Buy second-hand LEGO on BrickLink

LEGO is extremely popular, as evidenced by the range of Lego products, the Lego shops in the streets and the TV program LEGO Masters. You can buy used LEGO on BrickLink, the online marketplace for new and used LEGO bricks. How do you complete your collection?

BrickLink is an online marketplace of all kinds of LEGO fans who sell Lego bricks and sets. The idea was conceived in 2000 by LEGO fan Daniel Jezek and adopted by the LEGO Group in 2019. It is a site that is largely operated without the involvement of LEGO itself and is very popular with so-called AFOLs (Adult Fan or LEGO) because of the large selection and cheap prices of individual bricks.

Would you rather buy LEGO new? View the LEGO offer from Bol.com here

BrickLink

To shop at BrickLink you need to create an account at www.bricklink.com and choose whether you mainly want to buy or sell stones. In this article we only focus on buying stones. Some providers on BrickLink are professionals with millions of bricks in their collection, but most providers are LEGO fans who sell bricks to support their expensive hobby.

How do those sellers get so many stones? In most cases by buying sets in the store or online and posting the content brick by brick on BrickLink. That seems like a lot of work, but BrickLink has handy tools to automatically place all the bricks of a set in your store and give them a price per brick. In general, a seller can get as much as 200 to 300 percent of the price of the set if he or she sells all the bricks individually. Of course, as a seller you must have enough time and space to sort all these stones, store them and sort them all out again when they are sold.

So much for a brief background. BrickLink is not Bol.com or Amazon, your order is placed on the BrickLink site, but your contact is with the individual seller, so check carefully whether the reviews of a particular provider are positive before transferring money. By the way, BrickLink is a safe environment with few to no scammers. Our personal experience is very positive, we have made more than 350 transactions.

Brick Owl

BrickLink is the largest online marketplace for Lego bricks, but by no means the only one. Brick Owl is a direct competitor to BrickLink and many professional BrickLink stores have their offerings in Brick Owl as well. Do you think certain bricks are too expensive at BrickLink? You may find them cheaper at the suppliers in Brick Owl.

How does BrickLink work?

Once you’ve created an account, you can start browsing BrickLink. To get an idea of ​​the offer, click on parts below Browse LEGO items† You will now see all kinds of categories with how many stones can be found in that category. These are unique stones by the way, each stone can then be found in several (sometimes dozens) colors.

For example, click brick and then on Brick 2 x 4 to find the most iconic Lego brick. below lots for sale you can now see per color how many lots (lots) are for sale. For example, if there is 2000 behind black This means that there are 2000 lots of those black stones for sale worldwide. Each party can consist of hundreds of bricks, so you understand that there are several million Lego bricks on BrickLink.

LEGO Pick a Brick

LEGO itself also offers the option to order Lego bricks, although you will only find the bricks that LEGO currently produces; the offer is therefore a lot smaller than at BrickLink. An advantage is that there is no price difference between the different colors, so a 2 x 4 brick always has the same price, which is not the case on BrickLink. Another advantage is that the shipping costs at LEGO are a lot cheaper.

A disadvantage is that many bricks are a lot more expensive than with providers on BrickLink. You can find the Pick a Brick shop by clicking www.lego.com/nl-nl clicking Pick a Brick† If you order for more than 55 euros, you pay no shipping costs. Orders under 55 euros are sent to your home for 5.95 euros. If your order is less than 12 euros, you also pay a service charge of 3 to 6 euros, depending on the stones you order.

looking for stones

The prices of the bricks fluctuate enormously, this is because LEGO does not always produce the same bricks in the same color. New colors and shapes are added every year. So it may be that a certain brick in green was very scarce last year and cost 30 cents each on BrickLink, while it is currently available for 3 cents, because LEGO is now mass-producing the specific brick in that color again .

If you click on a color of a stone, you will see a laundry list of suppliers who have this specific stone in their range, arranged by price. It’s smart to filter the search results a bit. below Seller ships to choose you Netherlands and under Condition do you choose for example New† Click on the right More options and choose at Seller location for example European Union† This prevents the shipping costs from skyrocketing and you do not have to pay customs fees on your purchase.

Then click on Search to see which parties match your filters. below Condition (Qty) you see how many stones the supplier has in the collection. click on View to see the item in the merchant’s store.

Minifigures and Sets

On BrickLink you will not only find bricks, but also complete sets, mini figures, original boxes and instruction booklets are offered. When you are in a provider’s store, click on the left for example mini figures to see all the lego dolls.

To order

Each provider can determine its own prices and shipping costs. As soon as you are in the store of a provider, first click on Terms to see what the shipping costs are and whether the store charges other costs, such as handling fees or PayPal fees. It is also possible that a shop charges a minimum price per lot (price per lot). l

inks you see below parts all parties that the store has in the collection, you can select by category or by color. With a click on one of the parts, you will see all available games appear in the main window. A shop can also have several lots of the same brick in the same color, for example if one lot is new and the other used.

To add stones to your shopping cart, type the number of stones you want from the lot in the box and choose Add items to cart† Once you’ve added everything you wanted, click the green button above it to go to that store’s shopping cart. Now pay attention, because every store has its own shopping cart with associated shipping costs. If you want to see all shopping carts of all stores where you have ordered something, click on the gray shopping cart at the top right.

Colors

An annoyance for many LEGO fans is that the color names on BrickLink are not the same as those of the LEGO Group itself. For example, Light Bluish Gray on BrickLink is called Medium Stone Gray at LEGO itself. A table with both the BrickLink and LEGO names can be found at https://kwikr.nl/kleur† Some colors were only available for a few years, you can see this below Years Active†

Recreate a set

BrickLink is not only used to buy or sell individual bricks, you can also use it to collect bricks from sets that are no longer produced by LEGO. The entire inventory of a certain set can be viewed and all stones in a set can be immediately put in a so-called ‘Wanted List’. For example, type Ferris Wheel in the search box and click below set on the set you want to replicate. If you want to buy the entire set from a BrickLink provider, you will find search results below.

below My Wanted List can you also Part Out click. below Add to Wanted List then select Create New Wanted List and enter a name for your list. click on Submit for editcheck all stones if necessary, remove stones that you already have and continue all other stones in your new list on Add to Wanted List to click. If you are now in a store looking for stones, you can: Shop on Wanted List see which stones from a certain list the store has in its collection.

Studio

Part of BrickLink is the Studio program. You can use this to make digital models, view models from others and create instruction booklets. Since Studio is from BrickLink, you can easily export a Wanted List if you’ve created a nice model. The program is available for Windows and Mac and can be downloaded from https://kwikr.nl/blstudio†

click on Download Studio to install the program on your PC. The app also allows you to subject your creations to a stability test, which is very important when building a digital model. It may look sturdy on the screen, but if you were to recreate it in real life, your model might fall apart. When your digital model is finished, you can use Studio to create beautiful digital renderings of your creation.

Previously, LEGO had another 3D program called LEGO Digital Designer (LDD), but the company announced last year that it would switch completely to BrickLink Studio. you can you Easy to import LDD models into Studio by the way†

PartDesigner

PartDesigner is another program from BrickLink and is intended for designing homemade bricks or minifigures. You don’t make completely new creations with it, by the way. Upload images to make your own dolls or add digital stickers to bricks.

You then export these stones or minifigures to be able to use them in Studio. PartDesigner is still in beta, but you can already download it for PC and Mac.

Creations of others

If you want to get inspired by what others are building with LEGO, then you should definitely take a look at the page BrickLink Studio Gallery† Here you can see all kinds of digital models that users have created in BrickLink Studio. Search for a specific creation or be surprised by at Staff Picks to watch. Click on a design to see more images of it. For some creations you can immediately put the required parts on a new Wanted List by pressing Add parts to Wanted List to click.

Click on Easy Buy, BrickLink will look at which store you can order the most bricks as cheaply as possible. If you want to see which stones you need, click below the image Parts list†

This is not possible for all models, by the way, if there is a message to the right of the model: For Display Only this often means that LEGO does not have the rights to display the model. You can then Building steps click to get an idea of ​​how the model works.

MOCs via Rebrickable

Not only official sets can be built, there are also many sites that offer models made by fans. A well-known site is www.rebrickable.com† Find a MOC (My Own Creation), buy the instructions directly via PayPal and add the required bricks directly to a BrickLink Wanted List under Inventory.

Lego Ideas

Do you have a good idea and do you want LEGO to produce your design? Then sign up at LEGO Ideas and upload your creation. As soon as your design has received ten thousand likes, LEGO will review it and you have the chance that your set will actually be produced.

The chance of this happening is not very high, because only a few creations per year are chosen from thousands of applications. Know that once you upload an idea to the site, you may not offer the instructions for it for money on other sites.