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In lugnet.cad, Ted Michon wrote:
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I’ve always wondered why BrickLink was not set up to provide a user with the
cheapest solution to a specific want list. One could argue that it’s counter
productive for sellers wanting to get the most for their wares, but BL is
aleady setup to help users find the cheapest parts. So, why not help users
find the cheapest set of parts? I suppose this quickly starts to resemble the
traveling salesman problem in that finding the exact best solution is not
necessarily easy, but finding a good enough solution would probably be just
fine. One wrinkle is that BL doesn provide shipping costs up front, so that
makes a calculation more imprecise. Still, ...
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From a technical standpoint, I think this wouldn’t be too hard to do. You’d
query each vendor with the list of parts, and taking into account the vendor’s
minimum lot size for each part, get back a mock order that covers as much of
that parts list as possible. Then you’d display this in a table showing how
much of your parts list wasn’t covered, how many extra pieces you’re getting
(due to lot minimums), and the total cost. You could even compute the “value”
for each vendor by comparing their cost per piece (included in the order) to the
BrickLink average cost for the same pieces. (It’d be a computationally
expensive search, but it would tend to result in larger orders — the economics
could probably be worked out.)
The user could then sort this table by total price, value, pieces left over, or
whatever, and choose for themselves which best serves the need.
And you guys are right, this would mostly solve what I was looking for -- it
still lacks a central repository of LDraw models (or instructions) and parts
lists in some ready-to-use format. But if BrickLink could do this sort of
multi-part search, probably some third party would set up the model repository.
So. Who’s in charge of BrickLink, anyway? Who could make this actually happen?
Best,
– Joe
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Crazy idea for third-party Factory-like service
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| (...) Larry- I've always wondered why BrickLink was not set up to provide a user with the cheapest solution to a specific want list. One could argue that it's counter productive for sellers wanting to get the most for their wares, but BL is aleady (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
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