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I've been doing it for 12 years, full time for the last 6. You can't make any money at it and I wouldn't try. But tell you what, let me know what parts you have and I'll give you a decent price for them, especially minifigs. Seriously, it's just like running a car or motorcycle parts house. As stated above, you need good organization skills as well as familiarity with the parts. If you can look at a pair of legs and know that they belong to the Zeb minifig, it'll save you a ton of time over trying to look it up to discover what they are. I also determined early on that I don't want some customers. I don't want the customers that order 240 different parts, 1 of each. So I set a modest lot average minimum of $.90. I also have an $8 minimum order. True, I lose some small orders but, those are not my customers and I do not want them. I value my time more. You just have to decide what type of store you want to run. One other word of advice. Don't contribute to the race-to-the-bottom on items. If 20 people have a part and the cheapest is $.20, don't automatically go to $.19. It makes us all poor. Some store owners never seem to realize that, you can sell that same part for $.28 IF you have the other 40 parts that the buyer needs in stock. I'll gladly pay a higher price for a part NOT to have to place yet another order, with shipping. Good luck to you and don't hesitate to ask questions here.

Orient Express 20% off, plus double VIP points, and ballerina GWP. https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-orient-express-train-21344

Home Alone at Best Buy - _at your own risK $240 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lego-ideas-home-alone-21330/6485720.p?sb_share_source=PDP&skuId=6485720

I started my reseller journey with the intent to open a BL store, which is what I did (see my "First year as a LEGO reseller" blog post on this site). Only when I realized that often I could sell whole sets faster with less work is when I added the EBay/Amazon sales channel. I have always been small potatoes, doing the reselling more as a hobby than a serious business undertaking (though I do report business income to the IRS and have a reseller's license (and sales tax reporting obligation) with my state. You will need at least 100,000 parts in your store before you will see significant order volume (unless you bargain-price, but that has its own issues - see @raindog's commentary above). Having a good organization system is a must. You do not have to be the cheapest to get sales; for most buyers it is the "single trip experience" that gets them to shop at your store. For me it has been a great hobby that I can scale up and down based on the demands of my real-life job. Right now I get less than 5 orders per month, but I have a lot of parts ready to be uploaded and expect that once I do, order volumes will go up again. It is not going to make me rich at this point, or be able to compete with my regular income. For that you need a significantly larger operation, with warehouse space and staff. There are others on this site who can tell you the complexities of running such an operation.

As a small "buyer" and occasional seller, I lean to those where I can get all my odd parts at once. Most important to me is to just have an all in shipping price. I HATE being nickeled and dimed with this fee and that fee and this PayPal fee, and the dinner fee, and the purple brick fee. I will shop somewhere else to avoid it, even if I pay a bit more instead of using two sellers. If you build the costs into your parts, it should work out fine on the long run. Yay LEGO!

I'll just say that a parts store is not a money making venture. Some of us are just sick in the head and like sorting, organizing, etc. If you truly enjoy the arduous tasks stated above go for it. If you think you are going to create a great revenue stream forget about it - especially if you have kids! Enjoy them now!

That's a really good thought that I hadn't considered, thanks. I've been reselling part-time for a while just to fund the personal collection, but as I am getting more and more stuff I am wondering if parting it out would yield better results. But yeah, I still have a full-time job and two kids at home so the small orders might be a lot. That's what I'm trying to gauge.

And do you have a lot of time? Parting out takes time, and then pulling BL orders can be very time consuming for (sometimes) not a lot of money. I really enjoy my BL store and its a great community to be a part of, but I phased out a lot of my parts this summer because parts specifically were not a good use of my time now that I have two little ones at home. Pulling 300 parts across 250 lots for $9 before fees was fun at one point but as my free time dried up it just became stressful. If you are looking to do this small time there is always money to be made, but you'll need to have a large inventory to start making sizable money and really compete with the well established stores with big inventories. Also, and this is pure speculation, but if you are thinking of going big, I personally would wait to see how all this with Amazon shakes out - I have to imagine there are sellers booted from AMZ who's escape plan involve parting out into new or existing BL Stores.

Just out of curiosity for the sellers that got nuked, did you keep the $40 pro plan year round or did you bounce back-and-forth between that and the dollar per item plan?

Fred Meyer is 20% off all LEGO plus 15% off home good (coupon in aisle). Apparently no exclusions for either discount. 76281 rang up as $57.79 (32%) 76924 rang up as $24.47 (45%) Have to deal with the stickers, RFID stickers, and anti-theft devices, though ...

Can someone please share the Reddit thread or forum?

Well, I hope this site doesn't go more quiet than its been. That would be a real bummer.

maybe a bit tone deaf, but he aint wrong

Are we the go to place on Reddit now ? We finally made it

Is this common, or has this happened to others? About a year ago I purchased the Darth Vader Meditation Chamber lego set on clearance at Walmart. It was sealed - definitely. I finally got around to opening it last night for a build and lo-and-behold I don’t know what the heck was inside. First of all, no instructions. Then, a lot of the bags were not Star Wars related, and the pieces in the bags looked old, dented, scratched, etc. It looks like someone just threw some random bags in there. I confirmed it was sealed - unless some hacks have figured out a way to reseal a box and make it look like it was never opened to swap out bags and pieces?

I have the pro plan and got nuked, but Lego is only 10% of my inventory, but I just pumped a lot into it for december. I was actually in the middle of prepping a shipment when I got that email.