Secondary marketplace BrickLink has announced it’s planning to merge listings for hundreds of pieces, sparking a divided response from the LEGO community.
At the moment, BrickLink includes separate listings for hundreds of different variants of specific elements, allowing sellers to better distinguish the exact parts they have available and buyers to better find what they’re looking for. These variants include different mould marks in a particular piece, smooth and textured slopes, variations in patterns in frosted bricks and so on.
As of February 1, however, the platform is merging multiple examples of variations, with more than 1,500 product entries affected by the change. These include parts with connections between studs, torsos with ‘ribs’, and vented studs – such as those atop some minifigure heads. A total of 1,163 entries in BrickLink’s catalogue are affected by the vented stud merge alone.
“As a platform, we have decided to take a hard look at some of the mould variants that we are currently asking you to recognise,” BrickLink administrator Russell Callender explained on the site’s forum. “For sellers, more variants means extra sorting and extra work while pulling orders, plus the issues that arise from variant misunderstandings.
“For buyers, excess variants mean that it's harder to assemble a wanted list, find stores, and ultimately obtain the parts you are looking for.”
Callender also pre-empted questions from fans around the change, noting that BrickLink isn’t ‘dumbing down’ its catalogue, and that sellers can still add notes to part listings to specify if they have a particular variant available. But that hasn’t been enough to quell the response from the platform’s users, who have described the change as ‘the worst idea ever’ and claimed that it will ‘damage the site’.
YouTuber R.R. Slugger highlighted the upcoming change in a video that has racked up 20,000 views, and many of the comments are from people unhappy with the situation. “That is remarkably frustrating,” one viewer wrote. “What the heck are they thinking, ‘We just don’t need to catalogue things anymore’?” Another pointed out that BrickLink is more than just a marketplace for many people: it’s also an archive, and ‘needs to maintain the full catalogue’.
Callender stated that future merges will depend on the response to these initial changes, but ‘all functional variants and important cosmetic variants’ will remain untouched. And while some of the initial reactions across the web suggest the writing is already on the wall for deleting more variant listings, there are some who are pleased with the decision.
“You've got my support in this no doubt undesirable yet much needed BrickLink task,” wrote one forum user. “Anyone willing to stop the can from being kicked further down the road, as I see it, deserves respect and support.” Another pointed out the ‘nightmare’ that sorting parts can become for bigger sellers, making ‘hard manual labour’ out of what should be a ‘fully-automated process’.
Head over to BrickLink to check out the full range of affected parts and listings, which includes 11 different causes of variations.
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