Sell LEGO to a Shop or Sell It Online?

This gets framed as a moral question, as though selling to a buyer is giving something away. It is not. It is a trade: money for time and risk. The only useful question is what your time is worth and how much risk you want to hold.

What listing it yourself actually involves

Not the listing. The whole job, repeated once per box.

• Researching what each set currently sells for, not what people are asking.
• Photographing every box, including the corners a buyer will ask about.
• Writing a description that will not get you a complaint later.
• Boxing each sale in an outer carton bigger than the set, with enough fill that nothing shifts.
• Answering questions, some of them repeatedly, and chasing the buyers who go quiet.
• Handling the one that arrives dented, which usually becomes a partial refund.

What a shop or buyer takes on instead

You get one figure, one transaction and one day. You will not get the top price per set, because the person taking all of that on is paid for taking it on.

• The research, because they already know the prices.
• The transport, if they collect.
• The risk that a set does not sell, or sells for less than expected.
• The storage while it does not sell.
• Every customer conversation from that point on.

Where each one genuinely wins

The part people get wrong: small boxes

The maths on a low-value set is brutal once you include postage and packing, because neither shrinks with the price. A set worth twenty pounds can cost you seven to send safely and the best part of half an hour to pack and list. That is not a good hour of work, and a collection usually has more of those than of the headline sets.

Splitting it, which most people do not consider

A collection is rarely uniform. Keep back the handful of boxes genuinely worth your time and move the long tail in one go. That gets you most of the upside of doing it yourself without the sixty packing jobs.

Be honest with yourself about the ones you keep, though. A box sat in a spare room for eight months because you never got round to listing it has cost you exactly the time you were trying to save.

What we buy, plainly

Sealed and unopened only, from one box to a thousand. We do not buy opened sets, built models, loose bricks by weight or boxes with pieces missing. If your collection is mixed, say so, and we will be clear about which part we can price.

A rough way to price your own time

If you are torn, put a number on the hours. Count the boxes, allow fifteen minutes each for listing, photographing, packing and posting, then add a couple of hours for research and the awkward conversations. Sixty boxes comes out around seventeen hours.

1. Work out what the collection would fetch listed individually, using completed sales rather than asking prices.
2. Subtract selling fees and payment fees, which apply to the postage the buyer paid as well as to the item.
3. Subtract postage and packaging, realistically: a large sealed set needs a carton bigger than itself.
4. Subtract an allowance for the one or two that arrive damaged and become partial refunds.
5. Divide what is left, minus a whole-lot offer, by your hours. That is what the extra work pays per hour.

Written by Peter Pilling, BuyMyBricks, 26 September 2026. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorise or endorse this site. This article compares approaches in general terms. It is not a quote for a specific collection.