Can someone possibly explain to me how to get orders together on Bricklink?

[SteamSewnEmpire]

So, I have ordered from BL in the past, but I know I'm doing something wrong here.

I successfully uploaded a parts list and got all my ducks in order on that end. I get to this page...

... and then hit auto-select. Despite messing with the 'USA' or 'North America' or 'Anywhere' toggles, auto-select keeps spitting out just outrageous sellers - people asking $5 for a simple 1x1 clip piece, or 2x2 plate, and stuff along those lines. As a result, the price for a 2,000 piece model that's largely composed of very common black and DBG bricks suddenly comes back at me at like $1,500 and $2,000. Moreover, when I hit auto-select, the silly thing doesn't even assign all my lots - I wind up with, say, 90% assigned... and I don't even know how to tell what pieces haven't been purchased.

Clearly, auto-select isn't the way to go on this. But how do I proceed with manually selecting shops? How do I tell that I'm not, say, massively over-buying on a given part, or doubling up on those assignments? Previously, I had managed to tease out reasonable prices with auto-select, but it's obvious that this time, that's not going to be posssible.

Thank you for any help.

Edited March 16, 2021 by SteamSewnEmpire

[Pdaitabird]

I don't know much about selecting stores, as I've only made a few small orders. But regarding the outrageously priced clip piece, some parts like clips and jumper plates have undergone design changes (while remaining functionally identical) so that the less common version costs much more. Have you checked to see if there is an older or newer version of the same part that is cheaper? Also, are you limiting yourself to new bricks, or are you open to used/any condition? I have only ever bought used, but I would imagine new would be much more expensive.

[caiman0637]

Try going to your main wanted list page and clicking Easy Buy on the list you want to buy. This finds the best deals automatically.

[SteamSewnEmpire]

2 minutes ago, caiman0637 said:

Try going to your main wanted list page and clicking Easy Buy on the list you want to buy. This finds the best deals automatically.

That's definitely not spitting out the best price. Using filters on the page above, I managed to get down to around $650 at one point. Easy buy is asking $1,500+.

[caiman0637]

Just now, SteamSewnEmpire said:

That's definitely not spitting out the best price. Using filters on the page above, I managed to get down to around $650 at one point. Easy buy is asking $1,500+.

I hate to break it to you, but your wanted list may be a tad too large. You could try ordering from bricks and pieces...

[1963maniac]

With 2000 parts you are probably going to have to use several sellers to get everything you need. Some times it's good to get what you can from Lego replacement parts and pay shipping one time or at least fewer times. You can get VIP points from it too.

[Slegengr]

If I understand correctly, the problem you are facing is that you have the list of stores sorted by "unique lots" which will rank the stores in order of how many of the unique parts on your list are available in that store, highest first.  Notice that, in your image, the top store has 205 unique parts, while each store below descends lower.  This means that the top store has 205 of the total parts on your wanted list available, but not necessarily at the lowest price.

The optimization you are trying to achieve has to balance a compromise between wanting to order the most parts in the fewest stores versus the lowest price per piece but with more stores/different orders.  I am not sure the software can decide this for you.

Example: Assume your wanted list has 10 parts.  Also assume a store has all 10 parts available at $1 per part with shipping of $10 for order total of $20.  Now assume that 10 stores each have only 1 part from your list, all at $0.50 each but shipping is $2 per order.  This would give a total of $5 for parts but $20 for shipping, so $25 total, which is worse than the first case.  The ideal is usually somewhere in between based on your own decisions.

The way I usually use my wanted list is to search for some of the most important/costly/rare/etc. parts first, find a store with lower price, then search the store for my wanted list.  This usually allows me to work through my list based on the key items while filling in the more common elements over a few orders to find a compromise between cost per part and total number of orders to balance into a more optimum total cost.

...You will also get better results by adding maximum prices acceptable in your wanted list and excluding stores over the maximum price.  This will cut out the sellers with ridiculously high prices on common items.

Edited March 16, 2021 by Slegengr
Added maximum price recommendation

[Lfm55]

Also try to go trough your spare and limit the number of unique items lots.

It can help a lot!

[astyanax]

@SteamSewnEmpire This may be a bit tedious, but what I do is, I first check Lego Bricks & Pieces and put Lego's price (if available) as max price for each part on my BrickLink list.

Then in BrickLink I make sure to exclude the "Lots over max price" (unchecked in your screenshot).

Then the goal is to hunt down all parts not available from Bricks & Pieces -- BrickLink will sneak in also those parts from my wishlist that are offered cheaper than at Bricks & Pieces, great.

After achieving the above goal, I typically end up with a bunch of parts still on the wishlist, which I'll then just order from Bricks & Pieces. Typically this concerns very small parts like 1x1 plates or newly released molds/colors.

[MAB]

Don't use easy buy. That is for people that don't care about price.

If you keep getting expensive sellers, then least favourite them and exclude those sellers from searches.

Follow slegngr's route of identifying stores with expensive parts first and buying anything they have on your wants list that is reasonably priced from them.

[HappyAFOL]

Bricklink's Auto-buy isn't great by itself. It can help you find relevant sellers, but as you have witnessed, it doesn't give you the best results in terms of prices and number of stores.

The problem is Algorithmic - there are obviously better store and cart combinations out there, but finding them simply means having their servers try out all the possibilities for comparsion, and there's no good way around that as the data is completely random (you can't predict which sellers have the specific pieces you are looking for). As you can imagine, such search means insane load for their servers which they can't allow. Seriously, Bricklink is ridiculusly slow somtimes as is it.

There are 2 solutions for this:

The first is practical - try using your human intuition to target stores which seem to have as many pieces as you need and fair prices. This of course requires a lot of manual work.

The second is theoretical - I know of no such solution, but hypothetically somebody could one day write a better algorithm that runs locally on your PC which can use more resources (would still take tons of time since you'll need to download their database or frequently run queries and then have tons of calculations). Again, I don't think such software exists.

To sum up, sorry, there's no good solution. Especially for large orders! It's either work hard or pay more. I feel your pain.

[astyanax]

As a computer scientist I can confirm @HappyAFOL's algorithmic take on the issue.

What would be helpful -- and certainly possible now that BrickLink is owned by TLG -- is to have another checkbox under "Exclude", namely something like "Exclude lots over B&P price, if currently available at B&P".

That would weed out a lot of ridiculous sellers!

[MAB]

There have been pieces of software external to BL written to do it. It is not a new problem, I remember using atxdad's MATLAB scripts years ago. Take a look here, for example:

 

 

[supertruper1988]

You will need to go through your list and look for expensive and rare molds. LDD is horrible at this. Bricklink also interprets 1x1 tiles as the non-groove mold from the early days of tiles. It takes time to learn the finicky parts of BL but I am happy with all the various tweaks over the years and I just use "auto select" in the USA or north america these days. 

The tip about expensive stores being added to the "disliked stores" list is a good one. Some sellers have high inventory and prices so they get picked by the algorithm but they arent the best price. Those kids of places get put on the dislike list.