While DigiKey’s catalog of stocking components is vast and extensive, it is not all-encompassing. Sometimes a customer might need something from one of our suppliers that isn’t available in our website directly. These parts are often still available through DigiKey, via our special order process. A DigiKey Applications Engineering technician can initiate a special order request for you, or you can initiate one yourself via our Special Order Product Request Form.
The form begins with a request for the e-mail address you would like used for this special order. This is the address our team will use to reach you at, please ensure it’s accurate.
The second question prompts you for your DigiKey customer number, and diverges into two options depending on whether you know your customer number or not. Customer numbers are strongly recommended for special order requests, but please note: many customers place orders using customer numbers from someone else in their company, such as a purchaser or manager. These numbers may not match the shipping information you would like to use. Unless the number is your own, or you know the information in the number you’re using is accurate, you should select ‘No’ to manually enter the correct information for your special order request.
If you select ‘Yes’, you’ll see the following screen where you should enter your DigiKey customer number:
If you select ‘No’, you’ll instead see a sub-form where you will enter the information normally associated with your customer number:
You can optionally decide to append your special order request to an existing quote using the following question, if you know the quote number you’d like it appended to.
There are a few lines dealing with the end user for the product being order. One of these - application - is optional, while end customer company name is not.
Now for the tricky part: you will need to provide information on the product being ordered, as per the following sub-form:
The manufacturer part number needs to be full and complete - no wildcard characters are permitted, nor are partial numbers. If your application can accept multiple versions of a part and your engineers don’t care which version they get, they will nevertheless have to pick one - we cannot special order incomplete numbers. The process is faster if a customer can supply first-party verification of the product via either a manufacturer datasheet/product page link or attached drawing, but this is not strictly required. ‘Additional Supporting Information’ is for third-party resources such as document or website links from non-manufacturer sources.
Finally, there is a section for attaching correspondence you’ve conducted with a supplier that can back up your special order request. Selecting ‘Yes’ in this question will open up a space where you can attach such correspondence to send alongside your request.
There is a disclaimer following this section that you should read which governs the information you submit to us. Submitting your form constitutes your understanding of this disclaimer, so please ensure you are familiar with it and agree with its terms.
Finally, there is an option that allows you to enter additional part numbers on your special order request, going through the same process for each one.
Once this is all done, you can click ‘Next’ to get your requests submitted. You’ll be given a chance to go through the form again if you opted to, or if not then all your prepared requests will be sent to our special orders team for processing.
And that’s it! Within two to five business days on average, you will be sent an initial quote with the manufacturer’s response to your request. If a quote cannot be provided for whichever reason, our team will be in touch to communicate the issue and work with you to resolve it.