discogs marketplace?

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

lol fuck that guy, never gonna miss a chance to say that

the single worst human I have encountered through ILX

okay, i guess that was a bad example to pick. it was more the commentary in the responses that made me think this sounds like a terrible mess.

no worries! it is a good example tbh. sorry for reheating old beef.

and this does seem like a huge mess, feeling very thankful rn that I only sell at shows/in person.

it’s madness, the main reason I stopped shipping outside of the U.S. was the unpredictability of overseas shipping costs, forcing people to do this is not good

I'm considering taking down the 50-75 records I have up on there now that are under $20 and just bringing them to a record store for credit or something. I've never exactly been a power seller or anything so this hassle is just not worth the trouble for me right now.

Has anyone had any luck with eBay's Global Shipping Program, or is that a mess too?

I’ve been having more records show up mangled due to postal abuse. Seems like about half the time there’s a bend in the package. I don’t know if the Houston postal service is heavy handed or what, but it’s bumming me out.

I misread that as “blood in the package”

Everyone post your items you'd like to sell in a spreadsheet with prices or trade offers!

I'm in little doubt that Discogs marketplace requiring automatic checkout policies that cover all possible orders is in very large part to do with tax collection obligations. Or rather, not wanting to test the liability question, which means doing everything "reasonable" to "sufficiently" track all transactions they facilitate. There's no question this is a major consideration for online marketplace venues now. Currently they are obliged to collect US sales taxes, GST for Aus and NZ, and it looks like from January 1st 2021 VAT in the UK (in the EU from July.)

I can guess they aren't exactly highlighting this as a policy driver (aside from it being a negative driver) for the very same reasons that there is some considerable urgency about sorting it out.

https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-news/2021-eu-marketplaces-vat-deemed-supplier.html

I open up my record and it's full of blood.

Which has just brought home to me that as things stand from January in the UK there will be VAT on all online marketplace purchases from outside the UK.

I Keep Coming Across This One Guy's Record Reviews

https://www.discogs.com/user/wezbash

You can link right to his reviews: https://www.discogs.com/user/wezbash/reviews?header=1

ugh, n-word on that page, man's a fucking tool

Canadian sellers do seem particularly disadvantaged by the ASP enforcement; it’s all over the forums at present. Meanwhile, I’ve been having a simply marvellous time individually weighing all my many hundreds of CDs, LPs and 12”s and entering them on each sales listing. I’ve since spent many equally happy hours constructing a humongous spreadsheet to calculate all the myriad combinations of pricing bands that will be needed in order to generate accurate and competitive rates for every conceivable order that might come through. Ultimately, it IS doable if you put the hours in, and since Discogs sales are my only remaining source of income, I’m pretty damned motivated to do so. My entirely selfish hope now is that, with so many sellers in imminent retreat from the whole nightmarish shitshow, I might actually pick up more sales after October 1st, due to the reduced competition. Yay capitalism.

One thing about weight and pricing bands is that as only a very limited set of order types can be sent as a Large Letter, I know that no order above a given weight can be sent as a Large Letter. That was a key thing to realise (and became apparent as I plotted it out on a spreadsheet) because it makes things much simpler than may at first appear. It's only the region up to that weight that needs close attention, as above it it's into parcel territory.

I also don't think it's necessary or really worth the time to weigh everything. Some things do need adjusting, like outsized CD cases so they don't fall in ranges for Large Letter post, but otherwise I think any gains in 'accuracy' for postage charges would be marginal and mostly non-existent.

I did end up with ~20 weight bands up to the point above which no Large Letters happen. Some of them are for specific things like 7"s with tapes where I wouldn't want to try and pack them as letters. So the precise combined weight gets charged as a Small Parcel. Weighing then would actually fuck that up. Even that probably wasn't necessary but I wanted to see if it was doable, and it's nice to know it's there.

Beatles in Mono box set
NM/NM

Missing a few records. [lists the 4 records missing.] White album has a few scratches but still VG+. Does not come with book.

***

I wish there was a way of flagging blatant misgrading like this. Like buddy, this is about as near mint as I am.

what i do wonder about is people who try to sell bootlegs which are banned from being sold under a listing for the OG record, but specify "bootleg" in the comments. can you get penalized for this ?

xp to Noel Emits: I’m wondering if you’re just selling UK to UK, as I think things get more complicated once you’re into international Small Parcel territory. UK parcels are flat rate up to 2kg if you ship 2nd class, but with international parcels, you’ve got narrow price bands by weight that change every 250g up to 2kg, with some significant price jumps between the bands. Then you’ve got three rates - standard, economy and tracked - and four zones: Europe, US, Auz/NZ and “rest of the world”. The weight bands are why weighing of large vinyl and CD became necessary. Large vinyl typically falls between 160g for a thin 12” and 300g for a fat vintage LP in a thick gatefold, so one item can weight twice as much as another. And with CDs, most of mine are in gatefold plastic wallets at around 30g, but those in digipacks weight twice as much and those still in jewel cases twice as much again.

So I get why people with smaller stock lists might just go: sod it, I’ll just ship domestic, but in my case, about a third of my orders are international and a significant proportion of these are bulk. I had an order of 20 CDs to Australia yesterday, and about 3.5kg of large vinyl to the US earlier in the week. With the latter, tracked shipping would have worked out at about £60, so you really need to calculate accurately (understandably they went for economy at about half the price, even though it can take up to 12 weeks to arrive).

No Mike I'm set up to ship internationally.

It can be worthwhile distinguishing between CD packaging types (and I do) but this can mostly be done by sight and is for the most part about determining whether a small letter will be over 100g or not.

I think in practice 250g weight bands with a suitable amount factored in for packaging offers a reasonable margin for error. You can also err on the cautious side and either adjust it before a buyer's pays or refund some difference if you want. Or you can aim for an average.

With larger bulk orders in one sense it can become more critical, but in others not so much because a) you're not likely to be directly competing over the same set of 30 records, the buyer will probably want to discuss it first, and you are making money on a large order even if you happen to under charge some for shipping.

I don't think it's worth getting hung up on potential edge cases (something I se3 a lot of people doing), get it so it's right most of the time and on a erage it balances out. And I don't evaluate some presumed "competitive edge" as being worth the time involved with weighing literally everything, and actually the way I set it up depends on using standardised weights anyway.

But each to their own and I've seen these discussions a hundred times or more by now.

By the way I do actually think it's cool that you're taking the trouble to diligently weigh every item and perhaps ideally every professional seller should. It's really a stock check and something that anyone running a sales business should expect to do from time to time.

I guess I've just seen a large number of them flat out refusing to countenance doing so.

For smaller sellers though I think they could be reassured that it doesn't have to be so hard. When I first looked into it my first reaction was like many people's - what? This is stupid how is it supposed to... but then it literally took a matter of minutes to find some good answers to my main questions in old discussions. Not all but a good proportion of supposed issues and objections are based are based on misconceptions.

Setting it up was certainly a bit of a project, I had to study it and make notes and so on, but I knew it was perfectly possible because it's been in use for years. And I wasn't going to let it not work for me.

Is this the end for Discogs? A shipping policy change meets almost unanimous condemnation from users. A real shame, but hard to see how they can continue if this thing goes ahead as planned on 1 October. pic.twitter.com/KbXNifJtrb

— Max Tundra (@MaxTundra) September 19, 2020

It's sad to see so many of their users turn on the company. But online outrage can easily look far more uninimoua than it really is. Their forums alwqys blow up when anythinng changes. I really don't need reminding of the problems and limitations with the checkout system so spare me that but for most users it will work and once set up there is less work to do.

The visible reaction does have more than a little of the moral panic about it with the outrage and a hefty dose of misconceptions being echoed, with very little willingness to take on board information that offers counterpoint and balance.

Is anyone asking buyers how they feel about having all total prices easily readable and not having to wait for sellers to get round to invoicing?

Yeah, improving things for buyers is the likely key driver for the ASP enforcement, and the changes will certainly work in their favour. Automatic calculation of shipping costs is pretty much universally expected elsewhere, so the current manual invoicing system does place Discogs out on a limb.

I take your other points, Noel, but the ultra-fastidious option (which still has its own compromises and trade-offs) is the one I ultimately feel most comfortable with, and at least my laborious formulas will be future-proof. So the next time the postage rates go up (as they have done three times this year already), it will be much easier to regenerate all the shipping costs; that's been heavy-going until now.

Sellers could take this change as an opportunity to modestly raise their shipping prices as insurance against the occasional bad surprise. Most buyers wouldn't notice paying a dollar or two extra for shipping.

Buy-through rate will also probably increase sitewide once buyers don't have to wait for a shipping invoice and can make the same kind of impulse, instant gratification purchases as on every other major e-commerce site.

email from a vendor I previously bought from:

Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances brought on by Discogs, we will be closing our store by October 1.
All new orders for CDs, vinyl and multi media will be discounted 5% at checkout until the end of this month.
Thank you for your support.

Mandatory ASPs now pushed back from Oct 1st to Nov 1st.

I've noticed a lot of stuff from France & Germany is listed as "no additional shipping", even to the US...I'm assuming they're gonna stop me from ordering if I try it though

I've always had my shipping charges in the form '£4 first item, £1 each additional', with different amounts for each format (LP, 7", CD, Cassette) and destination. The buyer then pays whatever the most expensive 'first item' price is for the various things they bought and everything else gets the appropriate 'additional item' price. This is super common, right?

It always seemed like a lot of sellers had similar set ups, so I naively thought it would be easy to transfer across to the new shipping policies way of doing things, assuming that I could put my values in for each format and let discogs do the calculations when a sale came through.

Making the seller do the calculations ahead of time for the 'All Formats' portion seems ludicrous.

Since completing my ASPs, 12"/LP and CD sales have held up well, while 7" sales have dropped off a cliff. I'm now experimenting with making an operating loss on 7" packaging and fees, in order to compete with other UK sellers and their, uh, more slimline approach to packaging 45s.

How do you currently pack & ship 7"s? I never sold many, but seem to remember that they can be done as a large letter if you're canny with the packaging dimensions.

Use two filler pads and yeah, a basic paper manilla envelope with the clamp does the job just fine in my experience

If it’s a single 45, it goes in a cardboard mailer with a stiffener that separates the sleeve from the disc, with the disc in a clear plastic sleeve. The mailer strikes me as too flimsy to go in the post on its own, so I put it inside a padded envelope. It’s posted as a small letter and the weight is always just above 100g, typically 110 to 120, so postage is £1.40. Add in the packaging costs, add 30p to claw back the fixed PayPal fee (which counts for more if it’s a cheap deal, which many of mine are), and that comes to £2.25. But that price point isn’t competitive, and initially dropping it to £2.10 (my pre-ASP price hasn’t worked either), so I’m now trying £1.95.

(misplaced end bracket at the end of that, but I’m sure you get the gist)

Sounds like you're way way more organised than me. I have 7"s at £1.50, which I set years ago just to cover the actual postage cost, not any time/packaging/fees, as I sell about 10 items a year if I'm lucky, so I can get away with it. I feel bad that I'm part of the under-pricing problem!

"vinyl is fine while ringwear and drug abuse damaged the cover"

haha