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Hi All,
As I was laboring under extreme heat and humidity outdoors, my mind drifted to
LEGO. Bricklink in particular. Every month I spend a few hours just trying to
optimize my Bricklink orders. That is, given a list of items I'm looking to
purchase, I try to minimize the cost by choosing the best-price vendors, but
balance that with the sipping and handling costs in the event that the
lowest-cost vendor does not have the quantity I need. Therefore, I often go not
with the lowest price vendor, but a vendor that has the necessary quantity, as
long as the difference in price does not exceed the shipping and handling cost,
and so on and so forth. It gets even more complicated when you have a list of
40 or 50 different parts you're looking for, and anticipate minimizing the cost
by using 6 or 7 vendors.
My question is this: has anybody contemplated, attempted, or planned to devise
some sort of utility that could minimize your costs (assuming you're ordering
solely from Bricklink), given a list of parts to be purchased? I don't imagine
this to be an insurmountable task, but it's certainly not trivial. Some
thoughts:
(1) The user interface would need to allow you to enter in the part number,
color, and quantity one is looking for. They should also be easily edited, as
most people may want to juggle some order specifics if it will impact the price
significantly. Given that input, the utility would determine the lowest-cost
option for purchasing those parts, assuming that the order can be split among
several vendors.
(2) Of course, the utility would have to factor in shipping and handling costs
for the various shops.
(3) An option for selecting domestic vendors only, or international as well.
(3b) Bonus: make the vendor selection country more versatile - for example,
someone in the US might want to llok at shops in the US and Canada only.
(4) It would be useful if the utility somehow ranked or prioritized the order
items. For example, if I'm looking for 20 black pirate pistols, my order costs
might be skewed high. However, if the utility indicated that by going down to
16 black pistols I'd save 40%, why that would be just ducky!
Anyway, we might have to chalk this one up to sunstroke. I can't help thinking
that something like this would save me hours a month, not to mention some money
that could be further spent on other pieces. Now me, I'm just a mechanical
engineer, so I don't have any idea of how difficult this is, never mind whether
it's even possible.
Ooh, and if the utility were run through Bricklink, then a customer could just
click a little button that says "purchase these"! The appropriate orders will
be placed with each shop, eliminating the repetitive ordering from a half-dozen
or more shops ... wow.
This isn't really so much a solid proposal as it is food for thought. What do
people think?
-s
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