Bricklink/BrickOwl - Discussion, questions, & answers

[legorunner]

I wonder if this works for them at other merchants? When I go out to dinner tonight and the waitress asks for my card to pay, can I instead demand to pay with seashells? 

 

[raindog]

Funny incident but it does bring up the point that maybe the time is right for BrickLink to start recognizing, and providing for, vendors such as Venmo and even Amazon pay.  I know that many users are moving from Paypal and I get more and more orders paying with Stripe.  Stripe's fees are killing me!

 

[Randyipp]

20 minutes ago, raindog said:

Funny incident but it does bring up the point that maybe the time is right for BrickLink to start recognizing, and providing for, vendors such as Venmo and even Amazon pay.  I know that many users are moving from Paypal and I get more and more orders paying with Stripe.  Stripe's fees are killing me!

 

The fees are similar on all payment methods and Venmo is owned by Paypal.

I'd much rather they work on seller tools or tax exemption.

[Thanos75]

My wife runs a business that handels Credit Card fees for small business. She has saved small and large businesses a lot of money in fees. If the customer is using anything other than cash then a 3% fee is added to the bill. So instead of the business paying the fees the customer does. He business is booming because several of her clients would have had to shut down if not for the money they are saving credit card fees.

Edited February 16 by Thanos75

[raindog]

23 minutes ago, Randyipp said:

The fees are similar on all payment methods and Venmo is owned by Paypal

I understand who owns Venmo.  I also understand that my customers have asked in the past if there are alternate ways to pay other than PP or Stripe.

[keymomachine]

7 hours ago, exciter1 said:

Out of those options, I would go with McDonald's.

You can't even use McDonald's GCs in the app! F-tier giftcard.

[Bricklectic]

Website is 119% ads. And beyond slow to boot!

[Pseudoty]

10 minutes ago, Bricklectic said:

Website is 119% ads. And beyond slow to boot!

Create a free account and login and they go away. Oh, and turn on Dark Mode. 

[legorunner]

Our family is growing in size (yay) but that means that I'm losing the space where my BL Store currently lives. I am going to be able to keep selling minifigures and minifigure parts, but all of the other basic parts need to go. I just started running a sale and will liquidate what I can in the next few weeks, then I might just dump the rest on eBay or pack it up for another year. That said, if anyone wants to add some parts to their store for cheap, I'd gladly sell all of it to someone for a deep discount off of the 6 month sales average (around $1550 right now). 

• About 17000 parts spread across around 3200 lots
• I would guess about 4/5s new, 1/5 used 
• Full disclosure: storage and sorting of parts is on average mediocre. All parts are sorted and I can send you the Brickstore File, but some parts are stored in large AkroMills drawers containing a variety of different parts, so you would need to sort a lot of the parts down from my own organization to get it to match your own. Technic parts are especially offensive 
• I'm not looking to get rid of the AkroMills storage containers since those would drive up the shipping cost significantly, but I'm willing to negotiate. 
• I have a few small damaged box / open box new sets and miscellaneous bags of new parts from a planned expansion that was put on hold that I would be willing to include as part of the deal as well

DM me if interested. 

Edit: I'm in Charlotte, NC if anyone wants local pickup

Edited May 29 by legorunner
Location

[thegraverobber]

Just looking into Bricklick parts-selling for the first time. Is anyone seeing any sort of consistent activity through Bricklink, IE is it recommended by anyone here? Or too much competition or work to keep up with? Any sort of beginner advice from those more knowledgable and experienced would be much appreciated!

[Migration]

15 minutes ago, thegraverobber said:

Just looking into Bricklick parts-selling for the first time. Is anyone seeing any sort of consistent activity through Bricklink, IE is it recommended by anyone here? Or too much competition or work to keep up with? Any sort of beginner advice from those more knowledgable and experienced would be much appreciated!

How are your organization skills? 

[legorunner]

And do you have a lot of time? Parting out takes time, and then pulling BL orders can be very time consuming for (sometimes) not a lot of money. I really enjoy my BL store and its a great community to be a part of, but I phased out a lot of my parts this summer because parts specifically were not a good use of my time now that I have two little ones at home. Pulling 300 parts across 250 lots for $9 before fees was fun at one point but as my free time dried up it just became stressful. 

If you are looking to do this small time there is always money to be made, but you'll need to have a large inventory to start making sizable money and really compete with the well established stores with big inventories. 

Also, and this is pure speculation, but if you are thinking of going big, I personally would wait to see how all this with Amazon shakes out - I have to imagine there are sellers booted from AMZ who's escape plan involve parting out into new or existing BL Stores. 

[raindog]

48 minutes ago, thegraverobber said:

Just looking into Bricklick parts-selling for the first time. Is anyone seeing any sort of consistent activity through Bricklink, IE is it recommended by anyone here? Or too much competition or work to keep up with? Any sort of beginner advice from those more knowledgable and experienced would be much appreciated!

I've been doing it for 12 years, full time for the last 6.  You can't make any money at it and I wouldn't try.  But tell you what, let me know what parts you have and I'll give you a decent price for them, especially minifigs.     Seriously, it's just like running a car or motorcycle parts house.  As stated above, you need good organization skills as well as familiarity with the parts.  If you can look at a pair of legs and know that they belong to the Zeb minifig, it'll save you a ton of time over trying to look it up to discover what they are.  I also determined early on that I don't want some customers.  I don't want the customers that order 240 different parts, 1 of each.  So I set a modest lot average minimum of $.90.  I also have an $8 minimum order.   True, I lose some small orders but, those are not my customers and I do not want them.  I value my time more.  You just have to decide what type of store you want to run.

One other word of advice.  Don't contribute to the race-to-the-bottom on items.  If 20 people have a part and the cheapest is $.20, don't automatically go to $.19.  It makes us all poor.  Some store owners never seem to realize that, you can sell that same part for $.28 IF you have the other 40 parts that the buyer needs in stock.  I'll gladly pay a higher price for a part NOT to have to place yet another order, with shipping.

Good luck to you and don't hesitate to ask questions here.

Edited December 6 by raindog

[thegraverobber]

53 minutes ago, Migration said:

How are your organization skills? 

Probably too good lol. I do a lot of MOC building so my stuff is already very organized and separated. Space would be my biggest concern, but I can make it work.

[thegraverobber]

38 minutes ago, legorunner said:

And do you have a lot of time? Parting out takes time, and then pulling BL orders can be very time consuming for (sometimes) not a lot of money. I really enjoy my BL store and its a great community to be a part of, but I phased out a lot of my parts this summer because parts specifically were not a good use of my time now that I have two little ones at home. Pulling 300 parts across 250 lots for $9 before fees was fun at one point but as my free time dried up it just became stressful. 

If you are looking to do this small time there is always money to be made, but you'll need to have a large inventory to start making sizable money and really compete with the well established stores with big inventories. 

Also, and this is pure speculation, but if you are thinking of going big, I personally would wait to see how all this with Amazon shakes out - I have to imagine there are sellers booted from AMZ who's escape plan involve parting out into new or existing BL Stores. 

That's a really good thought that I hadn't considered, thanks.

I've been reselling part-time for a while just to fund the personal collection, but as I am getting more and more stuff I am wondering if parting it out would yield better results. But yeah, I still have a full-time job and two kids at home so the small orders might be a lot. That's what I'm trying to gauge.

[thegraverobber]

37 minutes ago, raindog said:

I've been doing it for 12 years, full time for the last 6.  You can't make any money at it and I wouldn't try.  But tell you what, let me know what parts you have and I'll give you a decent price for them, especially minifigs.     Seriously, it's just like running a car or motorcycle parts house.  As stated above, you need good organization skills as well as familiarity with the parts.  If you can look at a pair of legs and know that they belong to the Zeb minifig, it'll save you a ton of time over trying to look it up to discover what they are.  I also determined early on that I don't want some customers.  I don't want the customers that order 240 different parts, 1 of each.  So I set a modest lot average minimum of $.90.  I also have an $8 minimum order.   True, I lose some small orders but, those are not my customers and I do not want them.  I value my time more.  You just have to decide what type of store you want to run.

One other word of advice.  Don't contribute to the race-to-the-bottom on items.  If 20 people have a part and the cheapest is $.20, don't automatically go to $.19.  It makes us all poor.  Some store owners never seem to realize that, you can sell that same part for $.28 IF you have the other 40 parts that the buyer needs in stock.  I'll gladly pay a higher price for a part NOT to have to place yet another order, with shipping.

Good luck to you and don't hesitate to ask questions here.

Thanks for all of this! I have good organization skills and pretty thorough parts knowledge through MOC building, which is why I'm considering it. I've been reselling just sealed stuff as I come into it, but I've been acquiring used lots and minifigs lately and local/eBay have too many different downsides. Ironically just picked up a Zeb minifig in a lot recently. 😄

I buy a decent amount on Bricklink, I just wasn't sure how much of this inventory is just sitting there and how much is selling. Good to know that it's moving. It definitely seems and feels more convenient than the eBay listing I've been doing.

[Phil B]

I started my reseller journey with the intent to open a BL store, which is what I did (see my "First year as a LEGO reseller" blog post on this site). Only when I realized that often I could sell whole sets faster with less work is when I added the EBay/Amazon sales channel. I have always been small potatoes, doing the reselling more as a hobby than a serious business undertaking (though I do report business income to the IRS and have a reseller's license (and sales tax reporting obligation) with my state.

You will need at least 100,000 parts in your store before you will see significant order volume (unless you bargain-price, but that has its own issues - see @raindog's commentary above). Having a good organization system is a must. You do not have to be the cheapest to get sales; for most buyers it is the "single trip experience" that gets them to shop at your store.

For me it has been a great hobby that I can scale up and down based on the demands of my real-life job. Right now I get less than 5 orders per month, but I have a lot of parts ready to be uploaded and expect that once I do, order volumes will go up again.

It is not going to make me rich at this point, or be able to compete with my regular income. For that you need a significantly larger operation, with warehouse space and staff. There are others on this site who can tell you the complexities of running such an operation.

[gmpirate]

I'll just say that a parts store is not a money making venture.  Some of us are just sick in the head and like sorting, organizing, etc.  If you truly enjoy the arduous tasks stated above go for it.  If you think you are going to create a great revenue stream forget about it - especially if you have kids!  Enjoy them now!

[redghostx]

As a small "buyer" and occasional seller, I lean to those where I can get all my odd parts at once. Most important to me is to just have an all in shipping price.

I HATE being nickeled and dimed with this fee and that fee and this PayPal fee, and the dinner fee, and the purple brick fee. I will shop somewhere else to avoid it, even if I pay a bit more instead of using two sellers. If you build the costs into your parts, it should work out fine on the long run.

Yay LEGO!

[Pseudoty]

Not sure when all the updates and changes went into effect but BL is finally entering the modern era for placing orders with Lego S @ H want list integration. I ordered just over 500 parts for a build I am working on and it was much easier to see what was available and cheaper on PAB/BL and generate files to upload. Dual monitors helps.