discogs marketplace?

I always get all of mine by email - minus the types that I've opted out of (mostly database notifications) - but if a buyer isn't responding to messages, I'll double up with a direct email to them - it often does the trick.

I just sold a record for £1*, packed it in a decent mailer with bubblewrap and a stiffener (and a new inner sleeve) and shipped it for next day delivery. Now *that's* service, if I do say so myself ;-)

* yes not really worth it, but the lower value items often help sweeeten bigger deals as add ons. Although they do now allow sellers to stipulate minimum order requirements.

That's commendable. I sent a Photek CD to Japan the other day, price £3. I wonder whether it's really worth it sometimes but would agree with your disclaimer.

I'm down to the dregs now so pretty much all mine are 50p-£1.99. so yeah is it worth me walking into town to post it? probably not. what I really need to do is list more stuff, because yeah then those 50p items get added onto other orders.

every now and then i take all my £1.50 and less stuff (most of which i can't be bothered listing in the first place) and stick it all on ebay as a job lot (sometimes split into genres). good for shifting bulk and clearing space and saves you umpteen trips to the post office for negligible returns

last lot I sold that way was to some guy who had a holiday cottage and was filling it with vinyl as his USP. bought about 150 records of very questionable quality, mostly dodgy euro rave, shit techno and the arse end of disco. think I got about 80 quid?

Do you bother fully itemising them or just a vague description and hope it sounds enticing?

Laid them all out on the sitting room floor 16 at a time and took photos

lol, after all the excitement of making my first discogs marketplace order, the guy cancelled because he apparently no longer had the item in his shop. Fortunately, it's not a super rare record and I'm trying again. But it was only released in Europe, so most sellers are in Germany/Austria.

Would think you'd link up databases or something so if an item was old online it would be removed from sale in the shop. Or at least a reminder to remove it from the shelves came through.
Though probably going to find some lag between sales and removal anyway since staff likely to be busy and not 100% on top of things.
Not seen the set up with something like this, do things tend to be sold in 2 media at the same time or kept aside for online sales and not put out for rack sales. Otherwise likely to be some confusion innit.

It happened to me on Reverb LP a couple weeks ago too. A guy cancelled my sale and sent the message "Sorry, that already sold on my Discogs page." I'd started record buying on Reverb since I've been using it to buy and sell musical instruments and equipment for many years without too many problems. So my initial impression is that record collectors are just flakier than guitar players.

more objects to keep track of, by and large, I suppose

valid point.

xp Arse End of Disco B&B? I'd book it.

Admin for shops has to be a pain. Do they offer any sort of API you can begin to hook up to your own shop's database?

As a buyer I try not to get too miffed about frustrations related to discogs/ebay purchasing bc I try to remember that its just humans on the other end who by & large have the same distractions & limitations as me w/r/t going to the post office & keeping track of shit & whatever.

That being said the one thing that still gets me v v annoyed is when sellers tell me they already sold something. Seems to happen to me maybe 1 out of 20 orders and is almost always a case where I pay & then dont hear anything back for a week or two, have to ping them w/one or two reminders, and eventually get the message back "sorry, I've been looking for this everywhere & can't find it, I guess I sold it elsewhere, shrug". Drives me nuts.

I run listings on discogs and reverb lp, as I've found that buyers don't really overlap: discogs buyers tend to be people searching for specific stuff, whereas the reverb buyers tend to just be more curious about buying LPs... at least as far as I can glean. Anyway, I'm always terrified of having to tell someone that I don't have the item I say I have, so I watch it like a hawk. My inventory isn't especially big, so it's manageable. The one time it happened the buyer blew it off, which I appreciated. I'm sure it's much more difficult for sellers with thousands of items and many daily sales.

I have thousands of items and many daily sales, and logging the stock's dead easy - I have my spreadsheet open 24/7 (saved to Dropbox), and moving items from the "for sale" section to the "sold" section is literally the first thing I do after receiving a payment.

can discogs be linked up to that spreadsheet, or is that a manual step afterwards?

Going to start listing some more.

You can export your Discogs collection as a csv, update it locally, then upload the changed version.

just a shout that it's extremely easy to port your entire discogs inventory over to reverb LP, and well worth it IMO. My sales have more or less doubled since running on both platforms

xp - I update my spreadsheet manually. I've tried the csv export, but didn't find much use for it.

Is frequent updating the reason things fall out of my cart (Discogs) every few days from certain sellers? The items are almost never sold and I just add them back to buy on a rainy day. I'm just wondering why that happens.

Are you adding them to your cart or your wantlist?

Cart.

Maybe the cart times out after a period of time if you’re not committing to buy the items?

Nah, it's just certain (high volume) sellers. I've got stuff that's been sitting in my cart for over a year and other stuff I have to to keep adding back regularly.

I mostly just treat the cart that way to take the most advantage of combined shipping. I add a handful of things from on seller's inventory, and then check back from time to time hoping they've added something that will make me pull the trigger on ordering.

Yeah, some sellers update their stock by completely relisting everything regularly (although there are other ways to do it), others do it because items show up as new listings and buyers get notified (which is many users' No.1 most annoying aspect of the site).

My first job of each day is to discount and re-list anything which is still unsold after six months - that seems like a decent gap in terms of wantlist notifications, and it does help shift stock.

More than long enough IMO.

But also you can just upload changes, which doesn't generate new listings or kick them out of buyers' carts. AFAIK.

"Which is many users' No. 1 most annoying aspect of the site"

Ding ding ding

I actually take shit off my wantlist cuz of this, I think it's super annoying. Discussed upthread iirc

I also don't like aeeing the same overpricing shithead big lad sellers' stock every day but I can see the logical difficulty with preventing a seller from uploading stock repeatedly as new listings.

Stopping it would probably mean introducing listing fees and that would be pants so I put up with it.

Nah they just meed to let you block sellers!

Need

I don't even read the emails, unless there's a way to limit to UK only there's no point, I just get loads of results from the US where the shipping is going to be 5x the cost of the record

Yeah, c'mon it doesn't me £20 to send a cd to the USA, surely it can't cost that the other direction?

You'd be surprised US is almost as bad as Australia now

I think some rule changes mean US postage prices are that high these days. Looking at nearly £20 for tapes!

x-post - You can filter new items from your want list by currency (though not 'ships from' for no good reason I can see).

https://www.discogs.com/sell/mywants?currency=GBP

(Set the sort to Newest First).

Australia used to be really good for cds, new at a third of the price. Postage would be the other third, so you'd be still ahead.

xp yeah I do that on my wantlist, but iirc there is no way to do that for the emails

Basically the only country I can buy from now is Germany unless I want to pay out the nose for postage to the US. Not sure what the deal is there, but Germany to US postage is not much more than buying from inside the US itself.

I've noticed that as well

Yup same. Actually have had decent luck with Japan as well

As a Canadian, I pretty much only shop Germany on discogs. it's weird.

Wouldn't tie in with the reason everybody in Germany used to speak English with a US accent, because of the presence of so many US military/Air Force bases

sorry meant to end with would it?
Meant taht everybody was listening to US military/AF radio.

Just wondering if somebody found a useful loophole through that (bases etc) to get cheap mail rates or something.

Australia used to be really good for cds, new at a third of the price. Postage would be the other third, so you'd be still ahead.

this was probably when they dropped the parallel importation laws that had kept prices high on imports to protect the local industry - new CD prices dropped from $30 to $10 for two years in pop-up shops, 70+% of existing record shops closed, and then the pop-up shops turned into perfume galleries and mobile phone shops

also, postage mysteriously started going up every six months when a former venture capital manager and bank CEO was appointed head of Australia Post, raised his own salary to over ten times that of the Prime Minister, and laid off 900 employees. wild coincidence, I'm sure.

An update on my malady above, for anyone wishing one. I told Discogs that I wasn't get any replies from the guy who I'd attempted to buy the record from, and they said they'd freeze his account if he didn't reply within three days, and he just switched the transaction to "sent" without any messages. That was ten or so days ago, and the record hasn't arrived. I've ordered another record from a different seller since then, it arrived literally the next day. I don't imagine the record will arrive. It could have got lost in the post, but this guy's refusal to communicate doesn't make me want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't guess it's worth the hassle of trying to get a refund - it was a £9 record - but I definitely will give him a negative feedback if he doesn't reply to my next message.

He never replied to the tweet I sent him. Weirdly, it seems we have a bunch of friends in common, according to Twitter.

You should be able to get a refund processed automatically iirc? Without having to chase the dude himself

Via Paypal?

I guess my only reluctance over that is the only "proof" i have that he ripped me off is his never communicating and my never receiving the record