1.2k$ in inventory for 498$ Buying is the easy part?

[UpBrickVentures]

Hello!

My strategy is specifically to buy for part out. Time is not a concern for me and neither is the price as a set. 

Yes I know what this entails and am in the process of organizing and storing now

Sharing some deals I did over the past weekend. Collectively the inventory I picked up is worth 1,202 part out value. Cash price 498$. 6 New sets and 2 used sets.  

The first 4 were purchased on Facebook marketplace. All sets new in box except the Clone Turbo Tank. Initially I offered 230 and we agreed on 290. Payed 300 because I did not have change and he was a service industry worker out of a job.

Set #8639 was also purchased from FB Marketplace. Offered 40 payed 50 listed for 75 - new 

Set# 60110 was listed on Mercari (used) for 75 offered 48 and was accepted

Kylos tie fighter was listed as 70 on FB Marketplace new. Offered 40. Then 50. Seller only agreed to do 50 if she could sell me two. Which worked out great! Rev potential doubled!

Whats your buying strategy? Currently only making offers on things I can double my money (or better!) on part out. 

Initially I was making offers on a strict 60% discount. Which works well. They'll usually disagree with the .60 and settle for .50 - Which works out well since I show up same day with cash. 

 

 

[SLL]

Yes, you can use the part out price for gauging but bear in mind not all the parts in your inventory will sell, you will more than likely end up with bunch of parts nobody wants

 

[MrSam]

10 minutes ago, superlegolover said:

Yes, you can use the part out price for gauging but bear in mind not all the parts in your inventory will sell, you will more than likely end up with bunch of parts nobody wants

 

^ This is true. 

Parting out is a very time-intensive process, so I'd be expecting high potential returns. Your returns look about right. I'd recommend holding back some of the rarer minifigures that are still set to appreciate. That can increase your returns dramatically. 

Best of luck!

[joesnow2005]

76051 and 75151 listed at ~$280 and $330 on Amazon at this moment. I don't see the point to part these sets out.

[Shortbus311]

Also, the larger your inventory the more likely your parts are to sell. I don't have a pieces store on Bricklink, but I do purchase parts a lot to complete the used sets I sell and I will pay more for a part if one store has all the parts I need. That way I save on shipping costs, because lord knows a lot of Bricklink stores love to throw in hidden "handling" fees.

If I only need three pieces and store "A" has one for $0.05 and store "B" has the other 2 for $0.10 each, but store "C" has all 3 pieces for $0.75 each... I buy from store "C" because it is still cheaper to just pay shipping from 1 store instead of 2.

That is one of the main reasons I never opened a piece store actually. I don't think that I have enough bulk loose pieces that I would ever get any sales.

[UpBrickVentures]

Yes this is a great point about not selling everything. I plan on being in this game for the next few years minimum and am trying to take a business minded angle. So I'm okay with sitting on some inventory.

 

 So in my initial estimates I discounted future cash flow (net rev) by .30 then 50 and so on. I actually made offers with that in mind. "If I can only get 70% of this part out value, will I still make a profit?" is the question I asked myself. Acquiring a paying customer for break even or small loss is usually a long term win.

But generally looking for a 2x or 3x return seems to be a good rule of thumb. 

And @Shortbus311  you're right! I made my first bricklink purchase the other day. I bought the little businessman minifig in my picture but I wanted him to have an accessory cellphone. So I ended up ordering all parts from the store with the new figure and cellphone. Bigger inventory more purchases!

 

 

[iahawks550]

For those parts sellers..... It seems it's a very tedious process. I could have fun with this in the future (when retired) A few questions:

Do you buy new sets for your inventory? 

How do you sort, keep track of the parts? 

Is this a full-time job? 

 

[UpBrickVentures]

1 minute ago, iahawks550 said:

For those parts sellers..... It seems it's a very tedious process. I could have fun with this in the future (when retired) A few questions:

Do you buy new sets for your inventory? 

How do you sort, keep track of the parts? 

Is this a full-time job? 

 

I currently have 6 new sets and 2 used sets. I just started this but am leaning towards only purchasing new sets going forward.

Sorting and organizing goes as follows 

1. Break down set into polybags
2. Put on sort tray
3. Put all matching pieces into cups 
4. Use BrickStock part out set
5. Record location in remarks
6. Place in appropriately labeled storage container

It's not a full time job but I am treating it like a business not a hobby. I'll probably be working 30hrs a week on this. That being said I'm not a resale vulture. I loved legos as a kid. Especially the lego star wars video games and the Bionicle sets. I still remember getting my first lego city airport box. Good stuff.

But my priority at this point is creating a great store. None of this will be for personal use. Unless I get my hands on something Christmas themed because i love decorating for Christmas  🎅

[legorunner]

21 minutes ago, iahawks550 said:

It seems it's a very tedious process.

Yes, it is. It can be rewarding but also can tedious. Even with an efficient storage system (labeled Akro Mills or similar brand containers for me), spending 20 minutes to find the parts, print the label, and pack it up all up for a small $3 order of a bunch of cheap, little parts is annoying. You can solve this with an order minimum, but I don't have one. The flip side is I do have an above mentioned s/h fee - I don't try to hide it, but not all buyers read terms. If your order consists of 1 .03 part from me you will pay a $1 fee, otherwise I'm losing money on fees and shipping materials, not to mention time. As a LEGO fan I like being able to ship buyers that 1 part they need, so I don't mind an order that nets me a total of 60 cents in the end after fees, shipping costs, etc. 

My parts store is pretty small. I did buy some new sets when I first opened my BL to part out, but in hindsight I could eventually sell almost all of them on Amazon for more than I've made off of the parts with a lot less effort. Now I weigh the costs of completing a partial used set in a lot I pick up, and if its not worth the time / money to complete it, I part that out into the store - its the main source of additional parts for me. I think it depends on how large you want your store to be. If I wanted to grow significantly in parts, then I would seek out cost effective new sets for sure, but for now, its not worth it. The exception is the occasional damaged box set. Parts are just a plus factor for sets and Minifigures I make the most money off of in my store. 

I know that there are some full time BL folks out there, I hope they are hear I would love to hear from them. I love LEGO but I can't imagine sorting it as my full time job!

[UpBrickVentures]

5 minutes ago, legorunner said:

I know that there are some full time BL folks out there, I hope they are hear I would love to hear from them. I love LEGO but I can't imagine sorting it as my full time job!

After parting 5k+ pieces so far agreed. But the way I see it if that's the cost of doing business so be it. Wonder if anyone has successfully outsourced/hired someone to part for them. 

[SpaceFan9]

This article is a bit dated, but is a good place to start for a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run a large bricklink store: https://www.brothers-brick.com/2011/01/30/qa-with-bricklink-sellers/

There are a few folks here that sell lego full-time. ClintonJoseph and DadsAFOL, for example, both have physical stores which started out as online hobby selling.

Other good advice I've heard about starting any business is:

• decide who it is that you want to serve. 
• what talents do you bring to the table?
• build your business by setting up the infrastructure so that your talents can meet the needs of those you want to serve.

Best of luck on your new adventure.

[Shortbus311]

Yes, it is. It can be rewarding but also can tedious. Even with an efficient storage system (labeled Akro Mills or similar brand containers for me), spending 20 minutes to find the parts, print the label, and pack it up all up for a small $3 order of a bunch of cheap, little parts is annoying. You can solve this with an order minimum, but I don't have one. The flip side is I do have an above mentioned s/h fee - I don't try to hide it, but not all buyers read terms. If your order consists of 1 .03 part from me you will pay a $1 fee, otherwise I'm losing money on fees and shipping materials, not to mention time. As a LEGO fan I like being able to ship buyers that 1 part they need, so I don't mind an order that nets me a total of 60 cents in the end after fees, shipping costs, etc. 
My parts store is pretty small. I did buy some new sets when I first opened my BL to part out, but in hindsight I could eventually sell almost all of them on Amazon for more than I've made off of the parts with a lot less effort. Now I weigh the costs of completing a partial used set in a lot I pick up, and if its not worth the time / money to complete it, I part that out into the store - its the main source of additional parts for me. I think it depends on how large you want your store to be. If I wanted to grow significantly in parts, then I would seek out cost effective new sets for sure, but for now, its not worth it. The exception is the occasional damaged box set. Parts are just a plus factor for sets and Minifigures I make the most money off of in my store. 
I know that there are some full time BL folks out there, I hope they are hear I would love to hear from them. I love LEGO but I can't imagine sorting it as my full time job!

I understand your points exactly. I try my best to be a good buyer.

I recently ordered missing pieces to finish off 6 used sets... about 160 lots, 250 pieces total. I used the auto-selection on BL to find the stores. It came back with 4 stores. One store had ~50% of the stuff I needed, one store had ~25%, the 3rd store had about 24% and the last store had 3 pieces one of which the other 3 stores didn't have at all. I went to the smallest orders store to see if they had more of the pieces I needed to try and divide up my orders more evenly and only found one other piece from my list. So was only able to order a total of 4 pieces from that store. I am sure the store owner was frustrated with my small order (I would be).

I try to save up my used sets that are missing pieces so I can order them all at once, but sometimes small orders are impossible to get around.

Incidentally, the largest store from the order above charged me a $10 handling fee on top of shipping. Their terms in the store make it nearly impossible to figure out what the fee will be before placing the order as it is based off of total weight (I would have to have all the pieces to know how much they weigh before ordering)... ridiculous system. I ended up ordering from them anyway because I had already purchased the orders for the other 3 stores and didn't want to break that up into smaller orders from more stores. But in the future I will be doing everything possible to avoid purchasing stuff from that store.

[UpBrickVentures]

5 minutes ago, Shortbus311 said:

Incidentally, the largest store from the order above charged me a $10 handling fee on top of shipping. Their terms in the store make it nearly impossible to figure out what the fee will be before placing the order as it is based off of total weight (I would have to have all the pieces to know how much they weigh before ordering)... ridiculous system. 

I have seen this complaint many times already about other Brick-link stores along with the complaint of store minimum. I've decided I wont have a store minimum but will charge a shipping and handling fee. Comments like this are useful. Breaking down fees in an easy to understand way is an easy way to stand out from any lazy competition.     

13 minutes ago, SpaceFan9 said:

This article is a bit dated, but is a good place to start for a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run a large bricklink store: https://www.brothers-brick.com/2011/01/30/qa-with-bricklink-sellers/

There are a few folks here that sell lego full-time. ClintonJoseph and DadsAFOL, for example, both have physical stores which started out as online hobby selling.

Other good advice I've heard about starting any business is:

• decide who it is that you want to serve. 
• what talents do you bring to the table?
• build your business by setting up the infrastructure so that your talents can meet the needs of those you want to serve.

Best of luck on your new adventure.

That article is actually extremely useful! Thanks for sharing that with me. Good read. 

[Phil B]

A part-out store is labor intensive on the part out. I started mine 4 years ago with 17k parts from the WM Black Friday brick boxes, and have been slowly adding more as time went by. I'm close to 100k parts now, and still have around 100k in parts waiting in unopened sets. Not a big seller because I have priced my inventory deliberately well above the 6 month average, but stuff does sell. This way it is not a big drain on my time. Observations:

1. Use BrickSync (pls consider a donation even though it's free now, this is excellent software) to sell on both BL and BO. I sell more on BO than on BL.

2. How well your parts sell depends largely on your selling price. If you sell on or below the average, you should sell way more than when you sell above the average (but you need better buy-ins to compensate)

3. When parting out used sets, make sure you get the part numbers/variations right (or make very clear statements in your store terms and ideally also in the individual part listing's comment field about how you mix variations, e.g. the various styles of 1x2 jumper plates). Nothing more frustrating for a customer than to need a specific variation and getting the wrong part.

4. A good organization system is key. I have bins by brick type, and then individual parts in plastic baggies labeled with key info (color, part number, description, item count) in each bin.

5. 7k parts is tiny. You won't get many sales, unless you have some really desirable and hard to find parts, or price your wares at rock-bottom prices. I'd say you need to get 50-100k parts at a minimum for your store to be attractive to the generic buyer.

6. Many colors don't sell. Especially all those purples and magentas in the Classic brick boxes and Friends sets. You need to price those really low to appeal to people who just use the bricks for hidden support structures.

7. Get your shipping schedule set up right. This is the hardest thing to do, but once you have it set up so you can enable automatic checkout, you'll see more sales.

 

[UpBrickVentures]

@Phil B 

Thanks for the tips! Your 2016 blog post helped me get started. Having a parts target of 50k is also helpful. Interesting strategy to sell above 6 month sales average. I'll keep that in the back pocket. And will definitely look into BrickSync as Brickstock has already proven to be well worth 20$    

[iahawks550]

That was an interesting article. I wonder what the pay rate/hour calculates to be for a large online store? If anyone cares to give me a roundabout answer via PM, that would be cool too. I just can't make the numbers work. They obviously do for some people, but I also wonder about a source for parts at a price I can't compete with.

[$20 on joe vs dan]

Avoid having kids.

They are the chaos bringers to all things orderly and neat...especially inventoried LEGO pieces

A child looking to MOC is both a thing of beauty and awe...much like a Cat-5 Hurricane 

[legorunner]

1 hour ago, Shortbus311 said:

a $10 handling fee on top of shipping

Thats crazy. I understand your point as well - I've read through terms and such and then still been hit with a surprise s/h fee at the end, but $10? Ouch. That indeed seems like a great way to not get return customers...

[exracer327]

21 minutes ago, legorunner said:

That's crazy. I understand your point as well - I've read through terms and such and then still been hit with a surprise s/h fee at the end, but $10? Ouch. That indeed seems like a great way to not get return customers...

I agree. I had one of those and that was after I read his terms page (all 5 pages of it) and I still couldn't figure out where the additional $10 charge came from.  When I pm'd him, he was pretty condescending with "It's in my terms..."  *facepalm*  I needed a logic flowchart just to figure it out where all the charges came from.

If I didn't need the specific pieces he had in the qty he had them in I probably would have cancelled my order.  So I guess the lesson is; the larger your store, the more you can get away with.

[NIevo]

Most here have covered the basics but with a small inventory you are going to have a very hard time selling and actually making any money.  I don't even think about parting a set out unless it's a minimum of a 300% markup for the parts but try for 400%+.  Otherwise the amount of time spent inventorying and then packing will kill you.  I also try and make sure I have a large selection of minifigures as well because people seem to always want to throw in a few parts with figures and it is fairly easy to buy minifigure lots off eBay or other market places and double or triple the prices.

I agree with one poster about reselling some sets instead of parting it out.  It doesn't make sense to part out a set for not much more then you can sell for outright.

[UpBrickVentures]

2 hours ago, NIevo said:

Most here have covered the basics but with a small inventory you are going to have a very hard time selling and actually making any money.  I don't even think about parting a set out unless it's a minimum of a 300% markup for the parts but try for 400%+.  Otherwise the amount of time spent inventorying and then packing will kill you.  I also try and make sure I have a large selection of minifigures as well because people seem to always want to throw in a few parts with figures and it is fairly easy to buy minifigure lots off eBay or other market places and double or triple the prices.

I agree with one poster about reselling some sets instead of parting it out.  It doesn't make sense to part out a set for not much more then you can sell for outright.

Yeah I'm going to sell my minifigures as wholes instead of parting. I've also reassessed parting out the Ant Man Airport Battle looks like it's selling pretty well on ebay. 

[Migration]

I’m probably a bricklink oddball, but I primarily sell used parts. My inventory started with Bionicle, basically as a way to get rid the piles of it from bulk lots that didn’t involve giving it away. I tend to stay around 10,000 parts in inventory, bit low now as people have been bored so sales have been up. I don’t have a minimum buy (and have had a few $0.01 orders) but charge a flat $2 service charge on each order. As others have noted, make your shipping template simple and clear and allow onsite payment, also don’t be afraid of international shipping to increase your pool of potential buyers. 
 

I primarily sell on Amazon so the bricklink thing is a bit of a side gig, but it is an enjoyable one. 

Edited April 23, 2020 by Migration

[UpBrickVentures]

11 hours ago, Migration said:

. I tend to stay around 10,000 parts in inventory, bit low now as people have been bored so sales have been up. I don’t have a minimum buy (and have had a few $0.01 orders) but charge a flat $2 service charge on each order. As others have noted, make your shipping template simple and clear and allow onsite payment, also don’t be afraid of international shipping to increase your pool of potential buyers. 
 

I primarily sell on Amazon so the bricklink thing is a bit of a side gig, but it is an enjoyable one. 

 

Thanks for the tip. Just set up the BL store and restricted it to the US. But your right about buyers. The more the merrier! I'll change those setting today. I like the idea of the flat service charge. I might steal that one! A 2 dollar flat fee seems reasonable. 

Did you get grandfathered into Amazon? I've done some light reading but havn't gone too deep on how to get on that platform. Seems like they are restrictive of resellers. 

Also wanna know what car that shift belongs to 

[Migration]

16 minutes ago, UpBrickVentures said:

 

Thanks for the tip. Just set up the BL store and restricted it to the US. But your right about buyers. The more the merrier! I'll change those setting today. I like the idea of the flat service charge. I might steal that one! A 2 dollar flat fee seems reasonable. 

Did you get grandfathered into Amazon? I've done some light reading but havn't gone too deep on how to get on that platform. Seems like they are restrictive of resellers. 

Also wanna know what car that shift belongs to 

Yes, grandfathered on Amazon, and it’s a 2014 Subaru Outback. 

[Lobot]

I've had a Bricklink store for a while and in the last 2-3 years averaged around 55,000 parts and 400 minifigures (all new); giving me around 225 orders per year.

As others have mentioned, if you're parting out sets look for a minimum of 3x buy-in, otherwise you'll be doing a lot of work for a minimal return.  I work full-time so I'm quite happy with that level of orders; it's enough to keep me occupied in the winter months, but not too much.  You'll find that some parts will be in regular demand, whilst others will remain in your inventory for years unless you sell them very cheaply!  I'd strongly recommend avoiding the 'Friends' colour spectrum; the 'Classic' type sets look attractive on paper but they include a lot of odd colours and parts that aren't in demand....

If you're buying new, purchase multiples of a set - it makes parting-out a lot easier and you'll attract more buyers, as you'll have greater quantities available.  If you're buying licensed sets, either buy early in their lifecycle with as much of a discount as possible (as the minifigures will still be in demand and have a 'premium') or alternatively buy as cheap as possible and be prepared to hold them for a while.  For example, I did very well with parting-out the 2018 Harry Potter sets when they were first released (and found them at 30-40% off) but in the last 12 months they've flatlined - as the market is awash with them, combined with lower demand.

In all honesty, I've enjoyed it most of the time but unless you've got access to a lot of high-demand stock, there's easier and greater profits from selling sealed sets.  Some stores seem to do incredibly well, but from what I've seen you'd need a large inventory (250,000 parts+) for a viable return, and also make a lot of good decisions.

I hope this helps.