand vendors selling unique parts that DK will never carry on their own. This would be actually cool. But why add other distributors?
--- End quote ---
FYI, I changed the first section of text you replied to while you were replying, after checking it with that specific example. I agree, it’s impossible to see which are marketplace vendors. But at least it is trivially easy to exclude them from the results altogether. (Now they just need to let me set that as a search default, since for me, there is never a situation where I will want to order from a marketplace vendor, due to obnoxious Swiss customs fees.)
What I meant by no suppliers of the same part is that they aren’t allowing additional suppliers of the same SKU (the way Amazon does). Taking the 2N3904 example, if we restrict to “active” parts only, the only exact duplication of manufacturer part number is “2N3904”, once for NTE (which is simply using the generic base part number) and some company selling bare dice as special order.
I am in 100% agreement with you about the “what is the point of this?” issue, as evidenced by me saying pretty much exactly the same thing in my feedback email to Digi-Key: I go to a vendor website because I want to order from them, not someone else. If I wanted to do a multi-vendor shopping comparison, I would have gone to a multi-vendor comparison site like octopart!
tooki:
--- Quote from: ataradov on October 13, 2020, 09:48:02 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on October 13, 2020, 09:43:48 pm ---got a nice reply from a DK employee showing that they want to listen*
--- End quote ---
We had so many good replies from Autodesk people before they completely gutted and killed Eagle. This is a very old story. Nothing will change, since engineers are not actually in charge of anything, they will do as told, even if they care (I have no doubt about that at all).
A simple thing that will resolve the whole marketplace issue is a setting in the profile to set the default state for the "Include" checkbox. This is trivial to implement if you actually want to be helpful.
--- End quote ---
While your fears are certainly justified, given how many companies have done just that, I think we should be fair and give them a chance to get it right before bringing out the pitchforks. I don’t like how this thread is quickly going in the direction of an angry mob. We certainly won’t get taken seriously if we come across as a horde of irrational, implacable banshees.
eevcandies:
What I meant by no suppliers of the same part is that they aren’t allowing additional suppliers of the same SKU
Oh is this what you mean??? Keep dreaming
Once approved, you are given access to your own supplier portal. You determine the products you sell, you determine your price, you set up your shipping, and once a customer orders your product
from digikey.com you ship directly to them.
The list is not showing you parts that aren’t cut tape — they’ve finally concatenated different packaging of the same PART into one line item, so you’re simply seeing that other packaging exists.
You miss the point entirely...when I select the FILTER cut tape, the ONLY parts that should show are cut tape. If you are looking at a potential ist of 300 cut tape choices, having 4 other categories (full reels, digireels (lacking prices), etc) included, makes the list 4 times longer and more importantly each screen can then only only show 1/3 to 1/4 as many parts able to be compared due to all of the wasted lines...NOT good.
This has been brought up fpr several weeks and nothing has been done.
I want a supplier that cares about the quality of their products and screens out the crap but I think Digi-Key just fell off the cliff.
So far it's been a good trip downhill with their webpage.
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