AnonymousUser

I have ordered many components from this site and the parts that came were always of high quality and performed to specifications. The selection of components is very large. The shipping is usually quite fast. Getting a receipt/invoice with all necessary information sometimes was a hassle.

Strengths: Digi Key has a large catalog and selection of electronic components, making finding the component you want relatively easy. The ability to set ranges for specifications and see what components are available and their price is the best feature of the catalog.

They always have shipped the order very quickly and have never lost my parts.

Needs to improve: Using the search engine embedded in the website almost never bring up the part you want. You always have to use browse. Obtaining a proper invoice / receipt can sometimes be a hassle.

Good service.

Strengths: Nice catalog of antibodies, proteins, antigens. They have good data (dissociation constant Kd, forward and reverse binding rates) for some of their antibodies - very useful when designing detection assays.

Needs to improve: Their prices are a bit steep. You cannot sort their catalog by price.

Once you get past the horrible catalog and pick out your part, the part arrives and everything is fine.

Strengths: They sell very nice products, like the chromatography and microfludics connectors, fittings, tubing, and pumps. These are indispensable in use for chromatography and micro and milli fluidic applications.

Needs to improve: Their website and catalog is horrible. Its very difficult to pick out the component you need and they make you work hard to get the part you need. Its as if they don't want you to purchase these components from them.

Service was pretty good, had little issues.

Strengths: Pretty good selection of fasteners, tools, tool components. Large amount of products.

Needs to improve: The catalog is a bit clunky, but navigable. It tries to be like the catalog for McMaster, allowing you to narrow your search by choosing parameters but that is quite clunky. There is no "education material" (telling you how its used, where and when, and sometimes why) about each component as you find in McMaster's catalog.

Customer service is generally pretty good. They are willing to go e-mail back and forth with you until most of your issues are cleared up.

Strengths: Very user friendly website. You load your STL file, choose the material etc. and get a quote right away.
Their customer service is pretty good generally.

Needs to improve: They should be a little more clear on the finishes for the parts - it is hard to know how to each finish will look like and the default set finish is not always the best. Hand to ask about the finish several times.

The service was fine. One of the antibodies listed on the site as available was not available.
Time to obtain the antibody is a bit slow.

Strengths: Very large, nice catalog of antibodies. You can sort antibodies by price (this is lacking in many other catalogs). Other sort options (conjugate, (i.e. dye), host species etc.) are available.

Needs to improve: They don't make their own antibodies and so the contact their vendors to obtain the antibodies. Some of antibodies listed on the site as available are not actually available. You have to contact them to make sure. They don't provide much information on the antibody such as dissociation constant (Kd), forward and reverse binding constant, isoelectric point. For example AbCam does this for some of their antibodies.

Pretty good customer service and technical service. When you call them and get technical support, the techs are fairly knowledgeble and try to help you repair your instrument without having to send it out to them (which is very nice! as repair service is a bit slow and quite expensive).

Strengths: Very high quality product. Their meters / power supplies are state of the art.

Needs to improve: Equipment repair is expensive - usually around 1K. Repair turn around is not that great - sometimes after they let you know they repaired their product, they sit on the repaired product for a week or so.

Quality products; customer service can be weird sometimes.

Strengths: Large catalog of products useful for all sorts of biotech work. Often products are accompanied with good descriptions of their properties, and usage info.

Needs to improve: Their prices are quite a bit high. Shipping is very expensive.

Quick delivery of necessary chemicals.

Strengths: Nice catalog, good selection of chemicals; sometimes properties of chemicals are given.

Needs to improve: Catalog could include more information on chemicals, especially if it is found in other common sources (CRC handboook). Could provide an engine to calculate chemical properties (pKa, solubility, pKD). Shipping costs are a bit high.

Fast delivery, quality products; you can learn from their catalog.

Strengths: Product quality. You know you will get a quality product when you order from them. The shipping is also very fast (next day delivery).
Their catalog is probably one of the most user friendly ones on the web period.

Needs to improve: The prices are a bit high. While for 90% of the products the selection is awesome, for some specialty products (especially larger ones, e.g., ovens) the selection is not that good.