There are several small outfits out there, Dan's Small Parts and Kits and
KitsAndParts.com come to mind. I've chatted with the owner of
KitsAndParts.com from time to time, and I get the impression that you need
to buy huge quantities (and obviously sell them) to make it worthwhile. I'm
sure that for more "normal" things, it's going to be hard to compete with
DigiKey and Mouser. But there are a lot of things that are hard to find,
and I could imagine there is a niche there if you could find it.

KitsAndParts tends to specialize in toroids, and whatever he can get a deal
on. Dan's favors popular RF things that QRPers need. The trick, I suppose,
is to find something that DigiKey doesn't supply that is in demand, and that
you can become known for. Face it, for any project that I can't stock out
of my junk box, I'm probably going to write an order to DigiKey. If they
have something, you are going to have to be a whole bunch cheaper to justify
my writing ANOTHER order and another shipping charge. Probably you can't do
that, so your only hope is to have something that they don't have.

Once you have decided what they don't have, now you have the problem of
being in my face so that I think of you. The way to do that is to have some
category of stuff that you become known for. Dan's tends to have RF
transistors, varactors, etc. In addition, he has lots of stuff I could get
at DigiKey, but it's cheaper at Dan's. Once I figure out that I need a
varactor and I'm going to have to order stuff from Dan's, now I'll order all
sorts of stuff there because he's going to be cheaper than DigiKey. He's
not enough cheaper to get me to order something I could get from DigiKey if
that was the only thing I needed, but once he has hooked me with something
that I can't get, then he gets orders for a bunch of other stuff, too.
KitsAndParts is pretty much the same.

So what's hard? Medium power RF transistors come to mind, as do MMICs,
mixers, variable caps. Seems to me there *should* be a cheaper place to get
cases and knobs, but that is mostly a price thing. But I wouldn't spend a
lot of energy with stuff you can already get easily. You are going to have
to be a LOT cheaper, and that is probably hard.

...

"Greysky" wrote in message
om...
I have been pondering this idea on and off, but can't tell if it would be
worth the effort to do something like this. Can you make a decent living
selling small quantities of parts - passives, crystals, oscillators,
solid
state, IC's , even exotic things like back diodes and mmic's - via mail
order. Or, do the large parts houses like Digi Key have the field sewn up?