discogs marketplace?

sometimes the bar eats you

Been having a difficult time with Discographies not loading in the browser or app the past few days. Eventually, they load if I keep refreshing, but sometimes I'll just have to try again later.

god, i had a horrible experience with a truly unhinged seller this week. it was my bad for not glancing at the feedback -- my brain saw 97% and must have rounded up. but i paid immediately and then waited six days with no communication at all. when i asked what was up, he started getting defensive and accused me of "talking down" to him. so i just reiterated, "can you tell me when you're going to ship?" to which he replied, "i asked if you want me to cancel the order, and you're not answering my question!" lol, what a clown. i got my money back and plan to leave negative feedback.

i'll admit that him charging 8 fucking dollars to ship a 7" made me slightly less patient than i normally would be. but even so, if a buyer paid me and i couldn't manage to ship the record in six days, i would surely say something

I have a few jazz albums that have been on my wantlist forever and I keep seeing the same two items show up under different sellers with like 1-15 seller ratings…seems like instead of showing up under new seller accounts there’s a new scam going where they’re showing up under little-used accounts. Maybe this has always been going on but it seems newer to me.

man maybe i should move to north carolina if i can get $10 for marty balin records. 90% of that new arrivals was in my dollar bin 15 years ago. some of it still is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ucjun8yAQ

i mean there are worse places to live. its nice down there. i do sometimes feel like a dinosaur for not making level 42 records $12 or whatever but i just can't do it. i sell things for more on discogs though for sure. or at least i sell things there that i never thought would be worth selling online. but that's just time and inflation. i even have a hard time pricing madonna singles from the 80s for over 10 bucks. feels wrong! there are so many of them. but that's the marketplace for you. and they have gone up naturally in price. they aren't crazy prices.

i'm definitely selling more discogs stuff now in the store. i have also almost fully integrated all my online stock with my regular store stock. i used to separate things for some reason. i didn't want to scare people around here who tend to be thrifty. but people are really buying. i'll take down 10 or 15 records from discogs that i sold in the physical store on a busy day and 5 years ago that might have been 2 a day.

january was great. sold so many records. i just keep filling it up. must be that bidenomics.

I have no problem with people charging what they think they can get (I guess, sometimes I wish people didn't feel the need to squeeze every dime out of a record). My problem is more with these flip videos stores make of, like you said, dollar bin stuff being hyped as JUST IN! It's just so depressing, especially when it's both common stuff and you can tell it's not even in strong shape.

still waiting for the craze to die down here, used shopping is a joke

Rather than going by percentages, there should be some kind of "three strikes" rule for bad sellers on discogs who do high volume. I recently bought from a seller with 316 negative comments and 443 neutral comments. I didn't notice this because of course the feedback percentage is 98.1% positive.

I'm not a punitive person, but it seems obvious to me that anyone with literally hundreds of negative comments about everything from unreasonably slow shipping and missing / lost items to poor communication and overgrading should not be permitted to sell on this platform.

Was just talking about the prices people charge on the thread I started during the pandemic to use discogs more socially here:

I've been a little disappointed in my old boss from the shop I used to work at - he prices stuff 5-10 above discogs median with the thought that he can reduce aged inventory if need be and get away with better margins in the meantime, but it's deflating for consumers like me that are hip to actual going rates. Like, yes median discogs + shipping = comparable cost in the end but should go without saying you reward your in-store shoppers the ability to save hypothetical shipping fees to thereby facilitate more frequent visits. He's always been a bit too meticulous about margins at the detriment to a bigger picture strategy.

I will say that overall I've seen a little downtick in resale sold prices amongst stuff in my collection compared to my posts upthread from a couple years ago when people were pulling the trigger on really high sticker prices across the board. Hopefully things level off a little. Speaking about 2nd hand stuff specifically.

― Evan, Friday, February 2, 2024 11:32 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Used shopping isn’t really fun for me which is a major bummer because that was always one of my favorite things to do period and also the first thing I’d do in any new city I’d visit…at least here in the Twin Cities it feels like everything is priced about between the median and high discogs prices, leaning closer to the median of course, and once you take away any chance of finding a deal/score that takes away at least half of the fun off the bat. On top of that record stores now are full of people who have no idea that all of those big budget 70s rock classics weren’t always double digit items (and double digit items that don’t even really start with $1- anymore) and the last time I went shopping I had to overhear a group of surprisingly old couples (like early 40s) talking about their turntable and how they were just browsing but had come to look for Elliot Smith ‘vinyls’ (which I know is meme but this time it was real). I should just let them have their fun and be happy with the years I put in but the whole thing just makes me feel like a grumpy old record prick that I used to think were about as bad as it got in the field of music collecting.

"vinyls" is now pretty firmly established in the language, it marks young people and older people with no history of record collecting

all the good sleeves have been plucked for walls

I bought a few new things this weekend that I didnt know anything about, just based on the labels.

fucking vinyl store flip videos. I'll see a store recommended on Instagram and they invariably feature these, and I always try to freeze/enhance so I can see the prices. If you see a few record prices you might get a sense of whether or not the store is worth the drive. And in Los Angeles it's always for me a long drive. You can't trust online reviews because very few people are good at assessing vinyl value, and I've been misled into visiting pretty bad shops because of the positive reviews. Good condition and fair prices, kinda hard to come by.

there are a few good stores around here but yea I've had similar experiences. the thing is you don't even want to revisit those places because the second and third time you go you notice it's all the same stuff in the same order. but good shops do exist here and there - last time I went to Akron I went to three, the first two were disappointing because all the used stuff looked terrible (like thrift store quality) and most of the new stuff was overpriced, but the third one really did have a lot of cool stuff that was priced to move. I think I dropped nearly two bills there, but had I ordered all this off Discogs I'm sure I would've paid $30-40 more.

"Good condition and fair prices, kinda hard to come by."

275 Main Street. Greenfield, MA.

plus, all IlxOrs get the friend and family discount.

someday! I did get to go to Dan's store twice...

my brother will rob you blind! hahaha! he gets that new york money in there and they don't even look at prices. prices don't exist for them. plus, his rent is way higher than mine.

haha well once was at the old place where everything wasn't sorted and there was used furniture?? idk maybe 2010? possibly earlier? then once a bit later at the more normal store-type place on the main drag, and yeah things had even changed by then

iirc he gave me a Journey album for free, which would never happen in 2024, it would go out in new arrivals for 14.99

I'm not a punitive person, but it seems obvious to me that anyone with literally hundreds of negative comments about everything from unreasonably slow shipping and missing / lost items to poor communication and overgrading should not be permitted to sell on this platform.

And those are just the ones you're seeing. I only get feedback back on about half the orders- admittedly that would probably be mostly positive feedbacks. Saavy sellers know how to get Discogs to sometimes remove feedback from buyers as well.

The only negative feedback I ever got was for a record that didn’t arrive after 89 days. At about day 110 the dude messaged me and was like “guess what showed up today?” So I screenshotted it & got Discogs to remove it.

I do have one neutral review where the guy bought a sealed CD and it wasn’t the exact one he wanted. I had discussed that risk with him before he bought it, like dude…. Shrug emoji

So are you just fucked if someone sends you a shitty copy of a record listed as VG+? I bought a copy of Thin Lizzy’s nightlife and it’s warped and scratchy as fuck. Dude is not being responsive. I reported to PayPal. Anything else I should be doing?

give them positive feedback and leave a feedback message for all the world to see. or give them negative feedback. they hate that.

wait, is this on discogs? if not then i don't know.

yes discogs. in fact i scrolled through their reviews and saw someone complain about the same thing, so i reached out to them and now we're complaining together. i immediately told the guy i wanted to send it back and would foot the shipping bill. his response was "sorry go ahead and ship it back!" i then asked a follow up question and got the identical "sorry go a head and ship it back!" response like it was from a bot.

yah that's what you're gonna have to do.

they should pay for shipping though. but maybe that would be pointless to ask them.

if someone has a problem we usually just give a free refund immediately if the CD/LP is $10 or under. write it off as shrinkage. if it's $$$, sadly, we have to ask people to send the thing back. but we always pay for the return shipping.

not "free" refund. full refund.

Yeah when I asked if I would need to foot the shipping bill I got the duplicate apology reply. It’s confusing

i know he's ilx alumni and all but this list seems bad and dumb:

https://www.discogs.com/digs/music/essential-house-albums/

like snap! instead of like, i dunno, larry heard?

No Todd Terry!

or metro area or moodymann or theo parrish or dj sprinkles or

if you LEAD with the 12xLP house box then after that you can pick anything you want, no?

and yes of course i own that 12XLP house box. no home should be without it.

you should have it next to the fire extinguisher and the candles and the cases of bottled water.

Well, the subhed — "Discover house music with these essential albums" — puts you on the wrong foot right from the beginning. I mean, this is not an album genre, right? It should be an entire list of multi-artist compilations, seems to me.

all of their “content” is awful advertorial crap

yes

Asked a seller this question:
I'm located in Canada. Looking at buying multiple 7"s, but after I add two to my cart, the 3rd is an extra $4 shipping - wondering if there's a way around this? Most US sellers, I seem to be able to buy 8-10 before the shipping cost jumps.

Thanks for looking into it!

And received this response:

I’m on the verge of turning off all international shipping, and messages like this push me closer to doing so. The price shown is my shipping and handling price.

Like, a simple factual answer would have been sufficient, no need to be a dick about it. As a seller myself, I don’t have the shipping 100% dialed in and I’m glad to quote someone if I can give them a bit of a break & they don’t just sound like an entitled lowballer. I just mailed a record to chile that I might barely have broken even on, because it was obvious the buyer was just a fan, not rolling in dough, and in a place where a lot of records are obviously hard to come by.

Too bad Discogs Enhancer only works on desktop… would love a decent mobile app for this site; “block seller” is a godsend but I only use desktop for Discogs about 1/3 of the time or less.

Thanks for letting me rant. Back to positive vibes only mode.

TBH, the cantankerousness of some sellers is part of the charm of record collecting. When I see a bunch of yelp reviews for a shop that say things like "the owner didn't even say hi when i walked through the door", that makes me want to check it out.

(that said, your request is completely reasonable - it seems pretty unlikely that the extra 40 grams for a third 7" pushes that shipment into a higher postage bracket. that extra $4 is definitely "handling" not "shipping")

Your post puts me in mind of the record shop I heard about recently (on Reddit?) where the owner won’t allow browsing — you stand at the door and tell him what you want and he goes & finds it. If you complain he goes full soup Nazi. And he responds to every google review and neveruseshisspacebar. Everyone who doesn’t knowwhattheywantiswastinghistime.

Somehow I love that this store exists, even as I never ever want to visit.

***

“Handling”, sure — 90% of the PITA of shipping is taping up the package & printing the label & of course going to drop the packages. Once you’re on the path of sending a parcel to someone, adding another item to the package is like a freebie. “Gouging” is more like it, but hey, it’s his shop, he can do as he pleases. Plenty of reasonable humans to do business with in this world.

(Any ire detectable in the above post is, of course, not directed at you, enochroot)

Yeah there's a record store in Edinburgh where you can't browse and can only ask for what you want.
He's gotten a little more mellow recently but he's still a pretty irascible dude.
I do know someone who has managed to get inside the store and it's floor to ceiling plastic crates across multiple rooms.
It's not designed to be browsable at all

that’s kinda cool, do they list their full inventory online or do you just have to wing it?

a local store here does nightly “drops” on instagram where most of their hot records get sold, it’s fun tho!

wtf

xpost
I think he only lists on ebay because he gets most money that way. He has an email address so you can check on stock before you travel