discogs marketplace?

My deliveries from the UK to the US currently appear to be reaching my buyers after around 4 weeks, on average.

This is how long it took me to get something from Norman, when usually stuff from the UK will arrive within 8-10 days.

uh oh, I bought something from a French seller and as a seller have never had any issues with anything other than International standard for inter EU shipping.

Now I think maybe I should have ponied up the extra £4 for tracked as I might never see this, or it might arrive after months wrecked.

It took 2.5 months for me to get a registered package from Japan recently. Ordered first week of April, just showed up last week.

In early April, a colleague in Beijing sent me a package of PPE masks as a goodwill gesture; they just arrived today. (I was surprised to see the package on our doorstep... I had assumed it was intercepted or something.)

So it sounds like 2.5 months for shipping from Asia is a good benchmark at present.

Detail on a copy of Spearhead's Stay Human, Media: NM, Sleeve: P

* * * * WATER HAS STUCK IT TO MAXI PRIEST SOME GUYS HAVE ALL THE LUCK * * * *

Do all the Discogs sellers on here know that from October 1st, automatic shipping policies will be mandatory for all orders? As it currently stands, the shipping policy editor is impossible to configure for a full range of UK orders (i.e. that can take account of large letters vs small parcels), but a new, improved and more flexible shipping policy editor has been promised; I wish they'd hurry up and release it. In the meantime, I'm having to weigh all my LPs, 12-inch singles and CDs, and record each weight in each individual sales listing. What a joy that is.

i wonder if it wouldn't be easier to set your prices close to the maximum of what you'd expect based on region + speed (slow UK / fast UK / slow europe / fast europe etc.) and then just make clear in your seller terms that you offer a partial refund on shipping expenses that come out to below what you've calculated

i ship in / from USA and have always used the automatic shipping policies so the policy change won't affect me. i'm curious what's so different about shipping records in / from the UK that makes it so hard to predict what your prices will be.

It sounds like you might be over complicating it? I have it set up for a around 4 weight bands for under £20 (standard) under £50 (signed-for) and over £50 (special delivery)

There are nine weight bands for UK small parcels under 2kg, many with significant price jumps, so establishing the precise weight of packages is important if you don't want to risk under-charging or over-charging. This makes setting up shipping policies by format/quantity impossible, as weights vary so much, especially with "Vinyl (large)", where a heavy single LP can be twice the weight of a light 12" single.

So, OK, maybe you could set up all your shipping policies purely by weight instead. This means you'll need to individually weigh every item you've got for sale, and enter it into each individual sales listing, as the default Discogs estimates (eg. 230g for large vinyl) are often way off. (The exception here is 7" singles, as the weights don't fluctuate much, and so the Discogs estimate of 60g is basically fine).

However, purely weight-based policies don't work with UK pricing either. This is because almost all your packages will fit into one of two categories - large letter and small parcel - based on dimensions. These can also significantly affect pricing, but you can't always deduce the size of a package purely on its weight - there are too many overlaps.

Discogs are promising a more flexible shipping policy editor, which allows you set up rules based on a combination of format AND weight. This may make things feasible, but we can't be certain until we can see exactly what it entails.

I always add some extra into my postage + packaging costs to cover my time, packing materials etc, sometimes you might get a bit less, sometimes you get a bit more. Prices are upfront to the buyer, so they can choose not to buy.

e.g. under £20 (I would send 2nd class Royal Mail):

1 > 99: £1.59
100 > 220: £2.39
221 > 1850: £4.39
1851 > 3700: £8.39 (would go into two separate parcels)
3701 > £9.99 (I doubt I would every get up to this threshold from under £20, but just in case)

under £50 (will send 2nd class, or perhaps courier if cheaper)

1 > 220: £3.49
221 > 1900: £5.49
1901 >: £10.99 (If someone does a large

For all other orders (Would either be special delivery or a courier):

1 > 400: £8.99
401 > 900: £10.49
901 > 1900: £12.99
1901 > : £27.99

Have people shared their accounts here by the way? Mine’s https://www.discogs.com/seller/Chewshabadoo/profile

i've just started using this to buy vinyl and I love it. have had a great experience with every seller.

will check your prof out!

OK, thanks, I can see how that works for UK to UK postage - for UK to the rest of the world, I'm still not so sure. I also add extra sums on for packaging, which are separately calculated by format, i.e. I have different packing materials for 7"/12"/CD. Your rates are a fair bit higher than mine, and now that most people are starting to move over to automatic shipping, I'm increasingly aware that I have to charge competitively for shipping, without losing money on the deal.

Here's my stuff (sorted in decreasing price order, so I can show off the cool stuff and hide the crap!) - https://www.discogs.com/seller/miketd/profile?sort=price%2Cdesc&limit=250&page=1

Very nice keeping the 100% rating on over 3000 reviews!

Thanks! I've been selling for almost exactly four years, and I've yet to have my first negative feedback, but it's bound to happen sooner or later...

Discogs have now released their updated Automatic Shipping Policy editor, which does give more flexibility (although it's still an almighty pain to configure, if you want to set accurate and competitive rates).

Dire warning! Every seller HAS to set up Automatic Shipping Policies by 1st October, otherwise their items will be blocked from sale. What's more, these policies HAVE to cover ALL orders of unlimited size/quantity (literally up to someone trying to order your entire inventory in one fell swoop), or else ALL your items will be blocked from sale.

Please note that your Shipping Policies will need to cover all potential orders of all formats, up to unlimited weight or quantity.

https://blog.discogs.com/en/shipping-policy-editor-changes/

https://blog.discogs.com/en/complete-shipping-policies-set-up-guide/

This is ridiculous.

I agree, and there's already been a lot of opposition to it - but it's also seemingly unstoppable, and if you're selling a lot of items across multiple formats with postal classification systems like we have in the UK, then adapting to it is very time-consuming.

For instance, a purely weight-based policy system, cutting across all formats regardless, just doesn't work here. Example: an order of three 7" singles weighs 240g and ships as "large letter" for £1.40 (excluding packaging), whereas an order of one lightweight 12" single weighs 170g and ships as "small parcel" for £2.95 (with totally different packaging). So you can't calculate shipping based purely on weight, without significantly under-charging (hence losing money) or over-charging (hence losing sales).

Here's another piece of stupidity. If a buyer orders a mixture of formats together (eg. 7", LP, CD in the same package), and if your shipping policies are separated by format, then the buyer will be automatically invoiced for an aggregate of all the different by-format rates, leading to gross over-charging. As I get a lot of multi-format orders, for decent money, this is going to hit hard. All I can do is add a message to my seller terms, saying something along the lines of "if you order multiple formats, message me for a shipping rate recalculation before paying". Trouble is, half the buyers will never click through/scroll down to the seller terms.

In the meantime, I've weighed all my CDs and am currently weighing all my LPs and 12"s. I have about 3500 items for sale. This is a massive pain!

I was contemplating increasing my prices to be inclusive of appropriate UK shipping, setting “free shipping” as default shipping option then blocking buyers outside the UK but it (a) restricts my potential sales (I do seem to send a lot of my orders overseas) and results in overcharging on multiple item orders.

There are some benefits to the new ASP editor. One is that you can set some format-based policies by quantity (e.g. 7"s and cassettes, whose weights don't vary much), and others by weight (e.g. 12"/LP and CDs). Another is that you can construct more complex pricing bands, based on wider selection criteria.

Another is that you can rename each pricing category using free text, so I can add the words "no tracking" to all my Standard shipping categories - this will help to manage the expectations of overseas buyers, who tend to assume that all classes of shipping include tracking by default.

Also, now that UK to US shipping charges have sky-rocketed - the US is now the most expensive country in the world for UK citizens to ship to - I'm going get the slower "International Economy" rates properly set up; thankfully the new editor helps you make it crystal clear to buyers that Economy delivery times can take as long as 12 weeks.

I would just set a flat freight rate of say $1000 for quantities of records above a normal amount you will ever likely sell. Gets you over the line of being setup and will probably never be seen by buyers unless they add that amount of items to their basket.

Yeah, I did consider that, but I'm going to do it by setting a rule along the lines of "£x for each additional y grams" / "£x for each additional y items". Granted, it will round the charges up to the nearest big number, but then it will only kick in once I'm past the usual maximum order quantities.

I know in the long run I'll be glad I did this setting up shipping thing, and I've definitely been putting it off, but jesus christ could they have made it any more confusing? I keep worrying I'm going to accidentally charge zero shipping to send 15 LPs to someone in Germany or something. I go through all the specific formats for a given country and it'll say "This policy is complete" in green, but then when I go to fill in the shipping for another country, when I return to the main page it tells me the previously complete one is now incomplete. Super frustrating.

Why don't they have just a basic "shipping outside the US" option and have it automatically apply to all intl orders? Maybe I'm just too tired to deal with this right now and should try again tomorrow

Fuck it, is there a way to just not ship internationally? At least for now? And to set up domestic shipping policy and be done with this madness? I'll be losing a few sales, but I don't sell a ton anyway, and besides I hate filling out customs forms.

Within your Shipping Policy, you can have as many methods as you like, which can be as granular as you want, but it’s essential to have at least one ‘default’ method to cover all formats with a value set for ‘and up’ (‘flat rate’ or ‘per additional’) to cover all quantities and weight ranges. This method should also be without value restrictions (e.g. ‘Order subtotal must be over/at least XX.XX’).

DID THE FUCKING IRS WRITE THIS

yeah if you go to “edit shipping policies” under the seller settings, it should allow you to change which countries you ship to. or you could just add a new shipping policy.

I don’t even ship outside the US, can’t bother dealing with postage rates etc

The policy I’ve had for years is just based on the USPS media mail rate, basically

Got an email reminder last night from Discogs so attempted to have a go at this. And I'm still utterly confused. Mainly by the 'All formats' category (lol'd at Paul's post above). It looks like I have to apply a flat shipping rate for bulk orders but have no idea what this rate should be especially if it's mixed format. I suppose I'll have to come up with a weight calculation.

What a mess.

This is pretty brutal and will decimate international sales it seems.

Yeah I think I'm going to bow out of international sales. They're maybe 1 in 20 anyway.

I've never sold anything through it, but judging by Twitter... this is going to do more than decimate international sales. At least six different shops/people I follow said they are switching back to eBay.

There's no reason it should decimate international sales other than sellers en mass throwing their hands up in confusion and/or succumbing to what amounts to something of a 'moral panic' regarding the usability of automatic checkouts. The main real difficulty is inland shipping for countries with different pricing internally as there is no good provision for that.

The price of shipping an album to and from Europe / Canada -> U.S. skyrocketed the last few years which is more responsible for decimating international sales from my perspective. It's around 15-20 bucks to get a single LP shipped from most EU countries. Germany seems to be the only exception.

Bought a copy of Singles Going Steady off a guy as part of a 6-record purchase last week - they arrived yesterday, and tho the media was tagged as NM/M- there's surface noise all through, on both sides. Have mentioned this to him, and am a bit vexed about it tbh. I hate when Discogs sellers are shifty.

Any reviews on the quality of the pressing you bought? Sealed/mint vinyl can have a bunch of surface noise, though i guess this wasn't such a thing til recently. Seller maybe just eyeballed it.

On the shipping racket... i haven't looked into setting my rates yet, but this will probably make me go domestic (Canada) only. I'm super small time at this and just not going to make much effort with what they're up to.

When i browse as a buyer, the way it is set up now, i see all sorts of greyed out stuff not available to ship to Canada. Hopefully it stays like that, so if, say, I'm the only seller on something somebody abroad is after, they could message me and work it out.

From what I gather international mail pricing is much simpler in Canada than inland where it varies by multiple region codes.

xps Yeah eBay is keyed in enough with various shippers to just tell the buyer how much the thing will cost to get to them. Discogs doesn't seem ready for what they're trying to do.

xp I'm in Newfoundland, I'll probably just set it all as if I'm shipping to Vancouver!

Any reviews on the quality of the pressing you bought? Sealed/mint vinyl can have a bunch of surface noise, though i guess this wasn't such a thing til recently. Seller maybe just eyeballed it.

Oh, this wasn't sealed, and the sleeve was accurately described as "G" - the vinyl was dirty, too, and cleaning barely made any difference.

oh that is a bad grading by the seller

Discogs doesn't seem ready for what they're trying to do.

...to the surprise of pretty much no one who has ever peeked under the hood there

There's no reason it should decimate international sales other than sellers en mass throwing their hands up in confusion and/or succumbing to what amounts to something of a 'moral panic' regarding the usability of automatic checkouts. The main real difficulty is inland shipping for countries with different pricing internally as there is no good provision for that.

― Kieron Arse (Noel Emits), Friday, September 18, 2020 10:31 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I hope this doesn't come off as rude (I don't mean it to be) but your post seems to indicate that you are a Discogs seller who has successfully navigated this change. Are you and have you?

Discogs has generally been pretty reliable for me, it's eBay where you get those "played once" records that are full of scratches and fingerprints

something's definitely been up with the shipping lately, I've bought from 2 people last week who had a "$0.00" shipping option despite the fact that the record I was buying was under five bucks. didn't pick it cuz obviously it was a mistake.

sucks that the international shipping rates are so high right now, there's just so much stuff I'd like to pick up from Europe and Asia that I can't get without paying an additional $30 or whatever

Yeah the site is really not a lot of use to me since German postal rates went up so much.

Yes and no, Paul xp.

I (finally) started using shipping policies a few months ago, before they announced it would be required. So not much of a change for me, except to ensure that the policies are "complete".

It didn't take long to determine that for me it made most sense to set it up using "weight", a couple of people up thread have also said. I haven't looked closely at the updates they've done but I'm sticking with that for now.

I've never sold anything through it, but judging by Twitter... this is going to do more than decimate international sales. At least six different shops/people I follow said they are switching back to eBay.

this thread is fairly typical of what I've seen so far this morning, especially the replies

Me: jesus, 2020 couldn't possibly get any worse @discogs implementation of new, baffling, mandatory changes to shipping policies: pic.twitter.com/I22Hj5zkOp

— james toth (@jimmyjacktoth) September 18, 2020