"Which pays more, BrickLink or selling by the pound?" is the wrong question. BrickLink almost always pays more per piece, if you sell every piece at its individual market value. The real question is what that extra money actually costs you in time — and whether it's worth it.
The Basic Math
A pound of mixed LEGO typically holds somewhere between 150 and 300 pieces. At a flat by-the-pound rate, that pound is worth a fixed, known amount the moment you weigh it. On BrickLink, that same pound of pieces — sold individually at going market rates, once you subtract the 3% fee plus another 3% for payment processing — can add up to more. Sometimes meaningfully more, especially if the mix includes less common pieces or colors.
What That Extra Money Actually Costs
Here's what "selling individually" actually involves, piece by piece: identifying each part, checking its condition, weighing it for shipping, pricing it against current listings, photographing or cataloging it, and then — once it sells — packing and shipping that specific order. Multiply that by however many pieces you're selling, and it stops being a quick task.
For illustration: say sorting and listing 1,000 pieces takes a realistic 8–10 hours across cataloging, pricing, and handling the resulting orders. If that effort adds, say, an extra $30–$60 over what the same pieces would've earned sold by weight, that's roughly $3–$7 an hour for the work — before accounting for BrickLink's fees. The exact numbers will vary a lot based on what you actually have, but the shape of the tradeoff holds: the time cost is real, and it scales with how many pieces you're sorting.
When BrickLink Is Worth It
- You have genuinely rare or high-value individual pieces worth identifying specifically.
- You enjoy the process — some sellers treat it as a hobby in its own right, not just a means to an end.
- You're selling in smaller quantities where the time cost stays manageable.
When Selling by the Pound Makes More Sense
If what you have is mostly common, mixed pieces — the kind that make up the bulk of most family collections — the time required to sort and list it individually often isn't worth the marginal gain over a flat per-pound rate. That's exactly the tradeoff selling by weight is built around: a known, immediate number in exchange for zero sorting.