Coninuing our Marketplaces 2018 series, today we look at Bricklink. To find a full list of marketplaces we’ve written about already, visit our Marketplaces 2018 page here.
Web address: Bricklink.com
Marketplace Overview
Bricklink is a US based marketplace exclusively dedicated to the sale of Lego. You can list individual pieces, full sets, Lego related items and also mini-figures (which is the official name for those little Lego people). It is available to shoppers and sellers from all over the world and clearly has a significant international following.
Founded in 2000 it claims to have facilitated in the region of 1 billion transactions and continues to grow. They say that as of 29/3/2017, that on the marketplace there are 12,911,612 lots for sale and a total of 472,289,523 from 41,624 sellers. It was founded by the late Dan Jezek and remains a private company. You can read a full account of the Bricklink story here.
Seller registration and requirements
Information on how to register can be found here. There’s no qualification criteria to establish either a buyer or seller account and you can start listing immediately.
Product listings and fulfilment
There are 3 ways to list items for sale on BrickLink. If you just want to sell individual items you can do that using the Sell Item function and add your inventory individually. As all Lego bricks have individual code numbers, you can use the catalogue and the stock imagery, but your own pictures are highly recommended for more unusual items. If you have lots of lots, you can use the Mass Inventory Upload and add many items to your inventory at once via a file in XML format. Or you can “Part Out a Set” – Enter a set number and view parts and minifigs in that set ready for upload into your inventory. Merchants fulfil their sales themselves and payment is made using PayPal.
Tamebay’s take on Bricklink
What Bricklink ably demonstrates is how a honed and specialist marketplace can offer a much more satisfactory buying and selling experience than a generic service such as eBay. And recent updates to improve the look and feel of the marketplace have greatly improved the visual experience of Bricklink, which was previously rather perfunctory. Most beguiling though is the evident ongoing sense of community, including volunteer moderators, that will be familiar to those who recall eBay of old. True enough it has not made a big splash in the UK in the general consciousness but if you’re a dedicated seller of Lego then it has to be worth a look.
