discogs marketplace?

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

My first potential bad luck in a few years of discogs selling...

I'm in the UK and sold a somewhat valuable (£100) box set last month to a French buyer. I sent it International Tracked & Signed (but only with the standard £50 coverage I realise now) and it appeared to arrive ok, with Royal Mail and La Poste marking it as delivered with signature at the end of September.

Unfortunately the buyer has just got in touch with me to say they never received or signed for the parcel and that they have been trying to dispute the delivery with La Poste for the last couple of weeks.

I can only see that it was signed for, not who by, nor any image of the signature.

The buyer is asking me if I can send them the proof of postage to aid their case. Is it safe for me to do that? I'm wary of opening myself up to extra grief. I can't see how it could be used maliciously in the worst case scenario, but maybe I'm naive!

The buyer has >95% positive ratings as both buyer and seller with double digit transactions over years, so seems above board and I'm hoping that all this is genuine and that a neighbour has the parcel (it's an apartment block) and it can be tracked down somehow.

More than likely I'd say

Obviously post a photocopy (or email it, etc)

Send a scan. You’ll probably need the original if you claim against RM. Though given that it’s marked as delivered may mean they admit no liability.

RM did their job by handing it off to La Poste. They'll admit zero liability.

Thanks all. Yeah, just sending a photo of the proof of postage of course and have passed that along to the buyer. Fingers crossed for a miraculous positive outcome.

I just got an iPhone this weekend. Why is the iOS version of the app a total trash fire compared to the Android version that's designed with care and attention to detail and so easy to use? I hate this.

Can't even view my collection in mosaic format.

Might check out the RecordHolder app. I found it way more usable, at least for adding a bunch of stuff quickly.

i just go to discogs.com in safari on my iphone, the app is useless

I could swear that the Android version used to be useful but then stopped being useful at some point?

Still quite useful for me.

Android version is handy for the barcode scanning, but otherwise always seems awful to me.

Mandatory ASPs (automatic shipping policies) were expected to be enforced from yesterday. So far, it hasn't happened.

Seeing reports on other forums that a lot of users are now (temporarily?) banned from selling for not having their policies updated appropriately.

My store has been disabled. I knew this was coming but having tried to get my head around the new system a few weeks ago I gave up. Will give it another go at some point when I have the time and the will. Perhaps they've simplified the process now or is that wishful thinking?!

I don't know, I've never used discogs to buy or sell, mostly just as a research tool. Seems like a lot of people are giving up though, so it doesn't sound like it's gotten any easier. It will be interesting to see if this has any long term effect on sales.

I eventually set up policies for UK shipping ahead of the original 1st Oct deadline but am yet to add any other territories. I’ve never been selling in any volume, but a decent chunk of my sales were previously to buyers outwith the UK.

Sales listings for sellers without ASP are still visible, but marked as “unavailable”.

I set up shipping policies about 10 years ago. Have updated pricing occasionally but they are somewhat out of date, but hey it makes prices attractive.

I set up three areas: UK, 'far away' (ie Australia, USA, etc) and 'Europe'.

It's fiddly, but once its there its there.

I still get "How much to ship to Spain" enquiries, I'm like "C'mon, it'll tell you..."

Well I finally set up my shipping policies and think I'm going to go strictly domestic (USA). I gamed out international shipping all the way up to 2000 grams and realized the way this thing is designed I have to keep going until I cover every contingency or else someone could buy a ridiculous amount of records and I'd have to ship them at whatever my designated "and up" flat rate is. I guess I could put in an exorbitant shipping cost after a certain weight threshold just to be done with it but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble. I doubt I've done more than 2 or 3 overseas orders all year. Anyway, too bad there's not a contact seller option anymore for such occasions.

You can do "and up" as per each additional so the quick and dirty approach is just to repeat the largest range - e.g. 2001g and up $30 per each additional 2000g.

ahhh I see - thank you!

this is fucking wank.

I've added shipping policies for the UK so far. half the time when I load the page it's reverted to the previous incomplete policies, I guess their caching is fucked. at first I thought I'd have to enter everything again but refreshing the page it came back to the one I've filled in.

I had my items expired for a few months because I didn't want to deal with it. Now I have relisted them, a CD is showing shipping as £4.95 (the amount I put for any format) not the amount for CDs that I've filled in which is much less than that. This doesn't even fucking work properly.

Some CDs still show up as other/mixed, depending on how they’ve been catalogued on the database, for example if they come with an extra DVD, or if someone’s added an “all media” category for them.

I have two discogs accounts, one for lp sales, one for cd's.

It wasn't because of shipping, but it worked out to be the best way.

I finally got all the shipping policies done last night. Worked out what was happening with CDs - it applies the policies in order, so if you have All Formats above CDs in the list of policies, it will never get to the CD policy. There is no indication on the page that will happen of course, I assumed it would select the most appropriate policy, but I dragged and dropped the CD policy above All Formats and now it's showing the right price on CDs.

I did have to re-enter the entire Europe policy again because the fucking page kept failing to save it. Hopefully now it is done that means all I will need to do is just tweak the prices next time the postal rates go up. Which, as an aside, wtf has happened to US postal prices? They now have their own zone on Royal Mail with just the US in it and for most weights it costs more than anywhere else in the world.

Blame Trump, again. https://www.theamerican.co.uk/pr/ne-US-Mailing-Price-Rises-July-1

Setting International Economy surface mail rates as defaults has greatly helped international sales. I never did it before, as International Economy isn't an option if you're sorting out postage directly through PayPal; it has to be done instead via the Royal Mail site, which is pretty straightforward to use.

As a buyer, Marketplace search is infuriating. If I enter Philip Glass as artist, for example, it returns hundreds of items where he is mentioned anywhere in the listing, be it as composer, guest appearance etc. Is there no advanced search functionality which only returns items released under his own name?

You might be better off going to the artist page https://www.discogs.com/artist/20691-Philip-Glass and browsing their releases from there, as you can be sure that versions of all of them will be for sale.

Thanks, good idea.

one thing that will never stop annoying me is seeing a record in my daily wantlist email, thinking "oh, that's a reasonable price for VG+" or whatever, and then clicking through only to see "cover is G, covered in dog shit and water stains, large crayon markings from previous owner on back" and it's still like $45 or whatever. like fuck you !!

Eck, I got a VG+ gatefold copy of Watertown. It's a lovely thing and the cover is probably somewhere between VG and VG+, but the surface noise is kinda ridiculous. Seller has a 99.9% rating from over 5000 sales but I don't think it would only be me? Anyway, it was only £10 all in and I don't really feel like making a fuss so I'll just have a minor whinge on here.

What an album. It's just broken for the 19th time.

Would you grade it visually VG+? I’m not even that heavy volume a dealer, but I couldn’t possibly play-grade everything.