As many of you know, we sort LEGO bricks for another eBay seller. We are paid in bricks, so we can continue our personal builds and make a little money on the side, allowing us to purchase some of the more expensive LEGO sets. We also use that money to purchase any missing bricks.

Our venue of choice for selling our bricks has also been eBay. Last year was our first year selling there. We did ok for first timers. However, we came across a few issues, especially during the holiday season. Among those are:

• Not having enough space for our LEGO selections in the garage. We have sorted thousands of pounds of LEGO and, of course, have managed to accumulate quite a bit of pieces to sell.In order to prep for the selling season and to allow us a place to store all the cleaned and sorted LEGO bricks, we purchased a few Edsal shelving units (<– yes, that’s an affiliate link):
  These types of shelving units are rated to hold 5000lbs… which is great, since bricks can weight a lot… not that much, but it seems close. ;)

  While they are set up we are still not quite ready to use them as shelving units. We still have tons of cleaning to do!

• Not having enough free eBay listings to post everything we had for sale. We did an excellent job of sorting, photographing and bagging LEGO parts, but once we got to posting, we quickly ran out of the 50 free listings a month eBay offers its regular users. The amount we sell is so small, we’re not quite ready to purchase an eBay store.
• Not knowing exactly what we have for sale. As we sold and relisted, we realized we sometimes weren’t exactly sure of how many of the items we had left. They would get added to the “ready to sell” bins, but we’d lose count. Sometimes we found ourselves selling things that had already sold out. Ooops! However, it was clear we needed some sort of inventory system to make sure we were selling everything we had and not selling those things we no longer had.
• Not having enough listings ready to go when eBay offered special listing promotions. During the month, eBay tends to make these 500 or 1000 free listing promotions. However, since we could only prep 50 listings at a time, we never had enough opportunity to take advantage of the free listings. I believe, the most we listed at one time was 125 items. Now, that was a lot for us, but not quite using the free listings to their maximum.

This year, we decide to try and tackle these problems ahead of time. As you already read, we tackled our space solution by buying more storage racks. In order to address the inventory and taking advantage of the free eBay listings, our solution was to open up a shop here on the website.

With the shop, it allows us to keep an inventory of the items and relist them on eBay as free listings make themselves available. I’m hoping it will work our to our advantage, but we’ll see at the end of the year.

So, if you haven’t – go visit our shop today!