my anecdotal / personal experienceIME
Tayda of the past they were once rightly maligned for only peddling in cheap-to-a-fault bits (I had a load of switches I just threw out because they failed so consistently), but I tend to view them now in the same light as harbor freight: buy the right stuff, and will always be consistently adequate. As has been said earlier in the thread, good for jellybean parts.
In the last six months or so as of this writing:Their electro caps are hit or miss (mostly okay and within spec, but about 20-30% are quite out of spec)
Their film caps are good, no massive value outliers
Their resistors are good, all within spec
They have a good variety of switches (though frustratingly not series-matching toggles), pots, etc. --including the
white-label switches that several places use.
They have a good variety of component values and a very nice ordering page: e.g.
this one for 1/4W metal film resistors.
Their shipping rates are very reasonable, mostly because they aren't shipping from within the US (it's amazing how much freight is subsidized for importation purposes). Just make no mistake, the cheapest, longest shipping, is QUITE long--no exaggeration there. I think the only time I did that was almost 3 weeks.
The only order mistakes have been me not clearly reading the specs*.
subjective observations:
The leads (resistors in particular) are thin, which is a place to reduce costs I'm sure, but it just feels cheap, but they haven't failed or anything, and I haven't had it happen, but it feels like they could break with too many bends.
If they can sell pot caps for as cheap as they do, they need to just include them when you order alphas that omit them--not installed, but just, "here, have a bag of them"
*as a UX designer ...don't get me started on how this site could be massively improved with some UI tweaks and without much in the way of developer lift.
Small BearI'm glad they're back! They have a load of the non-jellybean stuff, which is great. I think it might be a good thing for them to look at their passives supplier and see if they can compete a bit more. They can be more Mouser/DigiKey prices sometimes, which, I'd rather use their UIs to order parts, personally.