Bricksetters' Bricklink stores

omnium

Lobot said:

• 'Consolidate' any new inventory into existing lots
  

As a BL user, not a seller, I've seen this a few times and always wondered how/why some sellers seem to have many lots of the same item. Now I know at least.

@TheFew, some of your identical lots are priced differently. Eg. you have 2 + 1 DBG #3003 at £0.054 and 23 at £0.063. I see that elsewhere and it had me confused in the past.

For my purposes, the main attraction to a store tends to be finding a seller with a bulk of a part I want. Once I'm in, I check for other random items on my Wanted list to bulk out the order and make the P&P overhead worth it.

Eg. I just bought 500 DBG 2x4s from a seller. While I didn't need to bulk out that order, I went on to add another £60 on misc items.

I could happily spend a few quid in your store @TheFew, but it would be many small lots, eg, 27 2x2s, 7 2x3s, ...

TheFew

@TheFew, some of your identical lots are priced differently. Eg. you have 2 + 1 DBG #3003 at £0.054 and 23 at £0.063. I see that elsewhere and it had me confused in the past.

I could happily spend a few quid in your store @TheFew, but it would be many small lots, eg, 27 2x2s, 7 2x3s, ...

@omnium

The pricing thing happens when you part out a new set at the current average prices and the fail to click the correct buttons to consolidate the new lots with existing lots. It is a rookie mistake. Personally it does not bother me when I buy from other sellers, as I know why it occurs. But I will aim to fix it.

Re buying many small lots from my store. Feel free. Spend £100's !

KingAlanI

for one order, I couldn't find 26 tan 1x2 brick - buyer took refund and the other items. sometimes I lose track of a couple small things but this was odd.

another order had 4 white 2x2 plate but I only found 3. did sort and list some other white plates during the search though.

any stuff you already have but haven't listed? getting around to that is a good way to increase stock, and I should take my own advice.

KingAlanI

On My Default Sell Item Options, https://www.bricklink.com/invOptionsAdd.asp, the first option allows you to have Consolidate prechecked. Old Pricing/Bulk/Sale/Remarks/Description are good so you don't have to change those. I like New Stockroom to bring the lot out of Stockroom. New Retain means I can have the lot become checked if I forgot to check the old one.

KingAlanI

Opened 7 #10404 - the bags are by color so this should be relatively easy to sort, but that doesn't mean I'll get to it quickly, watching and talking about Star Trek is far more interesting. :P

KingAlanI

Often trash/recycling pickup Friday morning motivates me to organize something. I opened the 10404's Thursday night so I could recycle the boxes. Now I started sorting the parts so I can dispose of the empty bags this week.

Hanzo

Is there a thread for tips about opening a bricklink store?  Or would this be the proper one to ask questions?  Having trouble understanding the shipping setup part.

All_That_Rocks

Checkout this vid on things to consider before starting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS89p1eRyn8&t=1s

legoprods

@Hanzo also the bricklink forums should probably be pretty useful for specific questions.

Aleydita

legoprods said:

@Hanzo also the bricklink forums should probably be pretty useful for specific questions.

I dunno, it's frequented by a few "buyers are all con artists" types who police any other opinion. Also, Admin is deleting almost all posts that are negative about Bricklink itself, so you don't really get a flavour of what's wrong with the platform.

SprinkleOtter

Yeah, Bricklink forums are flat-out useless, in my opinion.

sid3windr

The layout and UX alone give me that impression, let alone the content...

TheFew

SprinkleOtter said:

Yeah, Bricklink forums are flat-out useless, in my opinion.

Could you please delete this message as it is somewhat critical of BrickLink?

Hanzo

Well, might as well just ask here.  Is it ok to use the default shipping settings or should I be making my own?  It looks like it shows how many users use the templates, and I chose the tops ones, I just wasn't sure.

legoprods

They can be very 'gatekeeping', but they are usually really helpful on questions and they have a few dedicated users that like to answer anything and everything.

@Hanzo shouldn't you check what your actual shipping costs are in your shipping company and make a table accordingly? I mean if you are american and using USPS then maybe the template is provided, but watch out or you'll be either overcharging or undercharging and losing money in the end.

Hanzo

legoprods said:

They can be very 'gatekeeping', but they are usually really helpful on questions and they have a few dedicated users that like to answer anything and everything.

@Hanzo shouldn't you check what your actual shipping costs are in your shipping company and make a table accordingly? I mean if you are american and using USPS then maybe the template is provided, but watch out or you'll be either overcharging or undercharging and losing money in the end.

I am keeping things simple and using USPS and doing US and Canada only to start, the templates were for USPS in the US, I guess the part I was fuzzy on is how they were coming up with the amounts that were automatically being applied...unless the weight of every individual piece is in the bricklink database and is tied to it...but that sounds crazy.

Daragh

Yes the weight and dimensions for the vast majority of parts are there. Look at the catalogue entry for any part and you should see it. 

Hanzo

Daragh said:

Yes the weight and dimensions for the vast majority of parts are there. Look at the catalogue entry for any part and you should see it. 

Well, that's nifty.  I might be over thinking this then.  Only thing I need to figure out is if it automatically calculates and charges shipping, how does someone add insurance?  I didn't see an option during my test checkout. 

Hanzo

I found where to add the insurance option, but it keeps telling me I have a field wrong when I go to save changes, and it doesn't highlight anything showing what's wrong.  Went ahead and started a thread on there so we'll see.

TheFew

Finally updated my store following advice from the thread - thanks! Rationalising my store and removing duplicate lots was a massive hassle however!

Pumpkin_3CK5

Aleydita said:

legoprods said:

@Hanzo also the bricklink forums should probably be pretty useful for specific questions.

I dunno, it's frequented by a few "buyers are all con artists" types who police any other opinion. Also, Admin is deleting almost all posts that are negative about Bricklink itself, so you don't really get a flavour of what's wrong with the platform.

 Is that why most sellers don't respond when you ask for pics of what they're selling? I've been buying from eBay, but some sets take forever to pop up, so I'm giving Bricklink a look-see, and I see a lot of stock photos. Why isn't it a standard to upload your item's pics in the first place?

SprinkleOtter

Pumpkin_3CK5 said:

Aleydita said:

legoprods said:

@Hanzo also the bricklink forums should probably be pretty useful for specific questions.

I dunno, it's frequented by a few "buyers are all con artists" types who police any other opinion. Also, Admin is deleting almost all posts that are negative about Bricklink itself, so you don't really get a flavour of what's wrong with the platform.

 Is that why most sellers don't respond when you ask for pics of what they're selling? I've been buying from eBay, but some sets take forever to pop up, so I'm giving Bricklink a look-see, and I see a lot of stock photos. Why isn't it a standard to upload your item's pics in the first place?

Because 99.5% of buyers don't care. It takes a c##pton of time to take and upload photos of every item, especially decent photos with decent lighting. And what if you have multiple of that item? A different listing with a different picture for each one? And then you get into $0.05 parts...

I can testify that about 80-90% of people that message me, whether about pictures or some other info, never actually buy the set in question. Why waste the time?

Aleydita

Pumpkin_3CK5 said:

Aleydita said:

legoprods said:

@Hanzo also the bricklink forums should probably be pretty useful for specific questions.

I dunno, it's frequented by a few "buyers are all con artists" types who police any other opinion. Also, Admin is deleting almost all posts that are negative about Bricklink itself, so you don't really get a flavour of what's wrong with the platform.

 Is that why most sellers don't respond when you ask for pics of what they're selling? I've been buying from eBay, but some sets take forever to pop up, so I'm giving Bricklink a look-see, and I see a lot of stock photos. Why isn't it a standard to upload your item's pics in the first place?

It's the best place to find collector grade items, but you need to find the right sellers for that. In my admittedly limited experience, the stores with the largest stocks and the most orders rarely answer requests for images. Stock photos are fine if you're selling items to build, after all the only necessary requirement for 'new' is that the item is sealed.

legoprods

@Pumpkin_3CK5 That's the reason to have a catalog, there are already photos, weight, part count, dimensions... etc of everything (parts, sets, minifigs...)

I see some sellers not wanting to go through the hassle of taking pics, uploading, sending of some random set that a buyer that maybe doesn't want it and is just wasting time.

I don't see why you need sellers to make pictures of all the specific things in a store, everything is listed and then the listing takes the stock pic from the catalog automatically. I'm sure that if you want to ask for pics because you want to see the state of the box or something, sellers would be happy, but a big seller with nice feedback taking a pic just to prove they have it in inventory... well I can see why they could take it as "insulting". Would you ask an online retailer for a pic of their stock just to prove they actually have the product in hand?

Pumpkin_3CK5

@legoprods @SprinkleOtter I ask for pics to see the condition of the box. @Aleydita mentioned it's a good place to get collector grade items so I was thinking it'd be standard to show off the actual product. I mean if someone was asking for a picture of a specific part, then yeah I can see why someone would be annoyed and ignore that request. So far I haven't seen a lot of sellers with multiple items of one particular set, so I didn't think it'd be a big hassle to take a couple of pics. I was thinking most sellers at BL know they're selling collectibles and knows that box condition matters? 

SprinkleOtter

Time vs. money. Most people asking never have any intention of buying.

DB361

The thing is though in my experience nobody asks for photos of individual parts or even cheaper sets. The value of the set has a big part to play in it. Yes, 90% of requests end up with no sale, but in my experience that 10% that do are sales that are worth several hundred pounds. For 5 minutes effort of taking and sending a photo or two, all of a sudden it very much makes it worth it.

legoprods

Parting out a couple Hogwart Castles... so many parts!!

asrfarinha

Ooof! That one is a lot of different lots... Good luck!

Hanzo

So I have a dumb question, how do I get visibility for my new store?  Obviously if someone is buying they are usually going to order from someone with a bunch of positive feedback....so do I have to sell some stuff well under average price to gain attention and get some orders to gain feedback?

Thanks for any advice bricksetters.

Darth_Jar_Jar

^That's how got started, tough it still took a couple of weeks before the first order.

 
https://store.bricklink.com/SteveYeager35?p=SteveYeager35#/shop?o={"pg":2,"itemType":"P","catID":"5","showHomeItems":0}

Bumblepants

You can get feedback as a buyer. Not the same as seller feedback but looks better than a zero and easier to build off of.

Hanzo

Bumblepants said:

You can get feedback as a buyer. Not the same as seller feedback but looks better than a zero and easier to build off of.

What's that?  Buy more on bricklink to help my cause?  Sounds good to me :-)

SprinkleOtter

Hanzo said:

So I have a dumb question, how do I get visibility for my new store?  Obviously if someone is buying they are usually going to order from someone with a bunch of positive feedback....so do I have to sell some stuff well under average price to gain attention and get some orders to gain feedback?

Thanks for any advice bricksetters.

I found pricing things a bit below market value starting out was helpful. Lots of people don't care about feedback (I sure as heck still don't), and be very hands-on with the initial sales (messages when it ships and stuff) will get you a few dozen feedback in a hurry.

Now, I pretty much set the market price on my sets.

KingAlanI

Big sets are hard to part out because of all the lots and the low quantities, would never dream of trying it with Hogwarts Castle. But there might be a good market for unique pieces, and it could make sense for any you got cheap, especially if box condition wasn't good for selling sealed

I like selling pieces and polybags partially so I don't have to worry about box condition but it does sometimes come up with promos.

I'd bought for awhile before I started selling so I naturally built up feedback rather than needing to go out of my way to do so. Now that I have my own inventory to get parts from I rarely see stuff I want to buy from another seller

Haven't added much lately, but did just add a #30476. The orders I'm still getting are going pretty smoothly.

KingAlanI

finally finished sorting the pink/purple from 7 10404's. when I've been productive lately it's been with things besides BL or just filling current orders.

DB361

First two weeks of October have been surprisingly quiet - a few small orders here and there but nothing to get excited about. Then yesterday and today have come along beaten the rest of the month into submission! Had my biggest parts order yet at nearly 1,500 pieces, and sets are starting to pick up again as we get closer towards Christmas. This is just the beginning!
Meanwhile I've parted out 15x #41455, and already sold a lot of the rarer parts.

(And literally as I'm typing this, an e-mail notification pops up for another order. Man, today's been silly!)

KingAlanI

Either loads of activity or very little of it (not much middle ground), seems true for me as well - but that might be just what sticks in memory rather than an actual pattern

Some newly listed items do go very quickly, but that makes me worry if I underpriced them. Likewise I wonder if price cuts are necessary to sell slow-moving inventory

Sorted the black/dark bley/flat silver tonight - a little bit at a time is still faster than I'd been doing

bricknation

Aaarrrgghh. Error 500 again just when I have an upload ready to go

TheFew

bricknation said:

Aaarrrgghh. Error 500 again just when I have an upload ready to go

Could be worse. You could have removed 500 duplicate entries from your inventory but did it without turning master mode off in brick sync. So they got put straight back next time I ran brick sync.

bricknation

Could be worse. Did you ever have all just uploaded lots disappear from your inventory. I'm still looking for some of the parts few months later. It thought me to backup every brickstock file.

All_That_Rocks

DB361 said:

First two weeks of October have been surprisingly quiet - a few small orders here and there but nothing to get excited about. Then yesterday and today have come along beaten the rest of the month into submission! Had my biggest parts order yet at nearly 1,500 pieces, and sets are starting to pick up again as we get closer towards Christmas. This is just the beginning!
Meanwhile I've parted out 15x #41455, and already sold a lot of the rarer parts.

(And literally as I'm typing this, an e-mail notification pops up for another order. Man, today's been silly!)

I didn't bother picking up these sets because the part count and value didn't seem great. Maybe I missed something.

All_That_Rocks

KingAlanI said:

Big sets are hard to part out because of all the lots and the low quantities, would never dream of trying it with Hogwarts Castle. But there might be a good market for unique pieces, and it could make sense for any you got cheap, especially if box condition wasn't good for selling sealed

Parted out 3 Hogwarts Castles and 3 Whomping Willows earlier in the month and they have been great sellers for parts. My sales seem to be increasing month on month with October being my best yet.

Sales don't always turn into profit considering the cash that gets largely reinvested back into growing the stores stock.

All_That_Rocks

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

asrfarinha

All_That_Rocks said:

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

My backlog is at 42k parts and it usually bounces between 40k and 50k. The number grows while I build up a good number of a set, and then shrinks dramatically when I do a big part out.

Most of my storage is bags inside shoe boxes, grouped by category. Once that starts overflowing, I need to further subdivide the category. For example, basic 1x bricks (1x1, 1x2, 1x3, etc) all used to be inside the same box, later the 1x2 moved to a box of their own, and recently I split them into 2 boxes: monochrome+trans vs all the other colors.
It's a constant moving around of things. Not very time-efficient, but necessary due to the space constraints.

bricknation

All_That_Rocks said:

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

My shame pile is bigger than my whole bricklink inventory but it shrinks slowly as I'm learning to be selective with my purchases. 
I've planned my storage system before I moved into parts business. 33-drawer units from aldi, and 0.6L, 1L, 2L food containers from asda , 4.7L "shoeboxes" from tesco and Really Useful Box towers with 7L and 12L drawers. Unopened sets go on metal shelves I got really cheap when BHS went under. 

You can see some of it on my instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/brick.pulse

As you said the stock moves constantly from a smaller bin to a bigger then back to a small one but that's the only efficient way. 

All_That_Rocks

asrfarinha said:

All_That_Rocks said:

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

My backlog is at 42k parts and it usually bounces between 40k and 50k. The number grows while I build up a good number of a set, and then shrinks dramatically when I do a big part out.

I know what you mean. I have 24 x 10704 to part out which will make quite a dent. 

All_That_Rocks

bricknation said:

All_That_Rocks said:

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

My shame pile is bigger than my whole bricklink inventory but it shrinks slowly as I'm learning to be selective with my purchases. 
I've planned my storage system before I moved into parts business. 33-drawer units from aldi, and 0.6L, 1L, 2L food containers from asda , 4.7L "shoeboxes" from tesco and Really Useful Box towers with 7L and 12L drawers. Unopened sets go on metal shelves I got really cheap when BHS went under. 

You can see some of it on my instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/brick.pulse

As you said the stock moves constantly from a smaller bin to a bigger then back to a small one but that's the only efficient way. 

That's a really impressive store you go there. I don't know where I would put that many parts :) I'm assuming your full time? I'm just struggling with larger bin sizes. Need to go get me some cheap food containers I think.

bricknation

No sales? Sit down and check your store front page.
The fix is to remove all sets listed in category "LEGO promotional"

bricknation

All_That_Rocks said:

bricknation said:

All_That_Rocks said:

What's your shame piles like? Mine is getting a little crazy. Just calculated I have approx 55K parts to part out worth £5K. I need to find a way to part out quicker but am also facing issues with parts storage as the qty of each brick increases beyond their locations capacity. What do you guys do with large quantities? Bag em?

My shame pile is bigger than my whole bricklink inventory but it shrinks slowly as I'm learning to be selective with my purchases. 
I've planned my storage system before I moved into parts business. 33-drawer units from aldi, and 0.6L, 1L, 2L food containers from asda , 4.7L "shoeboxes" from tesco and Really Useful Box towers with 7L and 12L drawers. Unopened sets go on metal shelves I got really cheap when BHS went under. 

You can see some of it on my instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/brick.pulse

As you said the stock moves constantly from a smaller bin to a bigger then back to a small one but that's the only efficient way. 

That's a really impressive store you go there. I don't know where I would put that many parts :) I'm assuming your full time? I'm just struggling with larger bin sizes. Need to go get me some cheap food containers I think.

Yes it's a full time operation along with some selling on Amazon.