Now I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if I could get the shipping rate upfront but it seems 80%+ of sites won't give you a real rate until you have almost completed check out which takes a lot of time. The funny thing is if they have a phone number you sometimes can get them to ship it more reasonably if their system has the flexibility to do that.
This is where ebay is a godsend as a lot of sellers will have the odd part around and work at having cheap shipping. But it is caveat emptor.
Last time I made heavy use of Digikey was in Australia and it worked really well. I'd order on Thursday and it would arrive by ~Monday, which was pretty awesome. You're right shipping, I remember correctly, was $20-$30, but on $200 of parts it was a small cost.
But as I said, this was done in my professional life, so I didn't blink an eye at it. Hobby world I get is different, but also the cost is frustration as opposed to 1000s, 10,000s of badly built boards.
I can safely say the site is not usable for electronics. It returned valves, pipes,nuts - pretty much useless for anything in Europe, being non-metric.
I've never had any trouble getting individual parts from RS either.
Disclaimer: I only ordered full boards from them so shipping seemed reasonable. No idea about ordering one small capacitor.
You often just need to fill that form entry, and not have any sort of official company. Things like Self, or your name again will work just fine. I have a fake company name that one day I'll need to actually register, but in the mean time is used whenever someone is willing to take my money, but not provide service without a company name.
Flip note: US companies selling to customers in the EU do require EU VAT number as well.
Overall living in the US and applying the same rules/advice to people not living there tends to be wrong.
Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS will gladly sell me 4000 of those capacitors.
For a hobbyist outside of the US, AliExpress is often the only realistic source aside from the local RadioShack equivalent which probably doesn't have what you need.