Has Digi-Key taken advantage of high-tech warehousing?
When the Internet boom hit in the late ’90s, many people said that paper catalogs were obsolete and everything would take place online. Digi-Key was one of the few companies that used the Web to complement the catalog. Did you foresee how the Web and catalog could complement one another? We intuitively believed that the catalog and the Internet would work best in tandem. But, not being particularly trusting of intuition, we tested serving customers with and without catalog support. To our amazement, our intuition was correct. We also test to determine the optimum catalog frequency. Lately, the search functions in the Digi-Key Web site are so good that I will find a part on the Web, and then see what page in the catalog the part is on to view other parts in the same family. I often prefer leafing through my paper catalog versus the Web site. Many of our customers share your preference for the Digi-Key catalog in certain circumstances. I don’t foresee the Digi-Key catalog as ever going a
