A Small (Canadian) Primer on Buying Lego From Around the World

Welcome to the exciting world of Lego Investing! This primer is intended to provide you with as much information as possible to create a buying strategy for yourself as you buy Lego from Canada/USA/Europe. Buying and selling anything can be hard, but as with all commodities, if you can buy low and sell high you can make a lot of money doing this with Lego over time! This article is more Canadian focused as it was created with the Canadian shopper in mind, but it should have some tidbits that can provide you with good insights to buying regardless of where you are from.

Buying from Canada

If you're going to be buying from Canada it's really imperative that you only buy when there's a sale or some type of clearance going on (or if it's at this moment at Jul 6, 2013, the only retail priced set you should even be thinking of is Orc Forge ). Walmart typically does clearances twice a year like the ones seen by our American friends: summer (e.g. starting now) and winter (e.g. after the christmas season). That doesn't mean, however that you should only buy during these two seasons as in store promos and other promos (e.g. Lego exclusives at the Lego store) can happen all the time. It's a little bit tough but you can definitely score deals. Here's some places to keep on checking as you are looking for Lego to buy:

Amazon.ca
Walmart (both online and in store)
Target.ca
PlayValue Toys (never shopped here before but some members have given it good reviews)
Toys R' Us

Buying from the USA

You can also buy from the USA but keep in mind most of them do not ship Lego to Canada due to customs rules and the complications in tracking (which is very weird because Lego is a category 5 import, which means no duties on toys made from anywhere in the world). To get the great prices that our American friends get, some of us buy Lego online and then have it shipped to a US warehouse for pickup later. A great example is CBI USA (www.cbiusa.com) which you should check out if you're close to the Buffalo border. If you're going to the US you can always try to hunt down deals as you're cruising along the interstate to your destination as well. I usually star every Walmart/Target/Kmart along the path from my starting point to my destination on Google Maps so I can hit them all up if/when I can.

Some of the places that you will ship to US warehouse (or if you have time, in-store pickup) include:

Walmart.com
Amazon.com
Target.com
Kmart.com
Lego.com (only if you use a US-based Lego gift card as they have stopped accepting any Canadian-based form of payment to the US due to "privacy issues". Not sure when they will stop with US gift cards as well)

Toys R' Us

Buying from Europe (currently my favourite )

The third place that I usually look for is buying from the European Amazon sites which include:

Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.de
Amazon.fr
Amazon.es
Amazon.it

I generally only focus on UK and DE as FR charges way too much for import taxes, and ES/IT have a lot of items that do not ship to Canada. One of the things that's really advantageous to North American shoppers is that they discount the VAT when you buy the product. European prices often have the tax baked into the price, and it is this tax that they take out when you get to the checkout. There was a very good article on Euro shopping by Quacs that relates to this and you should read it here:

http://www.brickpick...e-at-amazon-uk/

Read the part about shipping carefully though! When you are buying from Euro Amazon the biggest risk is shipping/packaging as many shoppers (myself included) have had damaged boxes of Lego arriving on this side of the pond. However, their shipping has seen considerable improvement due to numerous complaints, and the items are now arriving much better than in the past.

Region-Independent Tools
Brickpicker.com - For price trending, history and sales reporting
Brickset.com - For detailed information pertaining to a specific set.
ToysnBricks.com - for checking promotions in case you don't have time to do it all yourself
Camelcamelcamel.com - For tracking Lego sales as soon as they hit on Amazon (regardless of geographical region)

To conclude there's really no limit to the amount of places you can go to scour deals. A lot of it takes time and patience, and sometimes really really good luck. Buying and selling Lego is pretty much a grind, and if you're focus on making big bucks on the short term this might not be a good investment avenue for you. Most of us buying here are also Lego hobbyists with some spare change sitting around so we're not forced to do quick sells to recover our capital.

You might not score an 80% off deal all the time but if you work hard at it you'd be amazed how many good deals you encounter (and how much poorer it will make you). Another thing is to pay attention to the Canadian exchange rates as I was doing some analysis on it late last night and realized that the Loonie has lost 4-6% of its values in just the last 2-3 months alone against the US greenback; which means even I may slow down my US buying and concentrate more on Europe. Good luck and happy hunting!