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Changes to Brick Owl
As a result of a letter threatening legal action we have received from BL, I'm afraid we will need to make some changes to Brick Owl in the coming days.
We will no longer be displaying BL names or numbers anywhere on the website. This means there will be some items that have no name. Over time we will rectify the names and encourage you to help do the same by the edit tab on items.
The BL Sync feature will be disabled on the 28th of September, around 4PM GMT. For sellers that currently make use of this you have a few options.
- Choose a website (BL or BO) and run the entirety of your store on that website
- Choose specific sections of your store, and run those sections of your store on one website, and the other sections on the other website. For example, you could have your Parts on BO and sets on BL.
- Run separate inventories, so for example, keep your current inventory as it is on BL, but part out new sets into BO, or vice versa etc.
- Run stores on both sites and update your inventory manually
A few points to note.
Judging by the actions of the new BL management, it would appear the BL Catalog is no longer freely available to anyone as Dan had originally intended (see here http://www.bricklink.com/message.asp?ID=661723)
Rather than the community having one unified Parts catalog, there is likely to be fragmentation, making it more difficult to compare parts on different websites.
Although I do not believe copyright legislation extends to names and part numbers, we do not have the resources or desire to find out whether that is the case in court.
For reference, the original letter can be viewed here https://www.brickowl.com/sites/default/content/docs/bl_letter.png
I apologise for the short notice, we had hoped to discuss/resolve this issue with BL but they have yet to respond.
We will no longer be displaying BL names or numbers anywhere on the website. This means there will be some items that have no name. Over time we will rectify the names and encourage you to help do the same by the edit tab on items.
The BL Sync feature will be disabled on the 28th of September, around 4PM GMT. For sellers that currently make use of this you have a few options.
- Choose a website (BL or BO) and run the entirety of your store on that website
- Choose specific sections of your store, and run those sections of your store on one website, and the other sections on the other website. For example, you could have your Parts on BO and sets on BL.
- Run separate inventories, so for example, keep your current inventory as it is on BL, but part out new sets into BO, or vice versa etc.
- Run stores on both sites and update your inventory manually
A few points to note.
Judging by the actions of the new BL management, it would appear the BL Catalog is no longer freely available to anyone as Dan had originally intended (see here http://www.bricklink.com/message.asp?ID=661723)
Rather than the community having one unified Parts catalog, there is likely to be fragmentation, making it more difficult to compare parts on different websites.
Although I do not believe copyright legislation extends to names and part numbers, we do not have the resources or desire to find out whether that is the case in court.
For reference, the original letter can be viewed here https://www.brickowl.com/sites/default/content/docs/bl_letter.png
I apologise for the short notice, we had hoped to discuss/resolve this issue with BL but they have yet to respond.
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Comments
It is shame to read on their forums what their members are having to put up with being left in the dark all the time.
Cannot say I did not see this coming due to their unwillingness to clarify anything.
I do hope BL will has a bright future after it has been updated as promised by the new owner, and that they can resolve their current issues their bill payers are faced with.
There is nothing wrong with healthy competition, it keeps you on top of your game (or should)
I have your back BrickOwl.
Chris
If I had less orders here I would have more time to help with the catalog, for sure I will make time in the first days.
If you want to divide some things up I would gladly focus on the Technic, electric, pneumatic categories. I have most of everything here and some names I think need changing anyway. Like whoever changed names of the versions of p6542 , great change.
So thinking on the positive side of everything, this another chance for you to set yourself apart with logical names not required to fit their convention. Names people would Google, push back with compliance and a better user friendly product.
Question; not trying to push anything.
Would BL part numbers be allowed as a tag?
Lawrence I wish you the best, no matter what route this site takes you. You have already proven yourself in my eyes as more competent than any of the people currently facilitating the "other site" I feel I must call it now. I was happy to continue on with business as usual with the previous "other site" announcements, but disabling this feature obviously means I can not simply continue my "civil disobedience." My advice is always "fight the power" but I can also admit in hindsight that was not always the wisest move in all of my past personal/business dealings. I hope your foresight in this matter is not out of fear of protecting what you have now, but instead fighting for what your dream of this site SHOULD be.
Good Luck!
Regards,
Patrick
Hoosier Brick
On a more sarcastic side note now, perhaps the "other site" should just pony up a nice some for this site to use as the foundation of "other site" 2.0 and make Lawrence and his team rich for their contributions to furthering the LEGO community
That sounds to me like a site shutdown, with the stuff earlier in the letter being reasoning for shutting down. Do you think you'll be able to keep the site up if you just eliminate all the BL stuff? Or are they going to be able to make enough of a case that your catalog here already contains too much BL proprietary data?
"........While we welcome the arrival of new Lego trading platforms that encourage competition and incite us to innovate even more........."
snippit from http://www.bricklink.com/message.asp?ID=756253
But I am just a bystander with an opinion.
Joe
I know that opinions will differ from new and established sellers and buyers.
I am new to this and BO works perfectly for me, whereas I started on BL and abandoned ship 1) because it was not user friendly in my opinion and 2) because I could see the site was in a state by information readily available on the internet, I was forced to delete my account over there as I knew that I would not be able to put up with the abandonment and site issues over there, however I keep looking back to see if anything has changed, and am greatly disappointed more and more day by day.
Lawrence has done and is still doing a brilliant job with Brick Owl, and I know he would not abandon and let site issues continue to affect the users.
They say do not put all your eggs in one basket, but I would rather do that here on BO than put some of them in a basket which obviously has a hole in the bottom.
I am sure sellers agree that the more places you can have your items available the better, therefore they (as the ones who pay the bills) would support alternative venues.
Unfortunately with all that is going on at the moment, I have to consider abandoning this altogether, which is partly why my store is closed at the moment. I would like to see what effective and sensible solution comes out of all this if any.
My support goes to all the sellers and buyers affected by this.
Sorry if all my comments are all over the place, so much running round my head at the moment, and I hope I have expressed how I feel and what I see in a way you can understand.
Thank you very much for adding a time, as someone who really wants to stay here, but won't know exactly what to do...probably even after the deadline I want to make sure I can wake up- sync everything up one last time and close one shop until I decide further. While the "other site" hopes this will damage the owl irreparably, I see only the sellers and buyers being hurt as they will be forced to choose one over the other. Again, best wish to the owl team.
Over time I have been slowly transferring more stock over to Brick Owl. My Brick Owl store is now almost half the size of the other one (but still small :-)) and I predict an overtaking manoeuvre sooner rather than later.
This is a fantastic place to buy/sell lego. I hope people consider splitting their inventory instead of opting to leave. Lawrence et al behind Brick Owl deserve our support after the amazing job they have done / are still doing to bring this site to life.
For anyone considering the split inventory option, I thought I should mention how you actually do this. If you currently have your entire inventory on BO, after you have synced up any outstanding orders, you can delete your inventory using the Mass Inventory updating, at the bottom of the inventory screen on here. After that, when you use the BL sync feature, when you get the file from BL, use the drop downs on their to select specific sections of your inventory, for example, new parts only. You will need to make sure you each time you use the BL Sync.
eg 1x3 brick arch 4490 would become bo4490 .
another suggestion would be since contributors on bl never got paid for building the catalog , why not divert 0.25% of brick owls income to purchase lego sets which can be prizes for a monthly draw on brick owl , everytime someone makes a catalog contribution they get a ticket , this way more people would add to the catalog in the hope of winning some free lego
Brian
The only thing this has gotten me to do is do a final sync, and get my payment and shipping methods working so that I can use this site as well. As I have a very small inventory, it won't be too bad for me.
Things like base part numbers don't belong to them, they are made up by TLG. Only things like minifig numbers and codes for decorated parts are their's.
Instead of now coming up with a new numbering system for decorated parts, I would say forget the numbering system and come up with something new and superior. For example, you could go into the part listing, and then there would be sub parts for the different patterns.
Good luck to both Bricklink and Brick Owl. I think there is the possibility for multiple Lego marketplaces to exist.
Kevin
@kevin.nxt Welcome! Enjoy reading your posts on the other forum
Tracy
I'm sticking with you, Lawrence: -
You've done a great job and you deserve to be rewarded financially.
You are a fellow "AFoL" NOT a commercial business venture.
All BL care about is $$$ (and lots of it) - they don't give a damn about small sellers, they made that perfectly clear with their little "round table" BS.
I feel very strongly given the type of orders I get here vs "the other place" that WE are serving other AFoL's and fans - I like that!
NOW regarding the threats (which is all they are) - don't forget they are based in China, there is no longer ANY agreements between the UK and HK if anything the relationship is very frosty LoL.
Given that the chinese govrnmnt endorse chinese rip off's I doubt a chineses company would even get a day in a UK court to have a go at you!
But yes caution is best.
Spread the word folks - BL(HK) Ltd is stealing from the community - and if not theft, then it is certainly immoral - "legal" (I imagine) because they were granted "permission" by individual contributors :O
I think it is likely that date is when they will finally show BL2 (would have to be in a buggy Beta)
Will it hurt them or BO? Well that's up to the sellers and buyers, if there are sellers here, buyers will come.
You have a relationship with both Brickset and Re-Brickable - I feel they could both be persuaded to stay with you.
The future looks good, we'll get thru this.
And please add me to the list of helpers - i'll do what I can
Graham
You have a strong opponent with a strong community but there are a lot of people waiting for something like BrickOwl. So please fight!
They've just drawn a line in the sand and now I don't feel like buying anymore over there. Buying on Brick Owl is easier anyway - I don't have to worry about losing my cart or suddenly getting logged out.
Thanks, Lawrence, for your dedicated work. As others have commented, this is a great chance to shed that musty old BL mantle.
We will do this freely.... (so the photo's etc we make and upload are "public domain" and can be used as suited! (by everyone (would like to ex) since we feel no one (except maybe TLG) has the monopoly on the bricks catalog... and we think and are pretty sure this would be more in line with Dan's original idea than what is going on right now....,
Go BrickOwl, Go!!!!!!
So it looks like BSX file upload is out now too. I will not be taking any risks using this method now.
I would personally suggest disabling the BSX file stuff now, if not just to look out for people who may not know the issues or that they may be "detected".
Being one who was pushing for this angle of stock manipulation I am disappointed that I now feel the need to stop.
That said I added over 2000 parts last night manually and it was not *that much extra work.
It may be a bit melodramatic, but on the plus side, someone needs to start writing the movie script.
No use completely reinventing the LEGO Wheel Hub 8 x 11.2 with Centre Groove (42610)
Brian
With regards to Peeron, you can already map Peeron ID to items if you wish. I had intended to become a sort of central resource for item IDs from all the different websites and not create any of our own IDs.
Regarding Peeron, do you mean tagging or outright using their part ID's?
Brian
HTH,
Brian
For long term I am not sure what I want to do. We have our parts in numerical order as we provide a job training program and our employees generally have no LEGO knowledge so I think storage by type is out for us. Hoping someone has suggestions or inspiration will strike! We are almost at 100,000 parts so it makes my head hurt to think about it.
@emilewski That is what we will do for now. We did that in the beginning and it worked just fine for us.
Tracy
I'm working on a system to maintain my inventory on my own computer so I would like the BL id to remain somewhere until I finish. It's work that I can't finish in a day.
Thank you to @Loremonger and @Dagsbricks and all the others who are acting as a voice for Brick Owl on the BL forum.
BL members are entitled to their opinions on what is happening/happened/whatever, but they need to get their facts right first and I for one am glad that they are being corrected as necessary.
My continued support goes to Brick Owl and @Lawrence.
I also wish that BL can continue to move forward and be what it once was for the community and it's members.
There we go I said it and I hope it is not out of place.
Kudos.
Pam
Enoch
I have yet to open my store on Brickowl as I'm still doing the work required (moving from BL due to the drama over there), but for the last 10+ years I have run a pretty large (>300,000 parts) store of BL and wanted to let you know how we do it. Not saying this is going to work for you necessarily, but it has worked amazingly well for us and there may be a spark of an idea for you to use.
We have a larger inventory and everything is stored in either plastic tote drawers, tubs or some custom made smaller drawers that have compartments in them (for smaller lots) which are arranged in rows in our stockroom.
Each drawer has a consecutive number ranging from D-0001 thru to something like D-1023, the tubs are similarly numbered, but are prefixed with T-00X thru T-XXX.
I have some fairly old photos of the setup here (it has since improved more):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjmorton/4576367267/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjmorton/4576995960/
We don't put our inventory away in any specific order (so, we don't sort by item type or anything like that) instead, the parts go in to any drawer that is available. For larger qty lots, we try and use one drawer per lot, but for items we only have a small qty of, then they go into Ziploc bags which are placed into the smaller drawers.
The key to being able to actually find items when packing orders is using the Seller Remarks field (this was Bricklink remember, I'm assuming BO has something similar) to record the drawer number. So, if I'm putting 1,400 2 x 4 bricks away into drawer 345 then the seller remarks field will have 'D-345' recorded. If it's a smaller qty lot that has gone into a shared drawer, then the Ziploc bag will get a label with the drawer number AND bag number such as :'D-345-012'.
So, when an order comes in, and we look at the invoice/pick list, it will tell us exactly which drawers to go to. I don't need to remember if the item is a 'Brick/Arch, or Brick/Curved', instead we can go straight to the correct drawers and pick the items we need. We did tests on this and it reduced our average pick time from 4.5 minutes (we get some big orders sometimes) to around 63 seconds.
We even got quite sophisticated on BL as I wrote some custom inventory software that as part of listing new items would automatically choose a drawer based on the size of the items/qty, which drawers were available and whether I already had each item in stock. I also had another piece that when an order came in, a picking list would be printed out on a receipt printer. Looking forward to redoing my workflow for BrickOwl.
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200367213_200367213
Drawer numbers 1-90 are my new stock and 91-360 are my used stock. I also have 15 or so of these
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Plano-5-Shelf-Storage-Unit-Light-Taupe/8251817
loaded up with cases of these
http://www.dollartree.com/household/storage-organization/Plastic-Storage-Boxes-with-Lids/500c541c541p330495/index.pro
for larger mostly used items that consume to much of the smaller drawers. I number each shelf as A-Z with each tub being A1-A40 through Z1-Z40 etc...
It works for me and as rjmorton said the pick time is very fast and inventory is where it is supposed to be, most of the time.
Brick Owl does have a comments section much like Bricklinks remarks section and it works the same.
Plastic Paradise