discogs marketplace?

nice!

i mean its nice if you can make it work. i sell every day on discogs. not having that money would be very noticeable. years ago i didn't sell as frequently. i also put stuff up for sale every day now which i didn't do in the old days. i have made a conscious decision to make my life less fun and try to make more money.

(i used to have amazing records sit for months on my walls back then...i felt like an idiot but i wanted people to walk in the door and be blown away by all the cool records and now...yeah, i just want to sell them. by any means necessary.)

(in fact i would say the cheaper stuff sticks around forever and people really do want more pricey "collectable" type things in general. which means there are probably lots of great cheap records out there in stores everywhere! i am always amazed at stuff that sits all day at record shows when i go to them. just huge amounts of goodness that are not cure/smiths/zep/dead/beatles/blah/blah/ugh/barf...)

In UK we’re also fucked by Brexit. I was never a volume seller but would get £50-100 a month from EU buyers. Enough to get new stuff, but that’s fell away to almost zero.

Recent hike in Royal Mail prices and now fees on shipping have made it super expensive to ship to EU and that’s before we factor in customs charges.

xp went into a new record store yesterday that had probably ~20% of its stock priced for $5 or less. some good stuff, too. I was floored. most of the stores around me have nothing <$10.

i have raised prices since the pandemic. not a ton. but i definitely have streamlined my prices. people - other than a few crusty old men - do not want dollar records. where i am anyway. or 2 or 3 dollar records. so, i mostly start at $5 now. 5/10/15/20. those are my common prices. post-pandemic $8 records became $10 records. i'm cool with it. i was probably way past due for an increase anyway.

and since the pandemic i also started selling new stuff. because i got covid money. and i still do when i feel like it. they sell well. i just hate paying for them. it goes against my flinty new england cheapskate record dealer ethos. used to feel like i was ripping people off selling those expensive things! now i don't. give me all your money. i need it.

people are STILL just getting into the vinyulz. it seems crazy but its true. i always forget that sometimes it takes people years to get in on a trend or fad. you would think it would be played out as a normal people fad. but it isn't. two people just left here who got their first crappy plastic turntable a few days ago. and they all want what every other new vinylz person wants. which is why they can get discouraged easily when they don't find every grateful dead album in my store for a dollar apiece. they just don't know what has been happening. which is why it was nice when one of the people asked if we had any roy buchanan records because his records are as common as dirt around these parts.

Wait what exactly is happening that is being referred to as "the fall of discogs" as if the reasons are common knowledge? The scams? Let me know what I'm missing because I'm not hip to this.

that guy's twitter thread has lots of his reasons. biden needs to pass the info superhighway infrastructure bill. too many tired old sites covered in rust.

Also I feel like new vinyl buyers are the ones willing to dish out $40+ for led zep reissues and Childish Gambino albums etc. (vs. expecting to find cheap OG copies of things)

Oh I don't have twitter so I couldn't see it.

xps to Evan the newest outrage is mostly about their attempt to take a cut of shipping charges aiui

this is apparently b/c dealers are listing like $1 records with $10 shipping

people on those threads are wasting their time crying about how the discogs database was created from the hard work of thousands of unpaid people over a period of years. this america! that is how we....roll. tell it to goodreads, hippie!

this is apparently b/c dealers are listing like $1 records with $10 shipping

yes and also discogs now takes fees for the shipping price. so you lose quite a bit in fees selling there (when you add in the paypal fee too)

oddly looks like that twitter thread has been taken down. big discogs???

https://discogs-data-dumps.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/index.html

Download Discogs Data

Here you will find monthly dumps of Discogs Release, Artist, Label, and
Master Release data. The data is in XML format and formatted according
to the API spec: http://www.discogs.com/developers/

This data is made available under the CC0 No Rights Reserved license:
http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Now do it with sales history/stats!

it's weird he deleted that, I wonder if he got piled on for saying "like it or not covid is over"

considering two ILXors I know (ian and 69) both got covid like a week ago and both are discogs power users, I could see that

i haven't had any recent problems with selling on discogs but again time will tell. i don't sell on ebay anymore - the venture capital people running that site are arguably worse to sellers than discogs if not worse than the most hated amazon. i REALLY don't want to go back to ebay. like rilly rilly rilly. i mean i might just find another way to make a living than go back on ebay.

i haven't had any recent problems with selling on discogs but again time will tell. i don't sell on ebay anymore - the venture capital people running that site are arguably worse to sellers than discogs if not worse than the most hated amazon. i REALLY don't want to go back to ebay. like rilly rilly rilly. i mean i might just find another way to make a living than go back on ebay.

So, what's this "partner fee" I'm seeing on my PayPal receipt (after having sold something) ?

I believe that's the fee paid to discogs

I take that back, I don't know what the fuck that is.

I recently sold my clear vinyl copy of Blackstar on discogs for $170. I only charged $3.50 for media shipping at the time. Add CA sales tax: 14.88.

Here's what the paypal receipt is:

Shipping$3.50
Tax $14.88
Purchase total $188.38
Fee −$7.06 (this is the paypal fee)
Partner fee −$30.50
Total: $150.82

Fuck me if I know where that comes from or who it's paid to.

I guess it's actually just the tallied fees and taxes. I don't know why they break it out like that.

What's the deal with the new exorbitant Discogs-PayPal Partner Fees

wow

And what do you know....When you and the buyer decide to cancel an order so you refund the buyer...Discogs keeps their partner fee?? Total BS.

yes, that also just happened to me, it's fucking annoying

I got that charge on something I sold and despatched within the UK. Taxes should not apply.

wow

And what do you know....When you and the buyer decide to cancel an order so you refund the buyer...Discogs keeps their partner fee?? Total BS.

― out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Thursday, 20 July 2023 02:26 (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

In fact, there was an agreement to give a part refund as one of the discs in the set was wrong - fortunately he wasn't interested in the blu-ray - but lo and behold it seems there's no "refund" option in paypal anymore!

pretty sure you get the Discogs part of the fee back when you refund, but you do lose the Paypal fee. I just checked the last one I refunded and that's how it worked on that one.

I'm not seeing any "refund" option, anywhere.

Partner fee appears to be: Discogs fee + VAT on Discogs fee + any taxes charged to the buyer

I think the confusion comes from the Discogs fee also being included on the invoice so it looks like you're paying it twice but actually aren't

Refund is under More on the order?

Ah, there. Thanks.

it is there, but in my case it didn't work when I had to cancel an order because the buyer asked me to.

Nor me, I'm assuming it tried to get the money out of PayPal but couldn't as I've got nowt there atm.

just ordered a cd and received three pop up windows asking me if I want to sign up for “hello fresh” and some other crap

jfc

Oh yeah, that's happened to me over the past couple months. Discogs must be struggling a bit.

i tried to warn ppl. and what did they say

Best thing to happen to this place would be for it to crash and burn and other people to set up new sites using the database.

I've sold on it infrequently - just a few items since they put the big burden on sellers to sort out shipping costs for all over the world, in advance (like, i dunno, do up a profile for Canada Post, someone? frig.). I will just go to eBay with the next culling of my collection that I don't sell local.

I wish there were filters for easier wantlist shopping so I can combine on shipping--like, show only buyers selling both album X and album Y from my list.

bought a copy of 154 that showed up with terrible hazing. It plays ok and I can’t be fucked sending it back but I kinda want to tell the seller off - he seemed like an ok dude and his reputation was 100% - maybe he didn’t know what hazing looked like?

anyway i think the moral of the story (for me) is that it is much better to look at records before you buy them

i've been selling since 2014, so almost ten years, but my breakup with the 'cogs has more to do with my own life journey and dwindling interest in collecting records or really any physical media. i already have all the records i'll ever need, and the joy of new acquisition just sort of disappeared in the last year.

curious how y'all would handle this situation:

bought a record on Aug 13 (a month and a half ago) from a private seller based in the USA, meaning that once shipped the record would usually take about 2-3 days to arrive

didn't hear anything for 2 weeks, sent him a message to ask the status, he responded by sending me a tracking number. I click the tracking number and it says "label created, not yet shipped"

that status remains for another 2 weeks or so, meaning he hasn't brought it to be shipped yet. I ask him if there's any update, he doesn't respond.

a week later it's still in "label created" status, so I send him a message saying hey let me know if you ever plan to ship this, otherwise I'm gonna go ahead and initiate a chargeback.

wait a couple days, still no response, do the chargeback, use the money to order another copy

today the record actually arrived, along with the "replacement" copy I'd ordered funny enough. I think 7 weeks from when I actually ordered it.

so now I feel a bit guilty having done the chargeback since I actually *do* have the record. normally I'd contact him and say hey, I can send your money back, but since I ordered a second copy then I get screwed.

do I owe this guy a response now? at least an offer to send it back, which is also kind of a hassle for me? (we don't have a UPS store, but I suppose I could just send it through the post office across town...I haven't opened the package yet)

album was $25 after shipping. so not exactly a significant amount of money.