discogs marketplace?

I keep saying it but I’ve gotta get out of the buying game soon. I’m NOT your fussy record guy when it comes to condition, but I keep buying records listed at VG+ and when they arrive I think you would have a very hard argument even saying they’re VG- (I had one that was entirely split around all four sides, barely held together, AND had significant ringwear). I don’t want to blast these people in the feedback because condition is subjective and I’m afraid they’ll retaliate but there’s no way these people think these are truly that condition.

On the flip side, I’ll occasionally get a VG that looks nearly mint. There’s just too much inconsistency and prices are generally stupid high for the older pressings I’m looking for.

IMHO you should feel very free to write to them, describe the discrepancy, and ask for a refund. When they say yes, ask for a shipping label if they didn't already offer to pay the return shipping. Discogs is explicit about using the Goldmine standard and you're on solid ground asking for a return.

If they won't do it, then appealing to Discogs or leaving negative feedback are the appropriate recourse. Feedback is also the main warning available to other buyers that this is one of those stores that overgrades everything, so it's a public service.

i sold about 200 CDs on discogs over the past few years but I did sell most of them for bargain prices.

at the moment I mostly only have some very expensive vinyl listed, but I'm reliably selling one thing every week or every other week.

when you look at the actual definitions for VG etc on discogs it allows for a lotttttt of leeway. too much really. “very good” should not mean “kinda scratchy” but yet

the only time i ever complained the seller was amazing, told me to keep it and they’d ship me another better copy for free

“Very Good” allows for light scratches that can be felt with a fingernail. To me, that’s bonkers. But I didn’t write the Goldmine standard.

Also, virtually nobody adheres to the values ascribed to the condition; if a NM copy sells for $50, then the VG+ copies are like $40 and VG copies are maybe 30, instead of $25 and $12.50 like they “should” be. But that seems to be what the market will bear.

I’ve had excellent luck with sellers’ grading on Discogs in the main. But I don’t buy from sellers with virtually any negative feedback and I rarely buy from sellers who don’t go into some detail about the condition.

I do list albums in general as vg+, and prior to despatch I'll do a closer check. If there are definite issues I'll let the buyer know and let them choose a discount or a cancel or whatever.

Ha, I’m the opposite and list most things as “VG”, but priced more like a VG+. I might sell less but I have an easy life.

One time I'd sent a nice looking mono "Rubber Soul" off, but the buyer sent it back for a refund, fair enough it happens but rarely.

I'd done due diligence, but. Anyway I looked again and thought it still looked good, in fact better than I remembered. I asked the buyer, he said yeah it looked better than it sounded so he had it professionally cleaned!

Anyway, all this was v.civil so we 'shook hands and parted

I guess the LP had been carefully handled but played a lot, maybe.

I'm only selling CDs right now but I undergrade them slightly so nothing gets listed higher than VG+ and they've been flying out tbh. I'm posting out 20+ in a minute.

Ha, I’m the opposite and list most things as “VG”, but priced more like a VG+. I might sell less but I have an easy life.

Yeah, if I ever encounter a seller who consciously undergrades records and I like what I bought, I'll keep going back again and again.

Totally. Also second not buying from people with more than a couple bits of negative feedback. Like, 99% positive is effectively my minimum, maybe 98.5% depending. If they're too new a seller for that to be meaningful then I flip through their listings as a whole, and if everything is "NM" then obviously they are overgrading hustlers and I add em to my blocked sellers list.

Another red flag is when every single negative review has an all-caps response from the seller reading something like "BAD ATTITUDE, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT A 30 YEAR OLD RECORD TO LOOK LIKE??? S C A M BUYER BEWARE!!!"

_Ha, I’m the opposite and list most things as “VG”, but priced more like a VG+. I might sell less but I have an easy life._

Yeah, if I ever encounter a seller who consciously undergrades records and I like what I bought, I'll keep going back again and again.

One thing I’ve learned is that the price of the record usually says more about the condition than what it’s graded at. A number of times I’ve scored great deals on here only to find the record itself was, at best, a full grade below what it was listed at

I also bought a 2LP set from a big seller and the jacket only contained one record. I messaged him about it and he said “oh, weird, let me look into that”. Still haven’t heard anything back. Strange cuz the dude still has like a 100% rating. I don’t wanna ruin it!!

Otoh some private sellers are pretty nice about this sort of thing - I got a $5 refund once because a record had two clicks at the beginning (the rest was perfect). Another gave me $5 because a corner was slightly dented - I probably wouldn’t have even noticed.

Bought something on Saturday, asked the seller on Sunday to cancel and he said he would. Monday he printed a shipping label, I asked why and he said oops! and canceled it. Now it's Tuesday and the USPS just picked up the package and it's, presumably, on its way to me.

I've never sold anything on Discogs, so I don't know, but is it *hard* to cancel an order after it's already been paid for? Because this guy made it sound like it was SUCH A BURDEN.

>>> he said oops! and canceled it.

The shipping label, I mean.

maybe he is just a whiner

lol okay I just heard back from him after I told him it had shipped. He immediately gave me a full refund. I told him I'd send it back when it gets here, but I'll be a little salty if he doesn't offer to pay for return shipping.

I had someone just cancel an order too with no explanation and I assumed it was out of flakiness.

According to this guy he got buried in orders of RSD titles, which is a reasonable explanation I suppose, but once I told him he had accidentally shipped it out anyway he refunded me within a couple minutes. Poor dude. If he'd just taken a moment on Sunday to do it, none of this would have even happened.

I suppose this is that "cancel culture" I've been hearing about

Why did you cancel your order though?

Because I found out later that day my insurance didn't cover an ER visit back in February, so I need all the money I can hang on to right now.

I'm out £40 this week because an order didn't make it to Italy :(

Wondering if I should either make everyone get tracked shipping (and potentially lose orders because it will be a lot more expensive) or limit the size of international orders so people can't make big orders so if the mail does lose stuff it's less likely to hurt as much

In the UK i have separate bands. e.g. under £20 order it can go standard post as that is covered by Royal Mail by standard, under £50 it’s the tracked option etc.

just don't ship to Italy xxp

To be honest, it's happened hardly ever that anything has got lost. And I don't think I've had a "dishonest' one (but how would I know? Because it's happened almost never)

.. anyway..

I don't use Tracked, unless the buyer requests BEFORE I'VE POSTED IT! and I tend to use insured if it's high value only.

If something goes awry for an outlay of £10, they can have their money back rather than have to reclaim it off the post office.

Don’t forget you can get up to £20 + cost of postage for missing items on standard post

I had 2 people message asking for tracking numbers the same week, one was this Italian guy. I haven't heard anything from the one in China since so hopefully that means that one arrived - they were both big orders. I did wonder if once he found out there was no tracking that meant he could just claim he never got it but obv have no way to prove that.

I will see if I can get anything out of the post office because £20 + postage would actually cover most of it, think the postage was about £12 and the order about £30. I did keep the postage receipt thankfully.

It’s relatively easy to claim online. You might have to wait a few weeks before you can put it in, and after that a few more weeks to get the cheque, but they’ve always paid up eventually for me.

https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/325/~/claims-centre

I would think it would be pretty easy to scam on discogs and just keep making new accounts when you get caught.

trying to navigate around teh site. Does everybody else have the problem with search engine results not linking you to the site page just stopping when clicked on. Seems o be a near constant that seems really frustrating. Just seems to dump you back on the page you're coming from

The Discogs search function = clearly designed by the ghost of Borges.

Discogs is weird. It'll be tumbleweed for a month or two and then I'll suddenly get a flurry of orders all at once. No rhyme or reason.

I've managed to go a month without any orders, and counting.

Apart from one month last year, that's not happened since I started about 10 years ago!

Ha, yeah I get the same. I guess that’s just the nature of random chance, but when it happens it does give me pause for thought.

what is it with these people? can you use Mondial Relay please? apparently this is some French courier. for a £4.50 order. I wish there was a way to cancel orders without possibly leaving you open to negative feedback

I’m getting no Discogs orders at all either, and sales have slowed considerably on the bricks & mortar side. I think the combination of pandemic isolation ending, financial nervousness around inflation & high energy bills, and the general understanding that records are fuckin expensive these days is to blame.

Yeah, my sales have crashed too, and rather sharply at that. I thought this was simply due to stock depletion, but maybe not.

Well, I added a bunch of nice CD things, and made about ten sales this week, so yeah.

I had 2 people message asking for tracking numbers the same week, one was this Italian guy. I haven't heard anything from the one in China since so hopefully that means that one arrived - they were both big orders.

and now I have a message from the one in China saying they didn't get it either. 2 big orders posted the same day lost :(

I do get a lot of overseas orders but I think I'm going to have to investigate how much tracked shipping costs and crank up the shipping costs which may hurt sales but fed up with this - out £65 on those 2 orders not including the postage. I have claimed for the Italy one but haven't heard anything from Royal Mail yet.

also is it normal to get a Seller Suspension Warning because I haven't replied to someone's message within 5 hours?? wtf

I've just restarted selling some stuff on discogs (last sold in 2010) and it seems now you sell an item and discogs charges a fee (fine), VAT/local taxes are charged to the purchaser (fine), but paypal also charges a fee (not fine). is there a way to get round having to pay the last of these items?

It used to be you could refuse credit card payments through PayPal, and thus incur no fees, but I think now all commercial transactions have fees regardless.

^

sorry to continually moan on this thread but just had a message from someone asking me to please confirm receipt of payment on an order which is set to Payment Received and has been since they paid

Paypal fees may actually be lower if the buyer uses a card without logging in to their Paypal account. In the UK it's 1.2% instead of the usual 2.9%. x-post.

My gripe - new buyer in Europe started asking where the package was four days after posting, now just over a month later they're still reporting non-delivery, so I'll be refunding it. Should get compensation from Royal Mail* but items going missing is so rare that it seems quite a coincidence for it to happen with a new user with no feedback who was jumpy from the off.

* but not sure if I calculated the 5 +20 working days right, can't find out if they count Saturdays for International Standard.

yeah I probably shouldn't be so distrusting but always suspicious when packages go missing. but since it happened to me with 2 parcels sent to different countries on the same day I think it's possible that they were actually lost by the post rather than 2 different buyers deciding to rip me off at the same time. I have put claims in for both of them but heard nothing from Royal Mail yet (says can take 60 days for international mail)

Yes, I have had that before where multiple parcels sent at the same time have all gone missing.

I thought it was common knowledge that packages tend to get lost at a greater rate if they are going to/from Italy or China.

Or Chicago.