When I first started selling on Amazon back in 2014, my business model was basically retail arbitrage, and my biggest source of inventory was Walmart. I don’t remember using Brickseek back in 2014, but I remember being at an Amazon Seller conference and hearing about guys that were having a lot of success using it. Brickseek was a wonderful tool back before there was a lot of competition using it. I would source multiple Walmarts in my area, and if I found something, I could check to see if it was available in the other Walmarts in the area. While it wasn’t always perfect, it generally got the amount of inventory in stock right, along with the price. There was one Walmart that was a little bit farther away, and the inventory was never right, and I knew not to trust Brickseek when it told me it was in stock and quantities that were available. But for the most part, Brickseek was pretty close to being accurate.
While this was a wonderful tool, it is no longer a useful tool at all, and I believe you should not be paying for a subscription for this service anymore. I had a subscription for probably six or seven years and was very happy with it. One of the things you have to look at when you’re paying for software for your business is if it’s paying for itself and making money. If not, you need to get rid of it. In this case, I was paying $10 a month for Brickseek, and if I was able to source and make over $10 a month, it was worth having. Sometimes, especially as I phased out of doing Retail Arbitrage, I didn’t go and source as much, but sometimes I would get a really good haul off of what I saw on Brickseek for my local markdowns, and it would pay for itself. Like for example I might have made $200 on one trip, and that would cover the next year and a half of Brickseek. So you have to be getting enough profit out of it to cover the service and hopefully much more or it’s not worth having the service anymore. Don’t pay for subscriptions that aren’t paying for themselves even if it is only a nominal monthly fee.
Brickseek worked great for Walmart up until the time around when COVID struck.
I remember Brickseek lowered their cost to keep subscribers and it was something like they gave you 3 months for the price of one or something along those lines, which was very nice of them to do considering most people couldn’t source. I kept my subscription but wasn’t out sourcing at the time.
When I got back out sourcing Brickseek was no longer able to tell you the quantity of a product available at each Walmart. All it gives you now is an “unknown quantity”, and what this is basically telling you is that this product may have sold at that Walmart location at one time, and if it’s still available there and what price it sells for.
So while Brickseek was a valuable tool in the past, it is no longer as useful as it once was. The quantity of available products at Walmart is now listed as “unknown”, which can lead to a waste of time if the product is not actually available. In the past, I could make a decision on whether a trip to a particular Walmart was worth my time based on the quantity of products listed as available, but now it’s more of a gamble.
I have theories about how Brickseek worked and believe that they had found a loophole or back door into the Walmart inventory system. However, around the COVID time, I believe Walmart may have fixed that back door access, which is why Brickseek can no longer display the quantity numbers.
In their Facebook group, BrickSeek denies the issue with Walmart and the inability to display numbers, and I understand that they are trying to sell a product and don’t want to run off subscribers, but I think that they do not want people to know that they can’t really do much with Walmart anymore. They gave some story in the Facebook group that they would be working on it and whatnot, but it’s never been fixed. I don’t think they can fix it or they would have by now.
So besides the price, the only information you get from Brickseek is whether Walmart has ever had the product in stock before but not if they have it currently in stock. That is not really of any value to me.
You can still use Brickseek to check if the product you’re looking for has ever been sold at Walmart and what its price is, which you can do for free through the Brickseek app or online.
I would also recommend looking at in-store deals for Walmart on the Brickseek website, even though you may not see the most recent ones as the top paid level of Brickseek.
Furthermore, the Brickseek Facebook groups are an excellent resource for finding products and SKU numbers that members post of their hauls, but you still won’t know if the product is available locally. Remember that there are many couponers and regular people using these apps to find deals, making it more challenging to find instock deals than it was in 2015 or 2016 and when items get posted in these groups they don’t last long.
To sum it up, using Brickseek to accurately find Walmart deals like I did in the past is gone and so is my Brickseek subscription.