RS components invoices are of the shite.
The website has manufacturers part numbers and a description. The invoice only states RS order codes and a descriptions which doesn't match the description on the website. It would be practical if they put the part numbers on the invoice.
Their voltage regulator section is now a mix of linear, LDO and SMPS controllers. What a mess, if you select LDO and Linear you don't get any output voltage results.
MARKET SHARE GAINS DRIVEN BY BEING FIRST CHOICE
>2x market growth rate target
We aim to grow at greater than two times the market, driving share gains by:
- Growing customer count
- Become first choice; grow promoter base
- Drive more traffic to websites
- Increase online conversion by improving experience
This, coupled with their persistent reduction of in-country stock and the removal of the free delivery for anything under $70 has just pushed me over to Digikey. Digikey is faster to arrive than most RS "global stock" (4 days vs 5-7), and their shipping is free over $60 (vs $70+GST). Then of course the massive advantage of a significantly larger product range.
RS were "good enough, fast enough and cheap enough". They no longer tick any of those boxes.
In the UK businesses get free delivery, but that has turned to shit as Parcel Farce (force) have become hopeless. I was desperately in need of parts that went from AM delivery to PM delivery to me standing outside work after work waiting for a driver that was a 5 minute walk around the corner. I then spent the next morning trying to find out where my goods were. So that was the loss of the last incentive for using RS, they used to deliver at 8:40 am next day, then it became the day after next - some time, when we can be arsed.
Parcel Farce Jul 24, 2012
We are widening the definition of "Neighbour" to include the local depot.
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.
They did one better than that for filling wrong numbers in. I bought £32k of stock off them for a mere tenner!
Unfortunately it's still "new and awful" here.
Unfortunately it's still "new and awful" here.
Different time zone and they probably do re-deploys in the wee small hours. Or it's a nation by nation thing and they have decided to make you continue to suffer.
Parametric data at distributors except Digikey has always been, and likely always will be poor, as the only way to do it right is to have people that understand what the numbers mean do the data entry, and that's expensive,
I accept that it's unrealistic to fix this, so for me the most important thing is to be able to search in a way that avoids missing potential parts. i.e. very quick and easy ways to select multiple options, and quickly view a large number of parts to scan through visually. One of the most annoying ways that RS obstructs this is that they don't show stock levels in search results.
Unfortunately it's still "new and awful" here.
Different time zone and they probably do re-deploys in the wee small hours. Or it's a nation by nation thing and they have decided to make you continue to suffer.I'm in the UK too and also get the new crappy webside. Perhaps the old one is still up and you got to it using an old bookmark or link? If so, please post it. I'd love to use their old, slightly less crappy site!