discogs marketplace?

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

Though when I type it out like that...

get a refund with the intent to send the money if it ever arrives? By this point the guy deserves to forfeit the money anyway, just for your time and stress.

If you used Paypal the onus is on the seller to provide tracking proof that the items was delivered to the address given.

I've never had a problem this severe on Discogs, but I know Paypal and eBay both strongly favor the buyer in finding a resolution. I imagine it would be the same in Discogs' case, or else they'd lose a ton of business.

Thanks everyone - if he doesn't reply this week I'll pursue the refund.

And almost inevitably the record arrived this morning, posted four weeks after ordered and almost a week after he changed the status to "shipped". He lives 20 minutes drive from my house.

Who knows, he might be following this thread?

(peace, man) at 6:57 26 Apr 19

... So my initial impression is that record collectors are just flakier than guitar players.

Gla dyou got your lp! It will never cease to amaze me that sellers like yours just do not reply. I can't grasp that.

Millennials don’t understand the concept of good customer service. /s

Gla dyou got your lp! It will never cease to amaze me that sellers like yours just do not reply. I can't grasp that.

I know! And I would have been chill with literally any explanation or excuse, like, 'Aw I'm just really slammed at the moment will get it to you ASAP' or whatevs.

I'm pretty sure he's not even a millennial. Eh, oh well. Record sounds sweet.

I think you've been very patient with this dude as you could've gave him a much harder time about this. Glad the record sounds good!