Farnell / CPC utter incompetence - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 04:57:47 pm
content: So for about 24 hours, every time I go to try and buy something, I get thisThis is across both Farnell and CPC web sites, multiple machines.What the hell is going on with them? Literally their web site is down or going snap every time I go to use it.RS aren't any better either.This has been going on for months. Do they even want the business?So fuck 'em. Lost another £100 to LCSC.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:20:36 pm
content: Same thing happens for me at canada.newark.com/, utter crap. I ve even talked to their support "specialist" last year about it.Her solution was to have me delete all cookies for their sie, it helped for awhile, but lately this error is back with a vengeance.They lost countles orders from me allready, the worst is when it happens after you set up complicated filter list and want to change the display format to display 100 items per page for example, then BABANGits all lost.Screw them then, I usually go to mouser's, pay a little more but sail through their site without any hustle.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:30:15 pm
content: It seems to be working fine for me (seeing the website, just tried it).Is it a problem with your cookies/web-cache etc, or something ?https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/uk.farnell.comA very long time ago, I had a similar problem (no error message, it would just hang for ages or longer) with the farnell website (or if I'm mixed up, it was digi-key), and it was caused by bad cookies/web-cache, on my end. Which I put down, to the Farnell website being rather badly designed.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:34:40 pm
content: It is the site being badly designed for sure. I spent a good number of years designing e-commerce platforms.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:41:28 pm
content: Quote from: bd139 on October 26, 2018, 05:34:40 pmIt seems extremely short-sighted of Farnell. To not have a really well oiled, and great website. For a business, which (probably) gets most of its business, via that website.One of the reasons, I like Digi-key, is because it has a very fast and good website, which allows me to very rapidly search for, narrow down and find parts I am interested in.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:47:53 pm
content: To bad Digikey is the most expensive of them all.

author: Wilksey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 05:55:43 pm
content: Odd, I've actually been using Farnell + CPC quite heavily over the past 3 days and it has never given me an error, taken a bit of time to filter the results, and some cases not actually filtered, but I've not seen that error.Yes, i'm UK based.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 06:00:46 pm
content: Quote from: alpher on October 26, 2018, 05:47:53 pmReally?Maybe it depends on the country. Over here, Farnell is hands down the most expensive of all. The big plusses are they have actual people you can talk to in most countries they are implanted in, and they have very fast shipping without extra cost. When you are a customer with a significant annual order volume, you can also negociate discounts easily with them. But their base pricing is outrageous?

author: chris_leyson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 06:02:51 pm
content: It's a shame Farnell can't get their act together, with Farnell it's either web site down for maintanance or worse still 'parts not in stock' email a day after you placed the order...arrrgh. Farnell don't seem to able to link an updated stock database at the point of purchase for some reason, it's a database not rocket science. Also looks like they might be cutting down on UK stock and didn't they anounce they were moving out of the UK not so long ago ? Digikey and Mouser have their act together so why can't Farnell.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2018, 10:11:07 pm
content: Burn Farnell, Burn!

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 12:04:38 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on October 26, 2018, 05:34:40 pmActually, that error is from Akamai.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 12:06:11 am
content: Try incognito

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 05:39:16 am
content: Oh, gosh, yes! This has been driving me nuts.Only been happening for the past week for me though.Happens at the most inconvenient moments. You'll be drilling down into categories, filter for the specs you need, find something that interests and click on it for details, and bam!I found it's not just the one request that fails, though. After it happens once, all subsequent requests error. Effectively you get locked out of the whole site.Almost seems like some kind of anti denial-of-service thing gone awry, as it mostly seems to happen after making a number of filter or sort changes in quick succession. Especially with the 'access denied' responses persisting for a long period.Farnell really need to sort their damn site out.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 07:14:36 am
content: I've previously found cookie clearing to fix Element14 (Farnell) problems. But yes, their whole stack feels slow and buggy.Digikey's ismuchnicer in terms of responsiveness. My guess: it's not due to servers, it's due to the design of their UI. E14's is complicated, big and has to reflow constantly whilst loading. Digikeys seems to be something closer to plain HTML.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 07:20:29 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 26, 2018, 06:00:46 pmDigikey is like 2 times more expensive than farnell in average. Not to say a lot of parts at farnell are among the cheapest you can find. Many parts are expensive but it's very rare to exceed Digikey price.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 07:26:42 am
content: And I thought RS components was the worst for load times and bloat but this seems jumpy and with that distracting fixed header.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 08:27:05 am
content: Quote from: Monkeh on October 27, 2018, 12:04:38 amGood point. Why the hell are they using Akamai? They don’t need a CDN for that shit. Multiplies conplexity and they’re not exactly BBC class traffic.“Astronaut architects”

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 09:34:41 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on October 26, 2018, 05:34:40 pmTheir site is so slow, that it can take minutes to find an appropriate SKU for a resistor .. And if you have 15 new passives in your design, do you really want to spend 20+ minutes finding SKUs for a prototype?A little while back I wrote a script that would crawl the product pages of passives and index them. After parsing metadata, it becomes trivial to build an own query engine to locally search for parts.At some point in time however, I found that their loading times of 100 chip resistors parts peaked at 60 to 80 secondsper page. I think their decompressed HTML is about 2MB. It takes ages to load using a DOM parser, so applying some regular expressions to strip a large part of the HTML speeds up things significantly (to decrease my own server load..).

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 09:41:37 am
content: I tend to go and find one "series" of part I want and then work out the part number and just enter that in the search.Then I get screwed by the fact that 1K resistors cost £0.028 each but suddenly the 3.3K ones are £0.247 each for no apparent reason. No pricing consistency. RS are just as bad there:1K:https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/through-hole-fixed-resistors/6833165/3.3K:https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/through-hole-fixed-resistors/6833629/What the feck? Not paying £6.175 for 25 resistors! Can go screwey!

author: Fred27
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 10:16:41 am
content: Quote from: chris_leyson on October 26, 2018, 06:02:51 pmNot just me then. I was sure that jellybean part was in stock when I ordered. Now it's got a long lead time and there are thousands of an equivalent part from another manufacturer in stock.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 12:22:00 pm
content: Yep. I had to wait 3 weeks for backordered 1N4007's that were in stock.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 02:59:05 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on October 27, 2018, 07:20:29 amPrices is really rollacoasting on Farnell is our experience since early 90ies, sometimes one can make deal sometimes they outright refuse for no apparent reason. Their packing is also a hit and miss, sometimes resistors and MCU in pink bags sometimes in real ESD bags. ESD sensitive resistors?

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 03:22:06 pm
content: Quote from: bd139 on October 27, 2018, 09:41:37 amAye, RS are not very good for small quantities of jellybean components. For a lot of stuff you can't even buy it unless you want hundreds or even a full reel, and where they do offer smaller minimum quantities, it's at silly prices.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 03:25:44 pm
content: Quote from: MT on October 27, 2018, 02:59:05 pmI don't recall MCUs in pink bags, however it's fine if multiple pink bags were put into a larger ESD shielding bag.

author: Macbeth
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 03:52:09 pm
content: Yes, I constantly get the Access Denied when using Chrome. It persists like this until I clear cookies or and/or use incognito mode. However after a few searches the bug returns.I switched to using Edge and didn't have any problem.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 03:57:05 pm
content: I’d rather hammer some 8 pin dips into my testicles than use edge.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 04:02:01 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on October 27, 2018, 03:25:44 pmWe do , many times, while no times in multiple pinks. So thats Farnell alright sloppy handling.

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 05:01:40 pm
content: It's not even as if the warehouse staff have to intuit or guess at whether a part is ESD-sensitive. The despatch notes have a little ESD warning note (that common 'hand in a triangle' logo) on relevant line items, so their stock control system knows, so the staff shouldn't be getting the bagging wrong.

author: TERRA Operative
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 05:17:36 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on October 27, 2018, 12:04:38 amMy bad, been too busy to keep the maintenance ticket count down...

author: Hydron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2018, 05:45:56 pm
content: Farnell and CPC are worst in terms of the website going down completely, either the "access denied" thing, simply not loading, or for maintenance. Farnell also seems significantly less reliable than RS in terms of getting stuff delivered next day - they always seem to use UPS who are absolutely awful (most RS stuff gets to me by royal mail by ~midday, vs late afternoon or a day late for UPS). And yeah, CPC tends to completely ignore ESD - if I buy expensive parts half the time I end up emailing them for a refund due to no ESD packaging, but they never seem to learn (at least I get to keep the parts though - OK for hobby projects as long as they still work!). CPC also managed to associate my private account with my employer (who I used as a delivery address a few times), and started issuing my refunds to them!RS on the other hand used to just drop me back to the main page regularly - I think it's improved now but also slow. And so many simple things are in huge pack sizes, at least put a bloody quantity selection or a total price _including_ minimum order quantity sort thing so I don't need to get past the 100 reels with low unit prices to find the 2 pack that I actually need. This goes for Farnell too, though they seem less bad at it.As for Digikey, I often use it simply for parametric search to find a part, then check with local suppliers if I'm not going to meet their minimum order quantity. They are kinda expensive sometimes but assuming I meet minimum order size for free shipping I feel I get more for the money than with RS/Farnell simply because the good website saves me so much time and anguish.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:48:28 pm
content: Just now, "Access DeniedYou don't have permission to access "http://canada.newark.com/w/c/cooling-thermal-management/fans-blowers/axial-fans?" on this server.Reference #18.48ff4f17.1540935829.445d419"

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:49:56 pm
content: Quote from: alpher on October 30, 2018, 09:48:28 pmLink works fine for me.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 30, 2018, 09:54:06 pm
content: Quote from: alpher on October 30, 2018, 09:48:28 pmI'm getting loads of those lately, though things occasionally seem to randomly work.

author: Hydron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 12:35:20 pm
content: Access DeniedYou don't have permission to access "http://cpc.farnell.com/TL0558961" on this server.Reference #18.d5921602.1540988836.cd36e62

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 01:29:05 pm
content: Hey I've got something nice to say about CPC. They sent me a credit note for an order they delivered, twiceAt least the fail went in my favour this time.

author: Ice-Tea
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 04:22:29 pm
content: Same here. Only on Firefox, but as I couldn't be bothered to look up username + pass to be able to order through IE, I went ahead and used Mouser.For the second time this week.

author: Wilksey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 06:15:12 pm
content: I've browsed on both CPC + Farnell at various times today, not seen any errors my end.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 06:45:10 pm
content: Huray, now it's my turnOther Farnell domains, like UK, don't even connect to the server.I can't even begin to start describing my disgust.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 06:46:04 pm
content: Quote from: Wilksey on October 31, 2018, 06:15:12 pmOK, I've tried once more,.This time everything went well, till I added items to cart, after a couple of min of watching a spinning thing a surprise!!"Access DeniedYou don't have permission to access "http://canada.newark.com/w/c/cooling-thermal-management/fans-blowers/axial-fans?" on this server.Reference #18.a7392b17.1541011215.692f80a0"Fuck it!, even though they cost over 4 buck more each I'll buy these fans from mouser or somewhere else.

author: Ice-Tea
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 06:46:10 pm
content: Quote from: hans on October 31, 2018, 06:45:10 pmPlease try.

author: Ice-Tea
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 06:51:21 pm
content: Also: information on their Twitter account about this:

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 31, 2018, 07:58:43 pm
content: Quote from: Ice-Tea on October 31, 2018, 06:46:10 pmMy rage was too short lived for this.I blocked cookies from Farnell and the issue cleared up. Funny, since I wasn't even logged in, yet almost 25 cookies were stored..

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2018, 09:23:04 pm
content: I found this article on the Akamai support website that is quite informative:https://community.akamai.com/customers/s/article/Why-is-Akamai-blocking-me?language=en_USSo, basically, Farnell have cocked-up the security policies that are applied to their Akamai caching.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 02, 2018, 09:26:40 pm
content: Good bit of debug thereSend them a solution and the invoice or post it on element14 forum

author: ocset
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2018, 11:18:52 pm
content: If poss, please sign the petition on Reply #29 of this...https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/farnell-website-is-very-slow-in-uk-why/Then we can get Farnell as good as Digikey

author: Wilksey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2018, 11:46:14 pm
content: I'd be very surprised if Farnell listen to a petition, they don't listen to what their customers tell them as it is!

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 06:51:58 am
content: Quote from: treez on November 03, 2018, 11:18:52 pmThat's assuming a good website is fully in their control. If that were to be the case, things would have been different.Farnell has struggled with their site functionality, bugs and speed for years now. In terms of functionality it's reasonably easy; add more code to the current platform.But bugs and speed may require a complete rethinking of the eCommerce platform, and I've heard some stories that this in particular hasn't been the possibility. Because after all, we only see so much of their ecommerce system (the customer frontend)..I can understand that they use Akamai for caching.. but also wonder how much caching you can do for webpages that need to be rendered for each customer: almost all elements on the site are interactive.For sure you could cache static content, but IMO a static.farnell.com domain would have made more sense.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 09:44:18 am
content: They don’t need Akamai for their scale and solution at all. I think they had an astronaut architect in there that sold it to them because their Java EE backend is probably too expensive to fix. Caching at that level is fine for very simple content like news / static / downloads etc but not for dynamic content.To be honest their catalogue model feels fine, just the front end stinks. Probably don’t know how to scale it out. Elasticsearch FTW here.

author: ocset
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 10:38:07 am
content: It sounds to me like many people here know exactly what Farnell's problem is.I would prey that someone can put together an email to the Farnell management on this...(now Avnet?)If the letter is not heeded, then the British Minister for Industry shoudl receive this letter.I seriously have spent ages clicking and waiting on farnell over the years.You have to go farnell because its the only reasonably well stocked one that has next day delivery in uk.RS doesnt seem to stock as much and doesnt have as good search engines.Digikey/mouser is great, but doesnt do next day delivery to uk...and they charge for delivery to uk

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 11:08:12 am
content: Screw all the UK companies. I got to LCSC first. Don't mind waiting a week for reliable stock.

author: voltsandjolts
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 12:51:49 pm
content: Seems to happen to me after a minute browsing their site - please get your act together Farnell.

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 01:55:21 pm
content: You know, it really is getting ridiculous that this issue seems to be widely affecting a large number of people, and yet still persists after quite some time.On a whim, I thought I'd take a quick Google search for "farnell access denied", and came up with a number of threads on the Element14 community forums:https://www.element14.com/community/thread/65053/l/cat-access-element14-sg-storehttps://www.element14.com/community/thread/65271/l/access-denied-on-newark-store-serverhttps://www.element14.com/community/thread/65266/l/access-denied-farnellhttps://www.element14.com/community/thread/65307/l/access-deniedhttps://www.element14.com/community/thread/65284/l/firefox-issuehttps://www.element14.com/community/thread/48076/l/access-deniedJudging by the responses to those posts, it seems Farnell/Element14 support staff are well aware, and yet can't seem to find the root cause.I'm wondering what the contributing factors are here.For all the people here that have experienced this problem, can we get a quick poll regarding the following two things?- What browser are you using? (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, etc.)- Do you use an ad-blocker or other anti-tracking/privacy/content-manipulating measures? (e.g. AdBlock, uBlock, PrivacyBadger, Ghostery, Pi-Hole, etc.)Using Chrome with no browser extensions loaded, I spent about 10 minutes clicking around without hitting the error, whereas with Firefox or Chromewithad-blocker enabled, it only takes a couple of minutes of activity to get the error.

author: ocset
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2018, 05:14:50 pm
content: thanks, i cant answer yet as its the computer at work where i search farnell.....but my home computer is slow aswell on farnell.I use chrome but how do i know if i have extensions loaded?

author: Macbeth
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 05, 2018, 02:25:25 am
content: Yes, I found I get this error with Chrome + uBlock.I resort to using Edge which I haven't interfered with, total virgin setup, has no extension stuff and have no problems.

author: Mustakari
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 08:20:29 am
content: Using Edge is totally unacceptable for many of us as it's non-free on a non-free os.Farnell has lost two orders now in a week because of this.This is getting a bit silly.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 08:34:16 am
content: In my case it’s because Edge sucksChrome and ublock here.

author: r0d3z1
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 09:09:33 am
content: Quote from: Macbeth on October 27, 2018, 03:52:09 pmIt happens also to me quite often, usually clear the cookies solve the problem in my case.

author: TERRA Operative
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 09:24:09 am
content: I wonder if by using an adblocker, a request which is denied by the adblocker keeps attempting to ping and eventually an anti-DDOS mechanism kicks in and blocks any further access?If anyone is finding they are blocked and are using an adblocker, try disabling it for Farnell and try again without changing anything else.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 11:13:56 am
content: Surely the point of the ad blocker would be to prevent the request from being sent at all?I've had the same problem with Farnell recently. Several orders have gone elsewhere as a result of 'access denied' errors, which is a shame as they're usually my first choice supplier.Ad and script blocking are completely standard components of a business PC. No valid reason exists for a B2B web site not to work with them.

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 11:38:11 am
content: If thereisa correlation between this issue and running an ad-blocker, and that clearing cookies seems to (at least temporarily) resolve the problem, I would suspect that one of the blocked requests is perhaps resulting in a cookie either not being set or not being updated at some point, and this omission results in client requests being flagged as 'bad' and access being blocked.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 12:07:55 pm
content: Athttps://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Premier-Farnell-Reviews-E10150.htmthere seem to be a number of employee reviews and stuff.A number of them are being rather rude about the company, and painting a bad picture of the competence of the IT department.Examples:QuoteQuoteQuoteQuote

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 12:15:45 pm
content: LOL it's amazing how transparent companies are these days thanks to things like Glassdoor.

author: Wilksey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 06, 2018, 12:36:25 pm
content: Sounds familiar.I found out that a company I worked for got someone to leave many false positive reviews on GlassDoor under different accounts to counteract the negative (real!) reviews.Management are a joke, I.T are useless, and some staff are oxygen thieves, standard Corporate outfit then!

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 03:48:37 pm
content: Well, theyseemto have solved the 'Access Denied' problem - no issues browsing around the website today.But just when you thought things were looking up... this happens:Oh, and B+ for irony, an error from their error-handling page.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 03:53:47 pm
content: Also -99 clue points for websphere. I suppose that explains a lot really.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 07:57:45 pm
content: *Looks up websphere*Oh god.IBM? I can't find any info on it newer than 5 years, but I presume the "ancient versions of java" bit still holds.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 08:20:16 pm
content: Websphere is current and up to date. You just dont hear anything about it because everyone who uses it is chained to a desk somewhere in Mumbai now somewhere behind several layers of IBM consultants and management. These poor buggers are basically forced to use the lowest possible efficiency path (the entire Rational suite) to generate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of XML and documentation to describe a trivial system at great cost. This is then knocked up in one of IBM's international sweat shops, deployed to some expensive IBM kit that the client didn't need and then the client is NDA'ed into submission.I can lay the same turd down for 100x less cost or something that works for 50x less cost

author: mk_
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 08:32:04 pm
content: Well.... Avnet....an other story of incompetence during the last weeks:MOQ for an evalboard (400 USD) is 200pcs...I mean... 2 ist ok - but twohundred? I don`t want to evaluate UPS or DHL, I need to evaluate a special component...

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 08:37:26 pm
content: LOL that's stupid

author: HwAoRrDk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 08:50:42 pm
content: Also LOL-worthy is something else I noticed earlier... Has anyone clicked on the 'Our Web Journey' link that now appears in the page header?It leads you to a page where they wax lyrical about how great their website is and how much it has improved over the last few months. Granted, it has improved in some of the areas claimed, and well done to them on that, but then they go and include this nugget:Quote

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 13, 2018, 08:55:33 pm
content: That also means "1 in 50 customers treated like shit"

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 14, 2018, 06:02:45 am
content: I read it as "Up to 2% of customers still receive bad inconsistent performance from our website."

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2018, 07:08:22 am
content: Farnell's website is trash.I know an ex-employee of the web development team, he agreed with me.The problem is management is focused on chasing after all those Web 2.0 trends that were great but we still have internet connections with ping time of 50ms so the more resources you stuff onto a page, the slower it gets. The website is full of back-and-forth server requests for almost everything, unoptimised Javascript and uncompressed images. I did a comparison a while ago - results attached - which show that Digikey is almost 3x faster to load. That's a lot of time when you're constantly browsing for parts.Because of this, I pretty much only use Digi-Key. I know my employer buys a lot of things from Farnell, they are our main supplier, and they order magnitudes more than I ever do... so perhaps Farnell don't care about the average engineer, although their investment into things like Element14 and Ben Heck would seem to disagree.

author: mk_
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 17, 2018, 12:44:11 pm
content: btw:I received finaly an answer from someone from Farnell DE saying that the website is known not working with firefox, I should give it a try with chrome. A nogo here at my office.Well, they are loosing business not I. Seems that they don`t care about that.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2018, 08:53:23 am
content: New PC with Windows 10, Firefox, Ghostery and NoScript here.With no special permissions set, the Farnell home page loaded OK but was missing some active content. Fair enough.Set farnell.com to be 'trusted' and I immediately get:Access DeniedYou don't have permission to access "http://uk.farnell.com/" on this server.Reference #18.f476768.1542530982.4e134f6

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 18, 2018, 09:52:24 pm
content: Quote from: AndyC_772 on November 18, 2018, 08:53:23 amIs that an exponent?

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 19, 2018, 02:13:57 pm
content: Quote from: mk_ on November 17, 2018, 12:44:11 pmI thought Firefox and Chrome were fairly evenly matched in regards to market share, but apparently Chrome has a whopping 60% whereas Firefox only has about 10%.That honestly surprises and scares me. With all the data Chrome ships back to Google, it gives Google an unprecedented overview of what goes on on the web.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2018, 12:26:45 am
content: Chrome with and without adblock now my turn to get access denied , yet same Farnell page on Opera with adblock their site works.

author: Hiemal
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 05, 2019, 06:22:50 am
content: To add on to the pile, I've grown very tired of using newark's website. Every webpage seems to load at a glacial pace, and sometimes wouldn't load any parts at all regardless of the category selected.On top of that, I had recently placed an order with them, and received an email stating that one of the parts was no longer manufactured. The customer service agent asked if I wanted to cancel the rest of the order, which I did since it was a relatively important part!I never heard anything back from them. Every time I tried to use their live chat feature on their website it was perpetually down, and when I FINALLY did manage to get someone, they said it was indeed canceled.I would have loved to have gotten some sort of confirmation on the status of the order but I guess they just... forgot to let me know.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2019, 04:51:37 pm
content: Argh another turd. Filter system on CPC has fallen over now.