At wholesale gaming site, could someone explain to me the difference between a "36 booster pack lot" for the Fellowship and a "Fellowship Booster Box"?
The box is a sealed booster box, obviously. However, the difference with the 36 pack lot is that there is no box. It is 36 packs that they have gathered up from various other places. The packs may have come from damaged or opened product like another booster box, an anthology, or the deluxe starters.
Another reason for the lower price on the lot is that the packs are even more random, this may or may not be good. In a booster box you usually don't get doubles of rares (or very few) because they line the rares up in a somewhat particular order. With a pack lot you don't get the officially sorted packs in the run they were printed with. So the odds may be in your favor of getting a lot of great rares in a focused batch, or the reverse of getting lots of doubles of crappy rares.
Back in the day of SWCCG, people could predict which rares were in a box based on opening a few packs in a certain order and the serial number on the bottom. The packs were arranged in a fairly predictable way and people would look for boxes with successive serial numbers in order to increase the chances of getting a more complete set. I don't know if this worked with LOTR.
Personally, I'd probably try the random lot first to see how it turns out since I could care less about the box itself and would be willing to pay less for a chance at more concentrated power rares. Just don't get to upset if the gamble doesn't pay off.
Hope that helps.