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« on: February 27, 2025, 07:24 AM »
I have never shipped a loose set assembled. My worry is it would break apart during shipping and then the buyer would claim pieces are missing. The only downside is during breaking down the set, if you run into those brittle dark red or brown pieces that break. I just built a set this week that had no fewer than five dark red pieces break during assembly and disassembly. Fortunately I had some other open sets with the same pieces that I could temporarily steal from as I ordered spare parts.
For my loose stuff, I do a full assemble and take a picture. Then I take a picture of just the minifigs with the instruction books. Lastly I take a picture of front and back of box. I disassemble and put all minifigs in a small ziplock bag and then try to go through the instructions backwards to put all the bricks in ziplocks and label them 1 of 3, etc. depending on how big the set is. If there are more than one book of instructions, I try to put the bricks from book 1 in one bag and from book 2 in another. Doing a full breakdown makes it like you are shipping a sealed set if you have kept the box. One thing I found out this week, is weight really doesn't matter for large boxes. I had someone ask if I could ship bricks in one box and the actual box in another due to the large shipping cost because of having to use a large dimension box. I notice when I changed the box weight, the price didn't change at all. I went from 10 lbs down to 0.5 lbs and it was the same price. I then tried raising the weight to 25 lbs. and it was still the same price. It was all based on the box dimensions.
As for selling on ebay, I avoid it like the plague. Way too many scammers. I feel that you literally have to take a video of yourself packing up a box with your item and even then ebay/paypal will probably still rule in the scammers favor. At this point, I have sold 134 sets, both loose and sealed. I have done it all through FB marketplace. I even sold a Cloud City set with the expensive Boba Fett mini figure that I had to ship. I haven't had a single complaint about anything. FB marketplace can be set to global, so I have had hits from all over the world for stuff. I have sold and shipped MR items overseas from FB marketplace. There are no fees, except for the normal fees from using Paypal. It is really the way to go in my opinion.