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Subject: 
Re: Bricklink frustration
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.general
Date: 
Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:57:44 GMT
Viewed: 
1464 times
  
Quoting David Eaton <deaton@intdata.com>:

In lugnet.general, Jennifer L. Boger wrote:
The largest issue I've always seen with this was that the amalgamated • carriage
fees would very quickly pile up.

Bam.

overall your cost of transport would be so high that it potentially • wouldn't be
worth it.  The cost of effort might, I suppose, as time = money and what • not,
however with the delays in shipping everything twice, waiting for one or • two
potentially slower sellers holding up the *ENTIRE* order.  etc, etc etc.

Yep. In my experience, AFOLs are generally interested in saving more, not
spending more. There are a bunch out there who *will* pay more, but in
general,
I think your average AFOL would much rather spend the time doing it
themselves
rather than getting a middleman.

Ok, so now we've also got the issue of near zero demand. *IF* demand was higher,
costs could be split through multiple orders from the same original sellers,
potentially.  I would say that your average AFOL working on a project is also
probably pretty eager to receive parts, and wouldn't want to wait at *least*
twice as long to get them.

I never found a good way to fix this.

Only thing I can think of is to have genunine colsolidated sellers.
Effectively,
have sellers send their entire inventory to a single seller, who physically
keeps the combined inventory of multiple sellers in stock, and handles them,
reimbursing sellers when their parts are sold. Saves a lot on shipping, and
makes for a lot less legwork. But ultimately it suffers from similar issues,
plus a couple new ones:

- Shipping overhead still costs much money

Bam.

- "I got consolidated 2x4's from multiple sellers. Whose did I sell?"
(probably
solved by proportional reimbursement)

Or by agreement, or by incentives, who knows, this is figureoutable.

- Sellers no longer have direct access to their inventory

Updating said inventory would become the job of the middleman, after shipping
costs, etc.

- Middleman now is doing all the sorting, packaging, etc, instead of the
actual
sellers, so, overhead still exists (although not as much as doing it on a
per-order basis)

See above, etc.

I guess while I love the *IDEA* the demand isn't high enough, the costs too
exhorbitant, the time probably not worth it, the effort monstrous.  Again, I
never was able to figure out a good way of doing it.



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Bricklink frustration
 
(...) Bam. (...) Yep. In my experience, AFOLs are generally interested in saving more, not spending more. There are a bunch out there who *will* pay more, but in general, I think your average AFOL would much rather spend the time doing it themselves (...) (19 years ago, 13-Jul-05, to lugnet.general)

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