Add the ability in the catalog cart for a buyer to reject a seller.

GuapoPogi

I have found that two sellers that have prices three times higher than most sellers consistently appear as Allocated Stores. Today my cart was $126 and change, I noticed one of these overpriced stores was there at $86 for 43 parts. The other $40 was spread out between four other stores. I spent 35 minutes or so checking the other four stores and found they had 41 of the 43 items the overpriced store had. I added these 41 items to those four stores then found another store that had those last two pieces. After doing that my cart was $83. I saved $43 by force adding items to those four stores and deleting everything from that other store’s cart.

So what I am asking is to either be able to ban those stores from my Allocated Cart or to be able to reject a store in my Allocation cart and force the system to look for other stores that carries my needed parts.

Just to be clear, one of the stores I refuse had one of the parts I needed for $1 and was the second highest. The cart I ended up adding the part to was for a store that had it for $0.37. Another part was $3 and I found it with another seller I was about yo order from for only $1. There was $43 of this.

Unfortunately the kid’s trick or treating interrupted me and all my store carts disappeared while I was out. Now I get to start over.

GuapoPogi

P6tu

What is a catalog cart? You mean like the wishlist tool?

MacsBricks

@P6tu https://www.brickowl.com/catalog_cart

P6tu

But why would one use the catalog cart instead of a wishlist?

GuapoPogi

When you find parts you want and click the "Add to Catalog Cart" button for them, they go into the "Catalog Cart" from there the system is supposed then search for a store that has all of the items you added to your catalog cart. You can add hundreds of parts and the system will in theory find a store that carries all of those parts if there is no store that carries all those parts, the system is supposed to find the smallest combination of stores that carries all of the parts. It also factors in minimum purchase amounts and shipping restrictions.

Unfortunately, this allows a seller that has a very large, varied inventory to set their prices at 3 times the going rate and gamble that a buyer will go through the purchase not noticing that they are grossly overpaying. I keep running into two sellers that are doing this, and I want to avoid them without having to manually put things in other seller's "Store Carts"

I am not really sure how the Wishlist function works.

Lawrence

@P6tu you may want to see the buying guide here https://www.brickowl.com/help/buying-lego-parts

This is something we could implement, but it's a challenge from a user interface perspective. In general, the WishList option will give you much more control. At the bottom of the catalog cart, you can click on the button to create a WishList. The buying guide gives more information about the difference https://www.brickowl.com/help/buying-lego-parts

P6tu

@Lawrence , maybe this gives you a bit of insight from a simple buyers perspective.

I'll start with the platform where I started mapping my Lego sets and inventory: ReBrickable.
From there, it was for me at the time the most convinient place to mark sets you have and also at the same time mark down parts that are missing or lost.

Now, having a list of lost parts, came a time to start actually getting the lost parts and it was very easy to export them to an XML format and then load the parts to a wishlist (rather than the catalog). And from there on, I took it to the stores and used the wishlist magic tool and this is how I have been doing it.

Nowadays I also use the custom sets parts list to get the buy list and for that, I simply can export those missing parts from ReBrickable by simply a press of a button - which actually creates a new wishlist (not a store cart).

So there we are. And now, when I fiddled around with the store cart to just see, how it works - my first limitation is the amount of lots that a store cart can handle. 100 is WAY too low amount for me. Secondly, GuapoPogi has a point. I've seen this many times without giving out any specific store names, but there are multiple stores with big inventories, which have sometimes triple the prices for a piece that could be get a lot cheaper from others - even covering the shipping cost actually. So this "get all parts from one store" might be a good option for few parts (20-sh or so), but when we are talking about bigger quantities (lots of 200+ and quantities of 1500+), then the price factor of a piece plays a BIG role. While it might be possible to get all those parts from a handful of stores, then the overall price difference may be in thousands. Did a simple test and after cumbersom hadnpicking and fiddling, then the store cart gave me a price of 900+€ while with wishlist I was able to get the sum down to 300€. That is a 600€ difference!

Personally, I can't see any justification for that store cart at this point and I will not look at it again, since it was very difficult to get the parts to that store cart list and even more so - it is useless since the wishlist tool works better. If we could now only increase the list view limitation and few filters like filtering out stores that do not ship to me in that wishlist magic tool - it would be awesome :P.

Lawrence

Certainly there are may different ways to use the website. I did not mean to imply you should use the catalog cart instead, just that the buying guide gives a brief overview of the different tools.

P6tu

Yeah, yeah . All cool. I was just describing how I got to where I am at the moment and how my habits formed :P.

Malnaborg

I too would like the idea of "blocking" a store. For instance, those that have problems filling out a toll form.

And since we can mark stores as favorites with a star, maybe a similar function could be added to mark a store "NOT favorite" !?