Comment by xadhominemx
3 years ago
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
3 years ago
Compared to Amazon, MMC has a very small number of SKUs, inventory that never goes stale, and prices that are only affordable in the context of B2B transactions. It’s not a comparable service.
And also zero counterfeit products that will burn down your house.
I am increasingly wary of buying things that might be in this category from Amazon.
Amazon does much better then Wal-Mart, but in either case I’ve found the best experience is to only buy products being sold by Amazon or Wal-Mart directly. I love the idea of facilitating small businesses selling through Amazon and Wal-mart, but in practice the feature is just abused by fraudsters, scammers, and disaster profiteers. The few legit sellers on either platform often don’t deal well with customer inquiries or returns. This is why we can’t have nice things.
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Same with products that are designed to come into contact with food or skin
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DigiKey eliminated everything except next day air for small packages some years ago because it was too expensive to have two different SKUs for shipping small orders in their system. B2B is weird.
Next day delivery is so common for B2B that many times it's the only way to order. I won a free DMM from Keysight and while it took a month for it to be actually shipped, they shipped it next day from Malaysia to the US when it finally did. Like you guys made me wait weeks for it, I could have waited another week for snail mail.
I made a small order from Digi-Key last month and they offered UPS ground, FedEx ground and USPS. I don’t think I’ve ever not been offered budget shipping from them.
But B2B is weird. If I need my employer to ship me something that I’ll use next month, I am hard pressed to get them to ship slower than 2nd day air.
Depending on the nature of the business, it’s not uncommon to have negotiated rates for 2nd day shipping that are really good, and essentially retail counter rates for ground. Sometimes that makes 2nd day service cheaper than ground for a lot of destinations. It’s weird.
Huh? I order from Digikey all the time and usually I get my packages FedEx because it's the same price as USPS. When USPS is cheaper, I select that because I'm in the same state so it typically gets here the next day anyway.
Perhaps. But all the more reason for Amazon to streamline it's UI and UX. Instead it's consistently a textbook case of TMI. If you're not paying close attention you're likely to miss something.
Maybe you didn't see the Footnote:
Footnotes
[1] "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not." https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
People complain about the prices, but it isn't like only businesses can afford them.
I buy screws there all the time. It isn't like it is $10 a screw! It's like a nickel or less.