General > General Technical Chat
RS Components new crappy webiste
Simon:
They have done it again. Just found this part on the analogue devices website then found it on RS via findchips: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/instrumentation-amplifiers/7798978//?cm_mmc=aff-_-uk-_-findchip-_-7798978&utm_medium=buyNow&utm_source=supplyFrame
So I thought OK, not the cheapest, now I know what category they are usually in lets see what else there is on offer..... oh..... it's in the instrumentation amplifier section... OK, yes they are technically instrumentation amplifiers but i assume there is now a parameter selection for the type of instrumentation amplifier function. Oh don't be silly, It's RS. LT parts are great but expensive, I am sure another so called distributor other than RS has these sorts of things and they will have correctly categorized them!
Cerebus:
Another classic RS fuckup. I took a look at the table Simon indirectly refers to above and found this:
Now, I'm looking at the whole "Instrumentation Amplifiers" table and there is one part they are holding a "Maximum Voltage Gain" parameter for, and that 'gain' is 0.172 dB (I suspect that it would be completely lost on the folks at RS that a gain of 0.172dB is obvious an error figure of some sort.*). Just one part, it's blank for all the others. The part, if you select on that field, is an AD8221, which actually has a maximum voltage gain of 1000, aka 60 dB, not 0.172 dB. Don't worry though, that's only wrong by a factor of 1000, what's that amongst friends?
What the fuck do they think they are doing?. They waste screen and database space to hold a selection parameter for one part and one part only, failing to populate it for the other 341 parts in that table. Then they even get the value stored there completely wrong. To put it in terms that the folks at RS might understand, suspecting that electronics specific stuff confuses them, it's like having a box for 'colour' on a page where you're buying t-shirts and then filling it in with 'white' for one product which happens to be a black t-shirt and leaving the rest blank. All having that parameter selectable can do is make it harder to find a suitable part. It doesn't merely fail to add value from their service, it actually takes it away!
* Perhaps this is why they do so badly at website design, they've go a metric somewhere that tells them how many customers they have gained and every time they make a website change the number goes up. Only they have failed to notice the minus sign at the front of it, 'sums' being hard and all that.
Simon:
They did one better than that for filling wrong numbers in. I bought £32k of stock off them for a mere tenner! yup! and I ordered in two batches. Cleared them out just to teach them a lesson. I even emailed them about a month later offering to sell them back to them as "I no longer needed them/bought in error". I did not even get a reply. When a couple of months later they got more in they increased the price by a about £2, so I reasoned that in volume this stuff is worth £8'500. Yup, instead of doing a deal with me and I would have happily taken say 50p a piece for them to have them back in stock days later at a cost of a little over £2'000 they paid £8'500 for more to arrive 3 months later and put the price up to be more than what say Farnell or anyone else charge for the same price thus making themselves uncompetitive. they really could not care less. They probably don't even know about websites like findchips and octopart, well they do, they just rely on company buyers buying into their "come to us, do enough business and we will give you a discount". one day when say in 10 years they go bust they might figure out that it was the engineers that were picking the parts, no that no one is making that stuff that is 10 or more years old no one is ordering from them because 10 years ago they made life impossible for the engineers that kept them in business.
I am constantly finding replacements for parts our assembler cannot get. The BOM was made out with Farnell numbers. the buyer sends me the problem parts and naturally unless RS just happen to have the identical manufacturers number I go to Mouser or Digi Key as to find an otherwise compatible but not the same part I need a parametric search that works.
Hopeless absolutely hopeless. Like you say, if it was an individual we would be very worried about their suicidal nature and trying to get them professional help. But it's OK, it's only several hundred individuals jobs and more than one may be suicidal when they loose they jobs and realize what a stupid employer they worked for. The last remaining British owned supplier is putting itself out of business. I suppose they can at least say they are only as bad as other incapable British business's.
I suspect the web developers are the ones with the most secure jobs, we seem to keep going round in circles with RS, they fuck it up, then sort of fix it, then fuck it up again, then eventually sort of fix it and so it goes on perpetually gradually getting worse and worse. Bit like company IT departments who most of the time just make life impossible for everyone else and at the end of the day the only skill they have is to punch in a password so that they can do for you what you could have done yourself without it taking 4 times longer.
Cerebus:
As of this morning, the RS website seems to have reverted to the former version. Went looking for solder, suddenly realised that I was not looking at the even more horrible new site, just the horrible old site.
BradC:
Unfortunately it's still "new and awful" here.
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