Discogs experiences-postive and negative*

When buying 70s vinyl, my biggest issue with UK sellers has always been the sleeves. I don't know if it's because of a lack of trees but the sleeves are often very thin and fragile and so are the mailers they use. I keep getting records from these in these super thin envelop-like mailers that always dings up the sleeves.

 

Fully agree.
Those envelope style mailers aren't tough enough for the shipping to AU.

 

Your choice but it's a mistake to believe just because a bunch of random individuals are selling through a website that there's some sort of agenda. I've had positive and negative experiences there. The negative ones are either done through carelessness, ignorance, or plain sloppiness... or plainly in error. In more than one way, it's up to the seller to make it right. If enough people complain not by posting a negative review entry and dashing off with the seller having no opportunity to make the buyer happy but by writing to the seller that there's an issue and allowing them the ability to address your concerns, they'll change the way they operate.

One seller I recently ordered form has a 100% feedback profile with thousands of ratings but the LP I got was overgraded. She has a store and deals with thousands of LPs so they're understandably graded visually and not for 10 min either so it's possible to have one slip through the cracks occasionally. Told her about it, am in the process of sending it back, she apologized profusely and stated I'll quickly get a refund once she receives it.

No offense, but the way you do business is the absolute worst customer I could ever have. To err is human. If I mistakenly overgraded a single LP and immediately got a negative feedback entry without the least bit of a chance to fix the problem, that would be *quite* unfair!

If that's the way you operate, I'm glad you'll be staying away from there.

 

Again, a typical human failing ; creating groups when there's no homogeneous operation whatsoever between individual sellers.

 

PayPal now has a program allowing return shipping fees to be refunded to you (up to a point) so that mitigates the shipping issue.

Had a Japanese seller play games with me, trying to get far more in shipping by lying about how an album is heavy (it isn't), then changing his tune to it being a double-album (it wasn't), and then a gatefold (it wasn't). Told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of his tactics and had him cancel the sale. Found the same album at half the cost on eBay.

Again, these are all individual people who aren't operating in this or that way. I've had great dealings with UK sellers and terrible ones.

 

None taken - your wish is granted.

 

This is exactly backwards. The current system gives the seller very little incentive to change because the onus is on the buyer to give them a second chance. I've already broken it down in this thread before. Some percentage of buyers will never complain. Some percentage of buyers will accept a partial refund and be stuck with an inferior product that they probably don't want. Some percentage of buyers will have to take time out of their schedule to repackage and return ship the product (possibly including buying/finding packaging material if the original package is not reusable). There's literally no incentive not to overgrade your items because you'll never get a negative if the buyer doesn't jump through all these hoops.

Conversely, if sellers started seeing their sales drop because their feedback percentage is low, they might proactively decide to stop screwing their customers in the first place.

 

Exactly. I have zero faith that my being nice - over and over again - had changed anyone's business practices, when there's no incentive for them to do so. I fell into camps two and three always, because there is no point in complaining - you just have to accept that a percentage of what you receive will be sub-par or worse.

 

Strange perspective. If a seller can't provide what you wanted in the first place, send it back and get a refund. I've done that plenty of times with actual retailers like Amazon. You buy a product which isn't what you had hoped it would be and return it. Not the end of the world, really.

So you're not stuck with an inferior product unless you're OK with getting a partial refund which I'm not.

 

If that was really the case we'd see a lot less complaining from buyer who keep buying from sellers with bad feedback scores. Apparently, low rating do little to limit some people behaviour. Inevitably, something goes wrong and they start a thread about it somewhere while everyone with any common sense is thinking "What the heck did you expect with a seller rating like that"

My favourite recent thread on the subject of Discogs feedback was the doofus who felt it wasn't enough to just show the feedback score and details. He wanted Discogs to implement a warning system of some sort so for example when you went to buy from a seller with a 95% score you'd get a warning message saying something like "Hey, 95% is a pretty bad score. You sure you want to buy from this seller?" His theory was that 95% looks high and people will not consider it a problem. My theory is, him and people like him are lazy **** idiots who deserve exactly what they get for being so stupid despite not actually being that stupid.

Honestly, the more I read comments from buyers, the less respect I have for many of them and the more I feel sorry for sellers (except the ones that ripped me off of course).

 

Strange attitude indeed...I'm upset that I got a record not as described so instead of returning it for a full refund and getting PayPal to pay for the return shipping, I'm going to keep it and complain about having it, despite the fact I don't need to keep it.

 

Perhaps you are using "literally" in the modern sense where literally doesn't actually mean literally, but clearly there incentives not to over grade e.g. the cost of processing a return. The seller loses the PayPal fee (as PayPal no longer refunds the fee as part of a refund) plus the cost of return postage, plus their time, etc. But the more that people don't return items, the more bad sellers don't lose in profits.

If there were no financial consequences of over grading, the only thing standing between me and a lot more money as a seller would be my ethics, which can probably be bought once I realise how much money I can make by over grading everything on purpose.

 

Beat records, thin packaging from overseas. Blatant lying on shipping charges. If you sell you'll get the "what's my tracking number?" They go dead at JFK or S.F. unless you send with registered mail out of your pocket unless it is like Australia or the U.K. or countries that pick up the scan at their end.

 

Totally incorrect - see here:

252 Eligibility | Postal Explorer

 

Yeah, I guess it's a strange perspective to expect that a customer feedback system might be used to give reliable customer feedback.

No, it's not the end of the world and nobody is acting like it is, but it can be a hassle if you don't have a post office nearby or if your schedule isn't very flexible. And if someone overgrades regularly, that's exactly the sort of shoddy business practice that customer feedback tools are supposed offer some protection against.

No, I mean "literally" in the sense of "literally". The additional business they get by overgrading and having negative feedback removed -- along with the time they save because they don't have to do a thorough examination before grading -- compensates for the cost of processing a small number of returns.

 

Lots of countries go dead at JFK and SFO hubs. They don't get scanned after. Try Italy, France.

 

You're free to use that tone all you want but you're seriously dismissing context for a black-&-white answer. If you think about it, context is everything. Read Amazon reviews for a quick lesson on that. You'll have people give 5-star reviews with one line that says "Got the product" or "Can't wait to use it" or 1-star reviews because they didn't read the description, got the wrong color, etc. Now, *none* of that has anything to do with the item, but hey... if no-context reviews are worth something just for the sake of reviews existing at all, then have at it.

Personally, I like to have context to have an idea as to what is being reviewed, how, and why. Otherwise, the review is utterly meaningless. When I see a review by some Discogs buyer with anger management issues writing in all caps that delivery to another continent took too long or that the seller took longer to answer emails than the buyer would've liked, or, such as in this case, no contact whatsoever ever being initiated by the buyer yet leaving a knee-jerk negative feedback entry, it means nothing to me... except that the buyer's being unreasonable or making a tempest in a teapot.

OTOH, when I read entries about using pizza boxes to ship LPs, taking 1-2 months to ship, routinely having no stock and strung you along before canceling the sale, being rude even in his replies to the neutral feedback, etc. I can see there's a pattern and these sellers are to be avoided completely. One seller I looked into recently had stellar feedback until you read the negative entries which all happened to coincide with the last 3-4 months. Clearly, this is someone who's taken a turn for the worse and doesn't care anymore about providing good service. These types of reviews and situational elements mean something.

Needing to return the odd thing is the nature of buying online. Heck, it's a byproduct of buying at all! My wife had to return shoes which were fine at the store but weren't comfortable after 1/2h. It happens and isn't just something that affects online purchases. Another recent experience involved returning a food item as its "best before" date had long passed. Someone somewhere forgot to remove it from the shelf or it slipped through the cracks. In both cases, we didn't hurry up to Google or Yelp to leave a bad review. We returned the items for a full refund and moved on.

Now, what you're referring to would be that the product wasn't as advertised, condition-wise... but even then, there's context. For instance, I recently visited a seller who runs a record-selling business from his home with hundreds of LPs stored there. I know he play-grades everything he sells which was something that appealed to me. However, I was disappointed to hear the LPs sounding like they were overgraded when I got home. What gives? I was listening to a Pink Floyd album he was play-grading as I was making my choices. Well, it turns out even though his system sounded nice, he was using an Ortofon 2M Blue for this purpose. An elliptical stylus will hide plenty of defects which explains why what he hears and what I hear at home is so different. He was grading as he heard the LP at home but with my much more revealing cart, all those hidden imperfections came rushing out of the speakers very easily.

It could be debated that as a serious seller, he should use a cart of a much more revealing nature. I certainly think so! But was he really taking the time to listen to each LP to purposefully overgrade? Doubtful as it would otherwise make much more sense to just grade visually and save himself hours upon hours of work. I'll be returning these LPs as you can probably guess. A disappointing experience but then again plenty of people on this forum and elsewhere use elliptical carts so what they'd really hear would be a NM condition record as opposed to VG or VG+. I keep this context in mind prior to judging harshly the supposed intentions of a seller. Thankfully, my revealing cart prevents me from falling into the same trap when I play-grade.

 

My comments on the Discogs Feedback system notwithstanding, I've had some extremely successful transactions as a buyer recently.

Three out of my last four Discogs purchases have been CD's, and I've been very happy with all of them. CD's generally under-graded, if anything.

 

I've had terrific and terrible transactions on every platform. Discogs isn't an exception to that.

Pretty simple, really. Some people are flakes while others are serious. The flakes always leave a bad taste in your mouth. It's normal.

 

Just wanted to note that as a seller who received a really rude message and my first negative feedback from someone overseas, I was unable to have it removed by Discogs. They basically said that I had to work it out with the buyer and there was nothing they could do. So at least they're equal opportunity with not helping buyers or sellers with disputes .

 

What happened? What’d he write?

 

Well, they essentially asked if I was "retarded" because of the way I shipped the record. I have a shipping method that I've used for 20 years or so and have had no issues I'm aware of, so I'm not really sure what went wrong here. I'm wondering if something happened at customs, but it's also entirely possible I did something differently when I shipped it that led to it not arriving in good shape (this one went from the US to Australia so lots of opportunities for error). Whatever the case, immediate negative feedback and an angry, ranting paragraph were not the way to handle it and I would've gladly worked with them were it not for that.

 

Interesting. Anecdotally, that sounds like exactly the sort of situation where people have reported having negative feedback reported in the past. Maybe they've changed their policies or maybe your sales volume isn't high enough to warrant special treatment.

 

I would've thought so. I looked the case back up and noticed "If you need additional assistance here, please let us know by replying directly to this message." at the bottom, so I opened it back up to see if that makes any difference. It would be nice to be 100% again! Despite that, Discogs has been a great resource for me as a buyer and seller and I've had very few issues. Most of the time it's before the sale where they want pictures and sound samples and then don't end up replying after I provide it, but I prefer that to having to deal with an unhappy buyer.

 

Neutral AU observer here.
Now ..... accepting that you did not deserve to be abused there's some inputs that lead to that.

In addition to Customs we have BioSecurity who will open *anything*.

The high postage cost from US to AU *and* rubbish exchange rate means a high monetary and thus emotional involvement.

Personally after receiving badly graded upon badly graded and expensive records I'd had enough of patiently discussing it with sellers. I just wanted what I paid for in the condition it was supposed to be. Rather than abuse I left factual negative feedback, which was thereafter removed by Discogs because I hadn't contacted the seller. When rational responses are worn out we get irrational, which can be very angry.