Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/bricklink-suspends-marketplace-operations-in-35-countries/

by makeitdouble • 8 months ago

147 64 8 months ago

jaysbrickblog.com

colechristensen• 8 months ago

no explanation?

gishh• 8 months ago

Umm. I guess not?

Six years ago, I wrote that it was a terrible idea for LEGO to acquire Bricklink and revisiting some of my thoughts I expressed then, it sure seems like there’s some dodgy stuff happening behind the scenes.
To be fair, I acknowledge that there may be compliance challenges operating in some of these countries, where things like local laws, logistics, import restrictions etc may make it difficult for LEGO/Bricklink to do their business there, but surely there could’ve been a better way to communicate this, or invite community feedback instead of turning the whole site off in 2 weeks.

jacquesm6• 8 months ago

Bricklink was acquired from the mother of the guy (who died) that started it by some asian 'entrepreneur' who then turned around and sold it to Lego, whose only long term interest always was shutting it down. The secondary market hurts their sales for new sets, or so they believe.

jmonty900• 8 months ago

Even if there were significant challenges in some countries, certainly other countries on this list didn't deserve the 2 week treatment. Lego's actions here are very sketchy.

"We appreciate your understanding, - The BrickLink Team"

Understanding of what? They didn't describe the situation that lead to their decision to unilaterally apply the same treatment to all of these countries.

gedy• 8 months ago

I've been a member for 25 years (yikes, since it was Brickbay) - I'm not sure why Lego company wouldn't have the resources to handle this compared to the prior smaller company.

jacquesm6• 8 months ago

Because it is not to their advantage. I suspect they always bought it to shut it down and this is just the opening moves.

RGamma• 8 months ago

Watching Held der Steine cured me of all notions that LEGO(R) still has any interest other than milking their brand/reputation. McKinsey leadership will do that to a company, I guess.

Thankfully there's many good (and compatible) competitors now, that get you much more bang for the buck. I'm not that deep into LEGO(R), but it feels they have already lost a substantial portion of goodwill in the power user community, which may be contagious. I certainly wouldn't buy or recommend it to anyone anymore (except used perhaps).

OgsyedIE• 8 months ago

Greenland is an unusual entry on the list given the nature of Lego as a firm.

mrweasel• 8 months ago

That one might be there for other reasons. Shipping to Greenland is generally pretty hard. Nuuk is easy enough, but other parts of Greenland aren't getting packages delivered for the rest of the year. We had to deal with cut of dates for Christmas being mid October. Maybe that has changed in later years, I haven't checked.

Israel also feels a little off. I doubt that that's there for the same reason as e.g. Taiwan or Kazakhstan. Or San Marino, that's not there due to war, sanctions, shipping or trademark violations.

It seems like they had a number of reasons to disallow businesses in various countries and now they're blocking them as one big chunk to avoid uncomfortable answers about individual countries.

makeitdouble2• 8 months ago

I get why for some of these countries, but Brazil for instance doesn't look like complicated situation or a small market in any shape of form ?

Is anyone finding relevant political or regulatory patterns in the country list ?

Direct link to the list: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2687

kasey_junk• 8 months ago

Imports into Brazil are pretty complicated, but I don’t know why you’d shut down an existing operation.

jacquesm6• 8 months ago

That's not Lego's problem, but the individual traders on Bricklink.

wbshaw• 8 months ago

Most of my South American buyers on Bricklink have me ship to one of the freight forwarders in Miami. Not complicated for me as a seller and it probably makes things simpler for the buyer too.

baiwl• 8 months ago

To put this into perspective, the total combined population of these countries exceed 2.5 billion, or just about 30% of Earth’s population which is wild.

Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it.

jacquesm6• 8 months ago

You'd be surprised where Lego buyers from bricklink are from. When I was active there I got sales from just about all over the world.

BrenBarn• 8 months ago

Maybe not but it does include some countries with very large economies.

hoherd• 8 months ago

Sure, but sellers in those countries found the service to be very valuable. The framing of this situation as being beneficial to the cooperation and detrimental to the consumer feeds the narrative of the Evil Corporation, which is sad.

It's really unfortunate that LEGO acquired Bricklink, and then did this, but it's such a common storyline.

jacquesm6• 8 months ago

Make no mistake: Lego makes a great product but they are an evil corporation. They have been so from the day they started making bricks (they stole the design, the marketing content and even the boxes), they continued when they sued everybody and their dog for doing the same thing that they themselves did, only much worse, and finally they did it again when they acquired Bricklink and started merging accounts with the Lego website. And probably many times in between when they created incompatibilities between older and newer sets just to drive sales.

altairprime• 8 months ago

Is this due to the same payment processor issue that was impacting Steam-PayPal users earlier this year? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891570

dawnerd• 8 months ago

They use PayPal so probably. I don’t think there’s anything nefarious from the Lego side, just some weird legal decision.

dhruvrrp• 8 months ago

Some really big/rich markets on the list (Brazil, India, ME..).

I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products.

embedding-shape• 8 months ago

I wonder what the story behind this action is? It's surprisingly short to the shutdown, and they seem to indicate they wanted to keep those markets open, as otherwise I feel like they wouldn't falsely give people hope they might open it up again:

We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.

Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.

aunty_helen• 8 months ago

Looking at the list of countries, living in one, and knowing how much the west is cracking down on money control. This reeks of anti-money laundering controls.

cyanydeez• 8 months ago

Probably. Know your customer is eaaiest to find noncompliance.

kijin• 8 months ago

How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money? Buy expensive Lego sets with dirty dollars, and sell them locally for clean money? There's certainly an opportunity for arbitrage there, but it sounds awfully complicated for a money laundering scheme.

Not being sarcastic, just curious whether there's something special about Lego or whether they're just passing along the restrictions imposed by their payment processor.

shermantanktop2• 8 months ago

I worked on a product based on micropayment transactions - most less than a dollar, and we supported tenths of a cent - and money laundering was a constant concern.

The baddies out there are numerous, dedicated, highly adaptable, and willing to throw mass volume at a small % opportunity.

linohh• 8 months ago

No matter what, as soon as you offer relaying or negotiating a relay of money between users, people will find a way to use it for money laundering.

makeitdouble2• 8 months ago

I'd assume using dirty money to buy blocks at an inflated price from a cooperating vendor(usually the buyer themselves) would be enough ?

The vendor's money would be "clean" from an outsider's perspective.

AnthonyMouse• 8 months ago

How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money?

AML laws aren't required to make sense in order to be enforced. Their effectiveness is basically zero:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...

The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.

pftburger• 8 months ago

This is A/B testing. Lego owns bricklink, so they shutter it in a few countries, see how it impacts sales, decide from there

shermantanktop2• 8 months ago

Source?

helsinkiandrew• 8 months ago

The site below posted a comment in a Reddit post that seemed to explain the decision:

We don’t currently have the resources to support Marketplace operations in these areas at the same level as everywhere else,” the statement reads

https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-is-closing-bricklink-in-3...

orphea• 8 months ago

No? The statement is a usual meaningless corpo speak, it doesn't explain anything.

justinclift• 8 months ago

Probably means they've been told to reduce headcount.

littlecranky674• 8 months ago

As for why, my bet is to prevent "counterfeit" (as Lego would call them) lego parts being shipped by vendors. They target low-income countries, as it is profitable there to import China-made bricks and sell them on Bricklink to make a living.

As a background, there are plenty of chinese lego alternatives, operating mostly legally in the west as the lego patent has expired long ago. Brands such as Mouldking, Cobi, Bluebrixx, CaDa, etc. are available here in Germany even in retail stores and online, and it is perfectly legal to sell "alternative" bricks. Cobi itself manufactures all of its part in the EU (mostly Poland) and creates original designs (mostly War-themed models such as tanks, fighting jets etc. as Lego does not do those).

Freak_NL2• 8 months ago

Is this conjecture or actually done? Bricklink Buyers expect Lego bricks, including the trademark on each stud, so any shop sending anything not produced by the Lego Group, but with the trademark on it, would be sending actual counterfeit products, not third party bricks.

Buying actual Lego bricks produced in whichever Lego factory and reselling them is not counterfeiting.

littlecranky674• 8 months ago

It is mere conjecture, I have no datapoints to support this. I would assume, since Bricklink sends worldwide, that you would not open a support case when buying a couple of $ worth of parts if they are non-original. The effort of return shippment probably not worth it. I could also imagine that you can buy china-manufactured parts that carry the lego logo.

retSava• 8 months ago

IIRC lego had two actual patents: the basic brick, and the classic figure. The brick is expired while the figure isn't. Hence you can find "alternate" bricks, but not figures. They do own a shitload of trademarks, and aren't afraid to enforce them (which they legally must or they risk losing the TM).

Fun story: my wife ordered a couple of those "alternate" sets, and none inflicted on Legos patent nor TM (no lego branding, not a copy of a lego set, etc). The Swedish customs acted on their own (baffling to me) and stopped the package, sent her a letter in stark wording to accept forfeit. She challenged this, then Lego's lawyers got in contact with us and, using the figure patent, claimed this was a copy and we should forfeit or they would sue her. Very harsh letter, very stark wording.

Left a very bad taste in my mouth, haven't bought any Lego (or alternatives either) since.

georgefrowny3• 8 months ago

Surely the minifigure patent has expired? The original patent was in 1979 (design patent 253711: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD253711S/en)

Or are they doing a pharma and have repatented a small variation, or the European equivalent is still going?

Or is it actually trademark that is being enforced here?

taffronaut• 8 months ago

There is jazz improvisation handbook "Harmony with Lego Bricks" written in the 1980's by Conrad Cork in the UK. It's pretty niche. Conrad approached Lego at the time and they gave him permission to use the Lego name. It's written "LEGO(R)" on the cover. Those were more innocent times I guess. (edited for a typo)

rasz• 8 months ago

Cobi has own minifig design, imo better looking, more human https://latericius.com/en-eu/blogs/blog/cobi-vs-lego

bartread• 8 months ago

I've become a fan of Cobi.

Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.

Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.

whizzter• 8 months ago

We got some Cobi set on a ferry cruise a few years back (Cobi 69120 Viking Line) and while kinda neat looking the tolerances/design made it hard to snap in and the decal placement (over edges) really made it a build-once model sadly.

At least there wasn't an horrid chemical smell as when we opened some Chinese figures off Ali-Express (soldier minifigs).

Thorrez• 8 months ago

Israel and Greenland are among the banned countries. I'm not sure your explanation makes sense for them.

Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries

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