How to Buy Lego Pieces Individually (Does it cost less?)
It’s no secret that Lego sets get more expensive year after year. If you’ve ever wondered if it’s cheaper to buy Lego set pieces individually from brick brokerage sites, you would not be alone. Personally, I am fed up with how expensive Lego sets are getting. So, I did some research to find out whether or not I’d save money buying the pieces themselves.
I’m going to go over how to buy Lego pieces individually for the lowest price, and whether or not it’s less expensive than buying the whole Lego set.
How to buy Legos individually.
I’ve compared several sites and Bricklink has the best spot to buy pieces individually. There, you have stores dedicated to selling lego bricks. My favorite selling point of the site is its “Easy Buy” button which I showcase in the video above. It performs an algorithm that finds the lowest price combination of Lego brick suppliers that sell the Legos you need to build a set. You can also select the pieces you want and deselect the ones you already have. See the video above for a demonstration.
Is it cheaper to buy an entire Lego set’s pieces individually?
Because of shipping costs and sourcing from various suppliers, it’s an average of 86.27% more expensive to buy an entire Lego set’s individual pieces. If you buy the set’s parts but leave out the Minifigures, it is still 41.61% more expensive than buying from Lego.com.
In plain English, it is much more expensive to buy Lego pieces individually than just buying the set outright. This is because of shipping costs and sourcing from several vendors. In some cases, it can cost nearly double the price of a Lego set if you buy each piece separately.
I found these figures in a mini-study I did for this post. I picked 15 random Lego sets from various themes on Lego.com’s store. I compared the price of the set on Lego.com and included any shipping costs. Then, I went to Bricklink.com and used their “easy buy” feature to find the lowest-price combination of the parts involved for each set over as few suppliers as possible. You can see this study in more detail by looking at my complete list of Case Studies.
When would it make sense to buy Lego pieces separately?
If you’re like me, you have a boat load of lego pieces in a few bins that need sorting. If you go through these pieces and organize them to know what pieces you have, you can get Lego sets for cheaper. If you already have a significant amount of Lego pieces for a set on hand, it could be cheaper to buy the remaining pieces on sites such as Bricklink.
Now, this comes with its ups and downs. The next section of this post will be dedicated to the downs of buying Lego pieces, so here, I’ll talk about the ups. You can buy Lego sets for a fraction of the cost if you already have most of the pieces on hand. To figure out what pieces you need, I recommend you do the following:
Head to Bricklink and look up the Lego set you have in mind. From there, you can click on the list of parts for the Lego set, as I explain in the previous section of this article. From there, take note of what pieces you already have and add select the pieces you need. From there, you can use Bricklink’s “easy buy” feature to have the site search its databases for the cheapest combination of suppliers to buy the parts you need.
Five downsides of piecing together a Lego Set
Buying Lego pieces individually to build a set has more setbacks than you might think. Here are five reasons why you should not buy Lego pieces individually.
1) Shipping costs and buying from several vendors will drive up the cost.
When you’re sourcing Lego pieces online, it’s very rare that you’ll find one person with all the pieces you need to build a set. This is especially true when you’re buying a large number of pieces. So, you will most likely end up buying from several individuals. Each one has its own shipping costs and other fees, which add up. It doesn’t take much to end up having to pay more than just buying the set from Lego.com.
2) There’s an increased risk of buying fake Legos.
You have to do your research when buying Legos online. There is no guarantee that you won’t receive some knock-off bricks when buying from sites not endorsed by the official Lego brand. I highly recommend you only buy from highly-reviewed stores when shopping on eBay and Bricklink.
3) You won’t get a Lego Box.
This may not matter to some, but if you ever want to resell your Lego set in the future, you will not get as much for it as you would if you sold it with the Box. I did a study (link to my case studies) where I compared several sets being sold on eBay when they had their instructions, box, and whether or not they were opened. Sets that were sold with their original box sold for 10.5% more on average.
4) You won’t get a Lego Instruction Booklet.
Again, some of you won’t care about this. If you don’t already know, you can download a PDF file of any Lego instruction booklet from Lego.com. As long as you have a laptop or device that can access the internet, which I know you do because you’re on my website, you can download instruction manuals from Lego.com’s Customer Support.
In the same study mentioned earlier, sets sold with their original instructions sold for 3.2% more than sets sold without them on average. This may seem like a small amount, but when you’re talking about large collectible Lego sets, this can be substantial.
5) Some Lego collectors may see it as unauthentic.
Some Lego collectors may say that you buying a set piece by piece doesn’t count as a real addition to your collection. Imagine a car collector builds a classic muscle car piece by piece, would that count as an authentic car? That’s up to you to decide.
Personally, I don’t care where you get your Legos from. Your collection is exactly that: your collection. As long as it is meaningful to you, that’s all that matters.
