Buying parts from Bricklink

[Vee]

Is there any good strategy when buying parts from Bricklink?

I am very new to MOC, actually I have just finished my first MOC that is not really a MOC but an extension to an existing set and it used 400+ parts.

Then I went to Bricklink and found it difficult to know what to do. To minimize shipping costs, one wants the fewer possible sellers but it seems that the sellers with bigger inventories are exactly the ones with higher prices overall so you win from one side and lose, sometimes much more, in the other side.

Angry and upset with my inability to know what to do, which sellers to choose, I ended up buying what was possible from Pick a Brick. Then, I was still left with 100 parts to buy. I looked at those sellers with bigger inventories and better prices and then started buying from the first one, then removed all those pieces from inventory (Bricklink should have an automated way to remove from inventory parts that you have just purchased...), then choosing the next one, etc, until the last one, the last seller that had the last piece I needed,litterally.

Also, the minimum amount required by many big sellers limits a lot our options.

So I ended up using PAB + 5 BL sellers to buy 440 parts. Total final cost - all fees and shipping included - was around 20 cents (US$) per piece, actually a little bit higher but I could have lowered a little bit the final cost if I was not too stubborn to not want to change some things that were using expensive pieces (dark green 1x3 plate, for instance!).

My question is: is there some smarter strategy when buying from Bricklink?

And, lastly, do you think 20 cents (US$) per piece is too high a price, as an average, for a project.

Edited December 12, 2013 by Vee

[AFOLguy1970]

Hello,

I have been buying parts for about a year now working on a couple of different projects. Here is what I learned:

(1) Create a wanted list for your parts. Then use the "By shop" tab. This is extremely useful, because it will show you the sellers that have the best matches to get as many of those parts as possible from one place. As you probably have learned, shipping is what really eats into your budgets, therefore you want to place larger orders with fewer sellers.

(2) Online pick a brick has three distinct disadvantages: First, the parts tend to be expensive (although some of the smaller parts are not too bad). Second, the selection is very limited. For the variety and color of parts Lego makes, the selection of parts is decidedly small. Third, the parts ship from Poland, so you might have to wait a while if you are in the states.

(3) You do have to research and compare sellers as far as prices go. Not all of the big sellers are unreasonable with prices. There are some who I have ordered from multiple times due to selection and reasonable prices.

(4) 20 cents per piece would of course depend on the piece. If you are talking about a 16x16 plate, this is a great deal. If it is a 1x1 plate, I would avoid it. The prices depend not only on size, but color as well. If the piece is somewhat rare in the desired color, then it will be higher.

I create my designs in LDD and then create the list of needed parts. While building in LDD, I sometimes go to Bricklink to make sure the part exists in that color and it is readily available and affordable. If not, something might be changed.

[Vee]

I mostly did what you described. I created the Wanted Lists and chose the By Shop tab. I even created three separated wanted lists, one with the most common pieces, two others with the pieces that I know would mess up things, i.e., they were pieces not as easy to find as the others due to their colors (brown and dark green). I found one store that had almost ALL the pieces I needed but its prices were outrageous.

What I missed in Bricklink was a way to "simulate", a means to do "what if's". I mean, I wanted to save a seller as if I had bought the items from him and then automatically my Wanted List would remove, or hide, those items so I could see what I could do next, and so on. I missed a way to save seller+purchase without really buying it and then, once I had all my purchases ready, each with its own seller+parts, I would buy them all. But no, I had to effectively buy ONE batch, from ONE seller, then I had to remove those items from the Wanted List manually (which is a pain), then start again the process of research, one iteration by one. But sometimes, you find out that you would be better off if some of the parts you have already bought from seller "A" would be bought from seller "C" (that you are still evaluating, or "simulating") either because this seller has a better price of because you need to increase the total value due to a buy limit imposed by the seller, etc.

Although Bricklink seems to be a great tool, either I don't know it well enough yet or it could be much better. It is clumsy, complicated to learn things, can't save your cart (timing out also loses cart contents) and lacks some features that I, that just started with this MOC thing, already thought of that would be extremely helpful to us buyers. Being a website with several years of existence, I don't understand why some features that seem evident that would be highly beneficial are not implemented and, I would guess, will never be then.

[naf]

I too wish that bricklink would automatically remove parts from a wanted list once you purchase them, I don't think there's a way to do this (that I've found at least). I want to expand on what the above poster said. From your wanted list, when you click on the "by shop" tab you'll see all the shops that carry parts in your wanted list. From here, there click the "sort by" drop-down and select "lots (unique). This will show the stores that carry the greatest number of unique parts on your wanted list. This helps reduce the number of different sellers you have to buy from.

[zux]

I too wish that bricklink would automatically remove parts from a wanted list once you purchase them, I don't think there's a way to do this (that I've found at least).

Well, I've found this some where on this forum - there is convenient way of removing ordered items from wanted list, not automatic, but still good:

Got to your orders > Placed > There you'll find a "scroll" icon named "Items in Order in Wanted list" which you can click and remove the parts you just ordered.

Edited December 12, 2013 by zux

[Vee]

... Got to your orders > Placed > There you'll find a "scroll" icon named "Items in Order in Wanted list" which you can click and remove the parts you just ordered.

That is a nice tip.

Now we need a way to _hide_ temporarily what is in a certain cart...

[L@go]

Got to your orders > Placed > There you'll find a "scroll" icon named "Items in Order in Wanted list" which you can click and remove the parts you just ordered.

That option actually turns up every time you place an order. On the screen where it says "BrickLink Order #xxxxxxx was successfully placed" (or something very similar, I can't remember exactly right now), there's a link that says "Items in this order on my Wanted list". Click there right after you have placed an order, and you can delete from the list the parts you've just purchased.

And let me add a general tip: Sometimes the sellers that have the most parts available for sale, might be more expensive than others, as you've experienced - although I must say I haven't noticed that connection. But even if they're more expensive, I've found that it's normally worth it to pay a little bit extra to a seller that delivers every time. So I tend to prefer the stores with the most feedback and most parts.

[Lego Otaku]

Try this one: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=82975

Not 100% but it helps narrow down to a few stores with cheapest possible lots.

[Heppeng]

I'll second that! The only downside to it is that because it checks out all possible permutations of all stores and parts, if you have a large list of common parts it takes a very long time to run through the millions of possible combinations before arriving at the cheapest answer.

One other advantage is that it will automatically split parts between stores - ie if the cheapest store has less than your minimum quantity of that part, it will still include them and suggest the balance from the next cheapest if you see what I mean, Whereas a bricklink search for 'parts on my wanted list' would have excluded them on the grounds of not meeting the minimum quantity.

[Lego Otaku]

How it works: Brickficiency checks all the store (within select countries or all) and when they start checking for combinations, they start with rarest piece first. But yeah large list can take a while to finish, especially if you selected up to 5 stores.

[Vee]

Try this one ...

Thanks. Seems promising. The title is perfect: brickficiency. I couldn't say it better. It all has to do with efficiency when buying in the maze that is Bricklink.. I will try it soon an see how much effective its efficiency is...

[Vee]

I am right now testing this application, Brickficiency. It is good, can be useful, but it is taking a lot of time to find a 4-vendor solution. It's past one hour and it hasn't even got to 50% of completion. My testing brick list is kind of heavy, around 1.3k pieces. It did find 2 3-vendor solutions before but both were using a store that has unrealistic prices, so I had to blacklist it. Once blacklisted, then it could not find a 3-vendor solution anymore and is taking a looooooong time searching for a 4-vendor. I believe it will be in vain, it will not find.

I think it can be helpful if we manually first buy the rarest and most expensive pieces (and whatever we think it is efficient to add to them) to lower the number of pieces and because expensive parts is better to be decided manually, prices vary too much. So a combination of manual buying with further automated-assisted buying should be nice. I am leaving the computer on for the night so that tomorrow I will see if it found a 4-vendor solution.

[Lego Otaku]

1300 is quite large. Do knock out some of the rarer pieces first. You can make a separate want list just for the top few rarest parts, try to find one store that has em all cheap as possible, and buy it.

[AFOLguy1970]

I am building a 5 level structure with 2300 elements in just the first level. Yes, I definitely recommend going with the rarer pieces first. In fact, my wanted list only contains the relatively rarer items which also cannot be bought on online PAB (meaning I must Bricklink them). I took the tedious task of handwriting my parts list and listing by part number and color in the order that LDD presented in the Excel document. I put how many parts I need of each type and check them off as I complete them or write how many I have currently if I am short. When buying the rarer/more expensive ones, I also usually add some of the common ones to the order if they can be acquired cheaply. Typically, I avoid placing small Bricklink orders (less than $15 or so) to avoid a huge chunk of the order being shipping costs. The hope is to have only common pieces left so that there will be no problem getting them and at a low price.