As a grad student, I always put off placing orders for parts. There were five different places I'd check for an item, and five different purchase orders to fill out. Today we added a new button to Octopart which we hope will make building things a little easier.

While you're searching for parts, add the ones you'd like to buy to your partlist. When you're done, click the buy button to start choosing distributors you want to purchase the parts from. After you've made all your choices, you can checkout from each distributor from our checkout page. While we do not have direct online checkout available for all distributors, we will be adding more as quickly as possible. In the meantime, download a summary of the parts you are purchasing so you can place an order the old-fashioned way.

Along with the new shopping cart, we've also revamped the partlist feature to better help you organize and access the parts and projects you want to keep track of. As always, please e-mail us with any comments, criticism, and bug reports you have.

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