Announcements

Almost as soon as PCB Shopper went live, people have asked us to show prices for shipping to places other than the U.S. Well, that feature has now been added. When feasible, we get the shipping price from the manufacturers’ web sites. If that’s not feasible, we estimate the size and weight of the printed circuit boards and query the shipping service(s) that the manufacturer uses to get the prices.

To be honest, the shipping price we estimate will rarely be exactly the same as the manufacturer’s shipping price. Manufacturers estimate weights differently and might get shipping discounts we’re not aware of. Hopefully, though, we’ll be close.

So to our friends all over the world: enjoy!

We’ve just rolled out a big new feature: quotes for larger quantities of printed circuit boards. Instead of a maximum quantity of 100 boards, we now support orders for up to 1,000 PCBs.

This wasn’t an easy feature to implement. Not only did we need to add new calculators for each manufacturer that offer “small batch” quantities, but we had to calculate shipping. Previously, we just always quoted the shipping cost for a small order, and hoped that would satisfy most users most of the time. That was not acceptable for our new, larger quantities. So now we estimate the weight and package size and use that to calculate shipping from China or the US.

How well does it work? Better than it used to, but not as well as I’d like. For the same size order, even different manufacturers come up with different shipping costs. We can’t duplicate them all unless we get cooperation from the manufacturers, which I don’t expect to happen. But we’re close – hopefully close enough.

For Accutrace, we’re now calculating shipping costs based on weight. Before, we always reported shipping costs for low quantity orders, regardless of how many boards you actually wanted. We’ll be rolling this feature out to other manufacturers soon.

We now report prices for boards from AP Circuits with more than two layers.

There’s a great new feature on PCBShopper: faster response times! We calculate many PCB prices by querying manufacturers’ websites. But that takes time – and PCBShopper was making you wait too long for results. The problem was only going to get worse as we added more manufacturers.

So now, we send the results to you as we gather them. You’ll see the first prices and shipping times from manufacturers just a second or two after you click “Get Prices”. Then, more will come every couple of seconds until all the manufacturers’ prices have been determined.

The overall time you wait for all the results actually won’t be any shorter than it was before. But it will seem faster. And you won’t have that feeling that nothing’s happening and wonder whether it’s working or not.

We now show the country for each company’s PCB factory.

We now display the price per printed circuit board. Some users were confused by whether the prices we were showing were for the total order or per-board. By showing the per-board price separately, it becomes obvious.

We now calculate prices for ITEAD Studio’s 4 layer boards.

We’re happy to report that we now calculate prices for PCBCART.

Dirt Cheap Dirty Circuits, aka dirtypcbs.com, is now part of our calculator.