They sell a lot of things, but fairly recently they've started to act as an online market place for other vendors, so a lot of the products are from other sellers.
I see the marketplace gets a lot of hate here. For the hobbyist or for personal projects I can see how the marketplace would be a pain, but for businesses or workplaces I think it's great. I'm making at least one DK order a week for my team/lab at work, sometimes multiple if we have a lot going on. Need a new scope? I
could go through the process to get Siglent added as an approved vendor, wait a few weeks, get a quote from Siglent, generate a PO, wait for approval, then make the purchase. Or I could buy the Siglent gear through Digikey on our account and get on with my day. I suspect this is the exact use case DK had in mind for the marketplace.
You don't
have to buy the marketplace products, and there's even a checkbox to exclude it from search results, so I don't really get what the issue is?
I mean take over their business and start selling more hardware parts: screws, nuts, drills, etc.
mcmaster is not as reliable to Canada as digikey is.
Good tip on the bearings!
McMaster also treats you differently as a business/individual, and if you're using it for personal projects not having fixed shipping costs is insane. I've often been hit with $100+ of (ground) shipping on $100 of hardware because it comes in 3+ separate packages from different warehouses. Hitting the order button is a huge gamble. My personal McMaster account got muddled with all our work accounts, and I always cheap next-day shipping. After I got it separated from the work accounts, no more overnight shipping and every order since has taken a week to arrive.