Hills Components

[Homer]

Mornin all

 

Anybody else here a customer of Hills Components? I've just gone to get something from them and it looks like they've gone under! Google lists them as permanently closed and their website is down.

 

Not heard a thing though and they were tweeting in August?! Just wondering if anybody would have a clue about what happened.

 

I hope they haven't... really good supplier, so helpful and always good prices etc for the odds and sods you need as well

[Homer]

Just called them not thinking it would get answered; ceased trading last Friday. Gutted for them

[TechMonkey]

Damnit. Their headphones were brilliant!

[synaesthesia]

Awww no those guys were awesome

[RichCowell]

Gutted We've only recently started using them but already love their stuff...

[DJ-1701]

Strangely we were talking about this yesterday on Edugeek Discord. I made the faux pas of saying 'Ah I thought you shutdown as I couldn't get onto your website on the last couple of days.'... then found out they did... about half an hour afterwards Google results added a red banner on the right hand side when doing a search stating that they are 'Permanently closed'.

[Jobos]

Such a shame, Hills will be missed.

[christhetech]

Have you tried CPC? They hold a lot of the stuff that Hills stocked and they're not a bad company to deal with.

[maark]

ordered some headphones in July - they said October delivery so had to cancel - now I know why :-) Edited September 7, 2018 by maark

[tmleafs]

Yup wanted to order stuff yesterday. Spoke to them on there facebook page they blamed school budgets cuts as which means schools are ordering less, they mentioned amazon and other sites undercutting them which I don't believe. They tweeted on the 14th August they had a huge delivery of stock

We normally do a order first week back of servisol products, batteries, headphones and more. Anyone know of alternatives so far I have found canford which does the servisol products we like and has batteries too, but as you said we liked the cheap odds and sods

[Andrew_C]

Start with CPC. Pretty good range; and their "own brand" stuff if fair.

[Oaktech]

Yeah - went to do a consumables and headphones order yesterday and got the permanently closed banner on Google...

 

CPC is going to have to do.

[ITBadger]

We had a delivery of Cat5 cables from them in August. Looks like we got in just in time. Real shame as they were always helpful and mega cheap. CPC can be cheap, but their website is awful to use.

[Katy]

We had a delivery of Cat5 cables from them in August. Looks like we got in just in time. Real shame as they were always helpful and mega cheap. CPC can be cheap, but their website is awful to use.

 

I usually find a similar item then click to get the on screen view of the paper catalogue to look through, much easier than trying to work out if they've called the 3m sound cable you're after "lead" or "cable", and "sound" or "audio"... or "snd"... and whether they've put a space in "3 m" or not. Awful search

[christhetech]

I do use CPC for some things, but for Cat5 cables, I always use Mills

Home page -Mills Ltd - London's Leading Supplier Of Structured Cabling & Specialist Tooling -

I normally order a good six months supply of network cables at a time, which normally means that I avoid any shipping costs at all. They offer free delivery on orders over £100. Anything under £100, they normally charge £9.95, but they will waive it if it's close to £100 and you haggle a little. I normally deal with a young lady called Rohini, who is really helpful and just an all round good egg!

[FN-GM]

I wonder what will happen to the stock? Might there be an chance to get some items one last time?

[saggu]

Damnit. Their headphones were brilliant!

 

Ditto. We used to buy headphones from them every year.

 

Sad!!

[Kingstech]

I do use CPC for some things, but for Cat5 cables, I always use Mills

Home page -Mills Ltd - London's Leading Supplier Of Structured Cabling & Specialist Tooling -

I normally order a good six months supply of network cables at a time, which normally means that I avoid any shipping costs at all. They offer free delivery on orders over £100. Anything under £100, they normally charge £9.95, but they will waive it if it's close to £100 and you haggle a little. I normally deal with a young lady called Rohini, who is really helpful and just an all round good egg!

I've previously used Mills LTD. Really good company. Used them for all sorts, from cat5 cable patch leads and boxes of cable to wall cabinets. Really helpful people as well.

[jmak]

they blamed school budgets cuts as which means schools are ordering less, they mentioned amazon and other sites undercutting them which I don't believe.

 

Both sound highly likely to me. It's Amazon's basic business model - undercut everyone and control the entire market. Annoying that they do so by avoiding tax in many different, but legal ways. Rumor has it that they're not the most generous employer to work for either.

 

Just imagine, if they paid a decent amount of tax, there might even be enough in the pot for schools to replace the broken stuff.

[chrisakak9]

dammit! they were one of my major go tos for headphones and cables!

 

Sent from my SM-A510F using EduGeek mobile app

[craig2562]

That's two of my Go-To suppliers gone in the last year - Millennium Business Systems and now Hills Components.

 

I guess you can only sustain a low price model if you can pile it high and sell it cheap, and fast. When budgets are hit as bad as they are now, that's not a feasible model anymore.

[Pyroman]

Ah bugger! I wanted to place a headphone order! Anyone know any other good suppliers for them? Every other set we have breaks and they were bulletproof!

[sonofsanta]

Oh no! They were always friendly and easy to deal with, as well as mighty good value for money. CPC have the range but ye gods, that website.

 

FWIW, the last headphones we got were from CPC (as Hills have been out of stock of their robust headphones for ages; maybe that's why their turnover dropped! D: ) for £3.95 each at quantity. Decent enough.

[Homer]

Do you guys have contacts at CPC or just register/get account/order?

[craig2562]

Register, get account, order.