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Built the UCS Death Star 75159 to add to my UCS wall. Coupled it with a WickedBrick display, but unfortunately the depth was too much for my shelving space so the minifigure display had to go to the left. I may readjust how to display the minis later. Fun build overall though!

Once again I am humbled by some of the recent donations. Jeff will put out a blast the next few days to promote the final week or two of the raffle. It has been such a difficult year for us all, but the school has been really hurt with no ability to do the usual fundraising because of that mofo virus. It's great to see that LEGO bricks have helped many pass the time and keep their brains sharp. Thanks again!

Figured I would add some info here. Started my store in 2015 and it has grown and hovers around 260k parts. Last year I had 35k in sales between BL and BO. I had a little over 1500 orders and have a $5 minimum buy with a fairly low shipping rate and no fees. I sell mostly new parts but also have used minifigures and minifig parts/accessories/weapons etc. Personally I try not to buy in a store that has fees, but sometimes still do if they have exactly what I need. I spend anywhere from 15-40 hours a week working in my store depending on how busy times are or if I have a lot of sets to part out. The store is fun and allows me to buy the Sets I want and also pays for my truck lease, but at times it can get to you when you get home from work and realize you have a few hours of orders ahead of you. Hope some of this information is helpful!

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.

I wanted to create a new thread in order to give progress on my site updates. I want explain a bit on what happened and what I am doing. What happened with the site? Honestly nothing really exciting or dramatic, overall in the end, I did not want to support the host I was with for the past four years after not really offering too much help with managed servers. They would spend 30 seconds looking, say they can ping the server so its up and then just say, "hey not my problem". I was on aging hardware, paying the same amount of money, so I took the opportunity to move to a new host with better/faster hardware and a staff that does help to support you when run into an issue that you can't handle on your own. I have been doing this a long time and pretty good monitoring and handling 99% of what comes my way, but there are issues that you need the next level up to help figure out what to do. I wasn't getting anything like that, but paying for it. Not anymore. What my goal is... I know more than anyone that the site needed some TLC. It's been a while since I have done any drastic updates, the site looked tired and I know the site can be so much better than what it's current state was. LEGO investing has changed since Ed and I launched the site and it's time to remove the dead content and bring more of what people are looking for. Below is the short term list of items planned for updating. I have been working on the nightly, just like the early days and enjoying seeing parts of it coming to life. Fix the login. This has been messed up and quirky for a while. This has been resolved and working well. It's a simple thing overall, but nice that it actually works how it's supposed to Overall price guide site design update. The site was tired and disjointed. I hated it and pained me to look at it. Time to start over. Brickfolio update. All the Brickfolio data is safe. I have close to three million rows of data for Brickfolio entries. Time to bring this thing to 2020. I will probably create another thread at some point to solicit some feedback on some new requests for the brickfolio Fix the data syncing with Brickset. A lot of people used this feature, but it's time to make it work the way it should. Later I will work on the content portions. The news and blogs. I have some good ideas for this, but want to get the price guide and brickfolio to you sooner than later. What I am asking for if possible... If you can, please stop asking where the brickfolio is. Again, the data is safe and I am working as fast as I can to bring it all back to you. It won't be a few days, but more like a few weeks, but it will be worth it. I setup my dev environment to push releases quick and easy. I want to create a true changelog so that you can follow updates to see what was done/fixed/new/removed, you know like what real software companies do. I really do appreciate your patience with this. It wasn't planned, but if there was going to be a time to do it, it was going to be now.

You can compare it with original 9446 but not with 70618

There is no comparison to the amount of detail 70618 has, It’s an amazing ship. The new one 71705 seems a much watered down version for the price. It would be a good consolation for those that missed out the bigger version last year. I am glad I held on my 70618.

http://brickhubs.com/lego-jurassic-world-2020-sets-i-mispronounce-more-new-lego-dinos/

We are halfway through barracuda bay, a great set, I just love ships. Hard to beat.

517707049

With 3 kids under 4 years old I'm not brave enough to go out anywhere. Lots of goodies on eBay and Mercari though. Ghost, with black hair Kanan and Zen. Not sure if everything else is complete, but I'd consider it a good deal.

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.

It’s alway a pleasure building the 10175 UCS Vader Tie from 2006. It is starting to look dated but still a nice looking set. It’s been nearly 7 years since I built my first 10175. The 1st pic is from 2013. It was a nice pickup then at $85 w/ the manual. Only needed some elements that were bricklinked for less than $8 with postage. This pic is from today. This set came with the box & manual. Picked it up 2 years ago at a nice price. forgot the exact price and will need to look it up. Much better quality of bricks (far less yellowish ones including the rare round cockpit cover) than my original.

We built 75230 The Porg over the weekend. Not the best build but the kids liked it In between games of Battleship and Uno.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Done sorting, getting started on 10195 soon.

Rebuilt 7676 tonight. It’s not as sturdy as our 75021, but my son wanted me to dig it out.

A pre-Ideas Cuusoo gem!!!

More of a "what did you build in the past month" picture. I picked up the Grand Emporium off eBay two years ago for about $180, a bit below the usual going rate. It was advertised as mostly complete and indeed was only missing about 10 common parts (somehow I don't have spare 1x2 white slopes in my bulk so I haven't quite finished the roof yet). I wasn't terribly excited to build it but I ended up really enjoying the process and I really like the final result. It reminds me of some of the buildings my wife and I saw when we traveled to Europe that summer. The Troll Warship was sort of an impulse buy. I've always wanted it (The Green Dragon!) and ended up with two partial lots in January that I hoped to be able to complete one from at a bargain price, but I was still looking at another $40+ if I really wanted it complete with all minfigures. I ended up winning one complete at auction on eBay for a total of about fifty cents more than I'd invested in the two lots. I already sold off part of that incomplete version for more than I expected, so once I sell the extra Green Dragon I'll probably come out a few $ ahead on the initial two lots, but not a good hourly rate, ha. Live and learn. I'm happy to have one complete and to have finally deleted it from my saved searches on eBay! I processed another 15 used sets from a bulk lot of partially built sets that I got locally last year and have sold most already, but I kept that Clone BP - those troopers look great! Finally, I ended up having to buy the Dewback set rom one of you off eBay as I missed it before retirement, but I want it to go with the new Bantha set...A really nice small build! There is a lot of terrible stuff happening in the world at the moment, but I'm thankful for my family's health and I've enjoyed the extra time to build and sort LEGO as a pleasant distraction. I reinventoried my very small supply of used parts on BL after a couple of inventory issues in January and sorted them out of plastic bags and into nice containers (you can see two of them in the background). Those may never pay for themselves as used parts are only a small part of my BL revenue, but it was worth it for the peace of mind of knowing I have what is advertised and that I can find it much quicker. I've done some MOCing, built the original 76021 Milano yesterday, and I am excited to start another project (or 5) soon (tonight). Happy building to all!

This is an innovation by LEGO - of creating unique box art - is definitely one I can get behind.

X-Mansion: Sentinel Attack by Odyssey Builds