BrickLink Lesson

In a post last week I espoused the virtues of BrickLink, but also warned of the dangers.

I realised that in my UCS project, I had likely been too hasty in my belief that if one store had all of one part I needed, that would be better than buying it in multiple lots from various stores and thus incurring all that extra postage.

Compounding this was the fact that once I found a store that could supply all of one part number that I needed, I also went through the rest of the UCS part list and bought everything else that store had in the same package. Sound logic only from the point of view of saving postage. This study will show that my logic was in fact, severely flawed....

Project: 10030 Imperial Star Destroyer UCS Set

Part #: 4599 in Light Gray. Need 144 for the set, of which 118 are still outstanding.

So I go to BrickLink and search...

There are three stores that can provide the full 118 pieces, the cheapest of which is RM1.51 pp (working in Malaysian currency while I'm still here). This works out to RM 178.18 for the lot, which is almost $60 Australian, which is a lot of money for 118 very small pieces.

So then I go to the cheapest stores that have at least reasonable stocks of the part (ie more than 1 or 2) and see how that compares:

One has 60 x RM 0.55 = RM 33
The other has 58 x RM 0.83 = RM 48.14

So we have a total of RM 81.14

If we assume RM30 postage per order, which even for the full 118 pieces is likely over-estimating it, we get:

RM 208.18 for the one store, or
RM 141.14 for two stores.

RM67.04 or 32% difference, is one big damn difference, and well worth the effort of buying from multiple stores.

Maybe I need to work on this further and graph it...

But what this points out without a doubt is that I have overspent on the UCS set.

Dammit.