discogs marketplace?

is this usually OK to use? looks to have a much better selection than ebay, or does anyone know of any good alternatives?

(sorry if this has been asked before, couldn't find anything when I searched?)

discogs imho is in the same league as Gemm and Musicstack--generally a slightly more esoteric selection, but the pitfalls and price-gouging remain the same. (i.e. it's a number of individual sellers and so it's dicey no matter what. I guess that's why there's a feedback system? I've never used discogs.)

i assume you're looking for vinyl? discogs is usually fine, but i wouldn't buy anything labeled below nm-, unless you've scanned the seller's profile and s/he seems like a saint

yeah just vinyl and CDs that you can no longer get elsewhere really, thanks for the warning!

i started using it a few months ago and have found it to be pretty great in general though i would agree about not buying below mint. out of about 30 purchases i've only had to deal with one person who ripped me off. i now look on discogs before ebay if looking for a record.

I was able to score a highly OOP release from overseas, and as long as you have PayPal, you're quick, and you're picky about feedback ratings, you should be fine. (same goes with Gemm and the like.)

via discogs that is. Granted, I've only bought one thing from Discogs marketplace, but it was a simple and quick transaction, especially for overseas.

+1 to discogs: they don't have Gemm's crappy UI (Gemm usually contains these impossibly long forms with checkboxes and radio selection buttons all obfuscated while you're trying to buy or sell through them.)

i buy and sell on discogs. have only had 1 bad experience with a guy who tried to charge me 10 dollars to ship a cd single from Canada.

i've shopped quite a bit on Discogs, 30+ purchases or so, and I have been satisfied in all but one. And in that instance I filed a claim through PayPal and got my money back. As long as you use PayPal you should be fine and protected, prices are high though and I don't buy anything under NM-, like everyone else here has said.

I've used it once so far without problem. There are some rare and/or hard to get things on there, but the prices seem a little over the odds a lot of the time.

lol last post on thread: http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?seller=musicberlin

Um, someone want to try and explain this to me? Also WRT his feedback rating/comments?

hahaha. so weird. just 5 seconds ago i sent my friend a link to a record that is also $1540.00. 2 days ago it was $15. something's wacky.

holy shit, so weird. it's actually the same seller. wtf

discogs allows you to bulk upload items to your marketplace account for sale via a .csv file. I guess with an inventory of 25000 items this is what that seller does and that their prices got out of whack somehow in the process.

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

should that weigh less than a non white label?

xp OK that probably explains that

titchy are you saying that's over the odds? It's not if you consider postage plus if you have to buy a mailer!

i suppose. but white labels are still cheaper than normal lps.

i do like discogs though, the offers system is good too. some of the prices people put on their records though is ridiculous (and i do wonder if they do end up getting the prices they ask for).

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Thursday, 17 September 2009 20:36 (18 minutes ago)

Postage rates have nothing to do with discogs though, they're entirely up to the individual seller, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being inflexible. You should contact the seller if you think they're charging over the odds.

I happily both send and receive offers on prices via discogs, often the listed price is just a ball park, or best hope, or even a stab in the dark if you're the only person selling an item.

Again, if you think something's over priced then just speak to the seller. No big deal. If they don't like your offer they'll ignore it or let you know. Easy as pie.

well i mean the indvidual seller obv, yeah.

I need to get rid of lots of dance vinyl - some desirable, some considerably less so - and ebay seems like a busted flush for this kind of thing: a few tumbleweed auctions surrounded by acres of Buy It Now postings from professional retailers. Has anyone here used it for selling recently? Is it better than ebay now? Does stuff shift fairly quickly or sit around for months?

I use discogs for buying and selling fairly often. For dance vinyl, I'd say it's def better than ebay. It's really quick and simple to list items, and there are no fees unless your items actually sell, whereas Ebay charges a listing fee. I have some things on discogs that have been sitting for quite a while now, but it all depends on what you have vs. how many others are selling the same item.

Best to put them on Discogs a couple bucks below whatever is the cheapest copy if you want to move it immediately. if you're in no hurry, put it at a good price, offer a discount for multiple items in the Comments field and wait.

Good advice. Thanks. Tbh I'm more interested in offloading most of it than making big £££.

ive put some stuff around the lowest price theyre listed at on discogs but still waiting to shift them. starting to think im possibly the only person buying old grime or dubstep 12s.

what does it mean when there's a color bar to the side of a release in discogs.

there's yellow, grey and orange here http://www.discogs.com/artist/Rolling+Stones%2C+The

If you hover over them it tells you.

ah! thank you. i've been searching for hours

So, if one were selling off a few hundred records of the psych / noise / jazz / indie variety, discogs over eBay, for sure? My issue with discogs (and, for CDs, Amazon) is the fact that things sell in spurts, with no deadline. It tends to make packing records and regular trips to the post office a full time job. Any advice?

i dunno, i always buy on discogs, sell on amazon. i don't want to wait for people to stumble over what i'm trying to unload, and on average, i get really good money from ebay sales.

i think the upside (sale price) on ebay is (or can be) higher, but the ease of doing stuff on discogs might be better, depending on how much hassle you're willing to go through

Yeah, I find Discogs has rarer stuff in the first place, and then for a more reasonable price than Amazon. If what you're selling is aimed at the collectors market or folks that may not look at Amazon first, Discogs is the way to go.

Thanks!

it feels good to sell rare-ish things on ebay for +£££s to people who don't know about discogs ;)

Coincidentally they just linked to this via their Facebook page:

http://www.discogs.com/blog/339369-top-30-most-expensive-items-sold-by-month

Advice on this:

Person contacts me on Discogs about an item that I am not listing for sale, offers me a large (but not obscene) amount for it, then paypals me with his "brother-in-law's" account and wants me to ship it to his sister (he's in Europe). Obviously I'm not going to ship it to anyone other than his brother-in-law (since anything else violates PayPal's Seller TOS) but should I even do that? Is this some sort of crazy elaborate scam to get a CD single? His Discogs rating is fine... but the whole thing seems pretty suspicious.

Obviously I will not accept the payment if I don't ship him anything btw.

I would just make sure to do delivery confirmation/insurance so he can't say it never arrived and file a claim with Paypal. That's the only scam I could think of if he already paid. Unless he somehow got hold of someone else's Paypal account but that seems far fetched.

Does seem a little suspicious to have done enough business on discogs to have a rating and yet you don't have your own Paypal acct?

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hmmmm

hmm discogs is really a good database and have often thought it would be nice to be able to look up different editions of books/comics/movies instead of just doing ebay-searches but not sure if this seems like a greedy move or an enthusiast move, also not sure if such databases/market places already exist

also, any thoughts on whether the new tax policy will be very harmful to the 2nd hand market place? (apparently Discogs will add 25% tax or something for all orders going from US to EU)

Whoa- what? Really?

It's VAT that's now payable on *fees* paid by sellers at their local rate if they are in the EU. Fees are 8% of sales prices.

So it only applies to sellers in the EU and it's nothing to do with where orders are going. I think it works out to no more than around 1.8% on the price of a record in practice. Presumably VAT registered businesses would be able to claim it back as well so no need to pass it on to customers.

I'll give Discogs credit for hooking me up with a good guy from Norway who had a Neil Young tribute LP I'd been trying to get for eight years (Everybody Knows This Is Norway. It's worth more than I was prepared to pay, so he ripped the CD, put it up on Soulseek, and I got it from him that way.

The other thing I've listed on my want-list is a Velvet Underground tribute that came out in the late '80s. I get an e-mail every few weeks saying one's up for sale, but it's always around 20 pounds, which after conversion and shipping is just way out of my buying range.

It seems to be a good place to buy from. I've only had one negative experience I can think of where a cd arrived shattered because it was sent with neither jewel case or adequate padding.
May have been others but that is the only one came to mind. Think I got a refund but not the cd I wanted.
Discogs is also a reasonably ok resource though it does have gaps. I use it frequently when EACing cds I've bought when they're not in the EAC database. Tends to have tracklisting down for main release version at least.
Gap can be in what releases are listed though.
Would be useful to have reviews of lps and individual release versions too. I think there are some reviews on site but sporadic. There is rateyourmusic I guess. But would be useful.

I actually appreciate discogs more because of the lack of reviews. Everyone on Rateyourmusic considers themselves geniuses but they're really just a slightly better class of youtube commenter.

I had someone buy from me in Argentina but wanted me to ship to his sister in Chile as you are 'not allowed' more than two foreign packages a year or some such.

So I did, and it all went fine.

JUst thinking that it would make it a full resource if people said what they thought of the lp since it could help one work out which lps by an artist were worth getting. also which pressings/releases of which lp.
BUt I guess that most people going to discogs are doing so to buy material they're already aware of. Particularly marketplace.
Just thought if it was done right it could help the experience. But not sure how 'doing it right' would be achieved anyway since I can see what johnny's saying about rateyourmusic being true at least to some extent. Ego/opinion outweighing info etc

Do wonder where you get information on the best sounding versions of things from since it doesn't seem to be fully utilised on RYM and Amazon just mixes all reviews for all releases under a title together.

Of course anyone can post reviews on there and the entire database is user populated. The process of submitting release data excludes editorialising though, which is as it should or it would never get done and.disagreements would be endless.

I like that the site still feels a bit down-home and ungentrified. Not unlike this place really. My impression is that the staff are still enthusiasts for the most part.

discogs are reviews are great, it's either:
a) old school clubbers reminiscing and being crazy hyperbolic about old school house/rave
b) a bunch of people posting "repress please?" or "you gougers should be ashamed or yourself" (hip euro "underground" deep house 12"s on small labels)
c) some person posting "the label on my copy is more periwinkle than violet and 'chuggin gasoline' is about 6 seconds longer than on the original uk chiswick issue"

It's amazing how many ex-A&Bers I run into randomly haha I was a metrotown guy.

I would never take a coffee cup into a record store, WTF.

Even more irritating are the folks who bring plastic cups of beer in whenever there is a street festival or something similar

Whenever I see records leaning forward I always try to set them back, but my personal rule is to only try twice and if they insist on leaning forward I leave them.

hi enochroot, I did get your ILXmail but I was unable to translate that message to a FB profile, you can email me directly using sleeve (at) efn (dot) org

Discogs has acquired wantlister.com so at least the fucking wantlist emails will actually be useful now

I hadn’t heard of them, has anyone tried it… hope they have some good devs they can bring along!

yeah I've been using it for ages, they sent me an email saying since I was already using it on their site I'm on the early adoption list on Discogs so I've just copied the filters over, but I'm not sure when/if that switches over to my Discogs wantlist emails which I just delete without reading normally. and don't know when regular Discogs users can use it

basically it means you can specify things like country, minimum sleeve/media conditions, max price etc and you can configure that per artist/release or just for everything

it also filters out when sellers relist their whole inventory every day

that's the best feature of all. I've removed things I've wanted from my list just because I got sick of seeing the same overpriced copy appear every single day

Would be good if you could see what someone wanted to pay for something so you could adjust the price if it was worthwhile.

xp same

i tried wantlister but it wasn't able to do any of the things i wanted, and it was impossible to use, so i gave up. maybe this will be better though

it's definitely true that the discogs wantlist feature leaves a lot to be desired

it's basically the same as wantlister, but I thought it was pretty simple to use? not sure what the problem was

there was this whole interface where you had to basically manually enter each record you wanted to add to each grouping of filters as i recall? so it just ended up being like you would have to construct a new wantlist from scratch because you couldn't even use your existing wantlist to build new groupings. and the whole thing just struck me as naive, like "never see a record in less than VG+ condition" and it's like dude i'm collecting jamaican 7"s

you can add each record individually if you want to, but you can just leave that blank and it applies to everything

if you don't want to exclude VG or G+ just set it to that? or don't set it? not really understanding the problem here tbh

i actually corresponded with the guy who made wantlister and he told me that most ppl who use wantlister have less than 30 records in their list, and the majority of them simply want to set a minimum grade and country of seller and then essentially leave it as is until forever

which is a model that doesn't really work for the kind of collecting i do

it doesn't work for me to apply the same settings to all 3000 records in my wantlist, and i found it way too time-consuming to build sub-groups, so i gave it up. does that make sense?

lol I have 19000 in my wantlist and works for me, but then I don't really want to buy records from other countries and pay more in shipping than the record cost

plus with that many in the wantlist the daily relisting thing made the original discogs email completely useless

yeah. it wasn't clear to me how wantlister solved that problem either actually, which is of course the most annoying thing about the discogs wantlist. to me the greatest improvement would be if you could simply filter out certain sellers when you are using the Marketplace feature

it just does that internally, you don't need to do anything, it must keep a cache of listings and if the seller and price matches the cache it doesn't bother to include it again

I’ve not looked at it but presumably it’s a bit like camelcamelcamel in you can set a maximum price you’d want to pay.

unfortunately blocking individual sellers doesn't seem to be a thing

xp yes you can do that

Hey all, as a Discogs novice, I'm wondering what is an acceptable time to wait before giving a seller a nudge? I ordered something on the 13th June and we're still at 'payment received', there's been no notification of despatch yet.

That’s plenty of time for a nudge.

Thanks!

I seem to come across a lot of discogs sellers that have stuff in there terms like DO NOT HASSLE ME, I AM A BUSY PERSON WITH A DAY JOB AND WILL GET AROUND TO SHIPPING WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT. IF YOU BOTHER ME I WILL JUST CANCEL YOUR ORDER, MANY THANKS. I usually don’t mind waiting a couple of weeks for domestic orders.

Yeah I wait at least a week but idk

I recently bought an item from a seller in Germany (I live in France). He gave me a tracking number which confirms that he posted it four weeks ago. Both the German and French postal websites just say that the item is "currently being delivered". The seller has no additional information. What am I supposed to do? How can it take 4 weeks for an item to move from one neighbouring EU country to another?

That doesn’t sound right. Is there a way to follow up with your local service? I waited 3 working days for a standard shipping service from Germany to the UK last month. That’s pretty normal.

I've had stuff take 6 weeks to get from the UK to mainland Europe tbf

Royal Mail won't consider a refund for lost packages before 4 weeks

I try to get everything out within three days, will send an apology if I don't.

my seller terms say I post once a week on Saturdays (I quite often do more than that but don't want to hold myself to it) but nobody reads those, although I've only had 2 disgruntled customers who failed to read, the rest were fine about it

the last time I nudged someone after 5 or so days they responded that they had been going through some shit with their elderly parent. i replied, oh no take your time and sorry that's happening. a few days later i got one email saying my record had shipped and another telling me i got a full refund. it was only a 7 dollar record but they paid for shipping as well. i think talking to someone like an actual human and not writing something like "wtf where's my record???" can go a long way

I'm going to go back and read the terms then probably leave it until after the weekend

the last time I nudged someone after 5 or so days they responded that they had been going through some shit with their elderly parent. i replied, oh no take your time and sorry that’s happening. a few days later i got one email saying my record had shipped and another telling me i got a full refund. it was only a 7 dollar record but they paid for shipping as well. i think talking to someone like an actual human and not writing something like “wtf where’s my record???” can go a long way

Absolutely. I’ve nudged a couple of times, both at around a week of no movement. The first one, the guy replied that his store was moving premises and it turned out they didn’t have what I want (that pissed me off a bit, I could have gone somewhere else sooner) but I didn’t make a thing of it. The other one, the guy said he was dealing with cancer treatment and I was obviously like, take your time (I got it a couple of weeks later). Really, mostly I just want to know that someone at the other end got my order; if it takes a few weeks, so be it, so long as I know a human is handling it. I don’t need it tomorrow, it’s not Amazon Prime.

Quick update, sent a polite message three days ago requesting an update, no response. I believe Discogs advises a four days wait before any more action, I'll leave it another four days, then that'll be a week since my message (and more than two weeks since the initial purchase). Curious though, the seller has 100% feedback.

List more on eBay

Hi Scott,

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thanks, i have a couple dozen faberge eggs i've been meaning to unload.

I had a CD sale to someone in Chile. No problem, I thought.

Then I find the cheapest postage is £35

Happy to report that my guy got back with profuse apologies and even an offer to refund some of the money for the extra hassle (which I refused), he seemed genuine but also (reading between the lines) a little anxious that I might leave him negative feedback, which I won't, life happens.

Once on eBay I had someone leave negative feedback after they a) won the auction, b) vanished and never paid, c) and then after i left negative feedback they claimed they had the record because they had paid and i already sent it.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRRk-pOKk3MR69jRMUq_VUFgPYx6rE_BXqq_Q&s

Had one on Discogs that bought a cd, never paid, a month later I cancelled. Then a week later they left me a positive review!

Arg, watch out - the “new improved” inventory tools managed to relist some banned bootlegs which had been sitting around for years and which I had sold elsewhere in the meantime. These were then ordered by sellers and now I’m out of pocket for Paypal fees.

Hang on, you can still cancel "item unavailable" and get your PayPal fees back directly

you don't get a refund on Paypal fees when you cancel an order. only Discogs fees

Swines

Yeah, Paypal brought that in 2 or 3 years ago.