BrickLink Trends: Daily Orders in March 2016

If you buy Lego online, odds are that you've heard of BrickLink, which is a marketplace for independent sellers to offer their sets, minifigures, and parts for sale.

One of the interesting things about BrickLink is that when each new order is placed, it gets assigned the next available order number, so it's very easy to see how many orders get placed across the entire site. I have been tracking this data for a while now. Every month, I update a chart which shows how many orders are being placed. The trend over the last few years has been of tremendous growth. Below is a snapshot, current up to the end of March, 2016.



This shows the average number of orders that are placed each day on BrickLink. In March, there was an average of 3753 orders placed each day. BrickLink has thousands of sellers, so even the largest of them doesn't get a lot more than 10 or 20 orders per day. But the chart shows the total orders across all of those individual stores. It works out to an order every 23 seconds in March.

March was a significant drop from February, but this is a normal trend that happens every year. January typically sees the most daily orders of any month, and this year that was certainly the case, with a record-breaking average of 4299 orders placed each day. We should see the daily totals continue to drop until the summer, when they will start to gradually climb back up again through the rest of the year.

As you can see from the chart, each year's numbers are higher than the same month for every previous year. The only time that this year-over-year growth wasn't sustained was in 2013.

March of this year saw an increase of 21% over March of 2015. This was a little lower than I had anticipated -- the grey line on the graph shows my projections for each months numbers (which I put up in January), based on previous years' trends.

What I do not currently track is the actual value of the orders placed. With just the order numbers, there is no way to know whether the actual total revenue is increasing in proportion to the number of orders placed. It's possible that the size of each order has changed over the years. The chart also doesn't take into account that some of these orders get cancelled -- all orders on the site get counted, regardless of whether they end up being completed or not (such as orders cancelled for non-payment). BrickLink has previously published some statistics which indicate that approximately 3% of orders end up being cancelled or otherwise not completed. (Though, these stats are several years old and may have changed somewhat since then.)

If you run a BrickLink store, you may see some similar trends to the chart in the sales patters of your store (higher sales around November to February and lower sales around May to August), but keep in mind that most stores will differ greatly from the overall trend. You may see two or three orders a day for a few weeks, and then no orders at all for several days in a row, regardless of the month. This type of variation is completely normal. The trends in the chart only start to become apparent and predictable at very large scales.

You can always find an updated version of the chart here.