| Redisplay Messages: Compact | Brief | All | Full Show Messages: All | Without Replies| Author: | Rakali  | | Posted: | Mar 6, 2024 01:32 | | Subject: | Looking to sell UK 39k new parts store. | | Viewed: | 109 times | | Topic: | Selling | |
| Sadly I don't really have the time to keep up with the part-out game any
more so I'm wondering if any other UK store (or I guess worldwide if you
want to pay the shipping on 39k parts) would be interested in taking the lot.
Current 6-mo average price is ~£2,750 according to BrickStock and an XE conversion,
and I'd be looking for £1,000 imcluding shipping which is about 64% off the
6-mo average. I also have 8 of your typical 4 x 10 small drawer storage units
that could go as well for a little bit extra.
I feel like normally when I see these posts people are always expecting to get
too much so I hope I'm not too far off base here. Please check out my store,
note that this is only the parts (and the few loose minifigures) and not the
few sets I have listed.
Cheers.
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| Author: | Rakali | | Posted: | Mar 21, 2023 02:23 | | Subject: | Wanted: Bionicle Kraata slugs! | | Viewed: | 114 times | | Topic: | Wanted | |
| Thought I'd ask on here if anyone has a pile of slugs laying around that
they don't feel like undertaking the process of identifying and would like
to offload. Drop me a message. I realize I might be a few years late to the party!
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| Author: | Rakali | | Posted: | May 8, 2022 03:09 | | Subject: | BL forcibly removing parts in unusual colors. | | Viewed: | 181 times | | Topic: | Problem | |
| Got an email through last night notifying me that some items had been removed
from my inventory with the reason:
"Reason: Item is a clone, replica, photocopy, modified element, or is counterfeit"
The item in question is
in Tan, Lime and Yellow.
I picked up these parts a few years ago now from a seller in Hungary who I assume
must have had some sort of factory connection. I was placing an order anyway
and picked up a few to resell as I thought they were interesting.
These parts are not fake, have the LEGO logo and the part number etc.
Is Bricklink now policing selling items in 'un-officially' released colors,
or is this an order from the corporate overlords similar to the *whispers* Osprey
I notice there is still a Red Darth Vader helmet listed, however it was forcibly
changed to Black on my wanted list this week. What's going on here?
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| Author: | Rakali | | Posted: | Oct 9, 2021 04:59 | | Subject: | Programmers: Page reqeust limit help. | | Viewed: | 92 times | | Topic: | Related Software | |
| First let me say that I am not a programmer, not even a little bit, and what
code I have so far is cobbled together from stack overflow and is extremely janky.
I'm just trying to make a little program for myself where I can compare LEGO
B&P prices of a wanted list to a BL stores prices.
I can pull the prices from B&P, and they don't seem to have any sort of lock
on how many page requests I make or how fast, but when I try to do the same from
a BL store, I'm running into 403 errors half of the time, and eventually
getting completely locked out to the point where I cannot view the inventory
of any shop even within my browser.
I'm not exactly flooding the server with requests here, a wanted list of
~100 items with half a second wait between each request gets me locked out straight
away so it has to be pretty strict.
Is it documented anywhere how many requests are allowed to be made, or is there
a better way to be doing what I am trying to do than loading each page individually
(and using some jank regex to grab the price).
Cheers for any advice!
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| Author: | Rakali | | Posted: | Aug 20, 2021 14:13 | | Subject: | Requesting help from a US seller =) | | Viewed: | 98 times | | Topic: | Help | |
| Hiya, I've had an order today an unfortunately I was missing 14x DBG
It's not often I get an order from the US, and even less often I'm missing
parts, but it's sods law they have to collide.
It there anyone in the US willing to ship these 14 parts to my buyer in the US
for me that I can order from?
Thanks!
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| Author: | Rakali | | Posted: | Aug 30, 2020 06:00 | | Subject: | Auto-select is awful. A different solution. | | Viewed: | 145 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | | Status: | Open | | Vote: | [Yes|No] | |
| Long post incoming.
As someone who does like to put together the occasional MOC from purchased instructions
as well as sell, I am having a hard time understanding how anyone manages to
buy parts these days.
Here are a few of my results from using the auto-select feature on a wanted list
of ~2500 parts in 374 lots.
UK ONLY, straight auto-select:
369/374 lots, 16 stores, £290.88
UK ONLY, manually filling from my own store first, then hitting auto-select:
369/374 lots, 14 stores, £270.19
I also tried the same list from a different account with the same results, so
it isn't just excluding my own store from my own search results.
I understand it's a very difficult programming task especially for such a
large wanted list, however with just one store manually selected, I was able
to reduce the number of stores by 2, and therefore shipping costs, as well as
the parts price by 7%, so why was my store not recommended to me in the first
place?
Let's try something else, and expand our search to EU stores.
EU ONLY, straight auto-select:
369/369 lots, 4 stores, £319.71
To keep it fair I removed the 5 pieces I could not get from UK sellers from the
query.
Now we are at 10 less stores than my optimized UK result, but for £50 more. UK
shipping is not going to be anywhere close to £5 per store, so we have given
the finder more choice, and somehow came away with a worse result.
This isn't even accounting for the fact that most EU stores charge a 5% Paypal
fee that the auto-buy can't see, and also the increased shipping cost for
international transactions.
Let's try and find those hard to find pieces.
UK ONLY, straight auto-select, then EU for the missing 5 parts:
374/374 lots, 20 stores, £332.33
EU ONLY, straight auto-select:
374/374 lots, 4 stores, £438.67
Now of course with 16 less stores, I am saving a considerable amount of shipping,
however we are not accounting for the additional 5% Paypal fees from most EU
stores. So average £2 shipping across the UK stores, add 5% to the EU store prices,
and I am still saving £100 by giving the auto-select LESS choice.
Maybe it is just not designed for such a large number of lots, but my list was
just the parts for two medium sized Star Wars models from Brickvault. That seems
like it would be a popular use case.
So what is the solution?
Work backwards. Start with the stores, then find the parts.
With so many stores having a whole myriad of different fees and limits these
days, it makes more sense to start with stores you are comfortable buying from,
and work from there.
I have attached an image of a piece of software that was written by BobDeQuatre
in 2013. It would load your wanted list, then you could give it stores you wanted
to buy from and it would cross reference the prices of all the parts between
the stores. You could then select which parts to buy from each and create the
relevant wanted lists. (if this was built in to BL you could of course just create
carts).
Sadly the software soon broke due to changes on BLs end before it ever had time
to gain traction, and the author did not care to work on the project any longer.
I used this to put together this MOC:
https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-6703/thire5/ucs-arc-170-starfighter/#comments
It was by far the easiest buying experience I have ever had as well as being
the largest MOC I have put together with parts from BL.
You can use the current features to find some stores with a lot of parts you
need with fair prices and terms that an auto finder cannot account for, put them
into this software and cross reference.
Need a rare part? Find a store manually that has it, put that into your table.
That store also had a few of your other parts cheaper than your other chosen
stores? Accounted for.
Unfortunately I am not a programmer, nor do I have the funds that it would take
to hire one, but I think this solution is worth something. I can offer up a token
£100 to anyone that would like a bit of a coding project to dabble with that
could be very beneficial for buyers and sellers alike.
Sorry for the ramble. Any thoughts?
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