Discogs has gone grey

No problem logging on just now with Chrome, opened right up into my collection.

 

This has nothing to do whatsoever with the new shipping policies ASP and therefore is off-topic.

 

It took some doing, but I managed to get policies in place for the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, UK and a few other select places.

 

If you can afford to hold out for six months or more maybe they will bow down and concede. But most folks need their income off of those sales.

I did a simple shipping setup for international. I still don't feel it is set up right. When I tried to set it for an individual format like CD and then country it rejected it. When I set it to All Items for a country it accepted it. Then I added LP below that. So I am not sure CD is correct or not and will find out later. For now, at least US shipping is set right.

 

I take my postal receipts from the PO and mark them when I got home with what each item is. If I have an item sent to Germany at $24.00. I put 1 LP next to that price. So over the last six months, I have all these prices with what the item was on a drawer full of these receipts. And I can fill in the amounts from there. I have some 3, 4, 5, and 6 LP box sets, and those will get complicated. So I'll need to weigh them as they have booklets and slightly more weight to the box itself. I am (in my head) almost up on shipping costs now. As I quit selling on ebay years ago and kind of lost track of the rising associated International shipping costs.

 

eBay used to (maybe they still do) give out advice to their sellers and say things like "take a loss on shipping as it's good for business in the long run." Or we're raising our fees, but it should not have any effect, just "raise your prices to include this new seller expense."

It seemed like every 3 months there was a new policy that resulted in less profits and less control of my sale until I just bolted. Really abusive. Then things like buyer info disappearing other than name and shipping address. Even the buyer email address disappeared from PayPal transaction page. I'm not sure if it returned once PayPal was sold off. But I felt the walls were closing in on me at eBay. Discogs has a long way to go to get that bad. But I sure hope it is not heading that direction.

Maybe someone should start harvesting and planting the database over to another site, and get ready for the day Discogs crosses the final line? Some good code writers could actually scan Discogs site, and grab everything including the pictures.

 

Thanks for this, though I ended up pulling everything off Discogs. It was just too aggravating.

 

It's November 13 and I am still only selling to customers here in the USA. I had lot's of international customers before this complication screw-job was laid upon us by the doofuses at the 'Scogs but to hell with it; there's really no way to set a shipping policy that will have actual real life shipping totals not be completely out of whack against what get calculated on that site when an order for two or more items comes in.

 

But most sellers can't afford to just say goodbye and cancel out their listings. I am employed full-time other than the covid reduced hours, which is why I went over to Discogs and loaded up a bunch of stuff. For the first time in 6-7 years, I had time to actually sit down and do record grading and everything it takes.

I wanted this horrible time that we are in to be at least useful and somewhat productive. There have been short periods when I was living off of record and CD sales. It really takes the fun out of it when it's your main gig. Don't tell anyone, but I actually took boxes top work at my night job where I am alone most of the shift, and I brought in my laptop and boxes of LPs and sat there all night loading them up at Discogs on the wi-fi. That was a pretty cool use of company time.

I want to have 1000 items up at all times. So I got about 1,160 up, with 100 sold, so I can relax maybe until 60 more titles move before I must add more I really do enjoy everything about records, buying cleaning collecting, needle dropping, and then selling for a profit. And I bought so many thrift store LPs in the past 20 years, including things I have little real interest in, but they were unique and condition so nice - made me grab them. I just would not want to rely on this for a living.

I am thinking about grabbing CDs more often now. I am thinking that the ultra-clean stuff, nicer issues, less common ones are going to go up in value in another 5 to 8 years. I think I am going to put up CD shelves behind the clothes on the closet, and just start grabbing all the good .50 and $1.00 stuff of good classic titles when condition looks nearly new. A very small investment on hot collectible artists and classic titles.

In other words, I need Discogs right now.

 

I recently started to receive inquiries from Discogs users who reside outside the US, asking I can sell/send them items to their country (The UK and France, just today.) I explain to them that I still do sell to countries outside of the US, but that they will have to go over to "that other site" to do so. Thus, this has shifted (some, so far) international business that I would have otherwise in the recent past completed on Discogs over to eBay.

 

France: better register at $16 per. UK gets free tracking from Customs. I just don't do overseas. At $16 to save my hynie from reversals I'd be broke doing eBay.

 

"This" That is why I think leaving a comment about international shipping in your seller terms that state to "contact me" about the cost and arrangements. You can set your price, terms, etc. before that hit the buy button, even if there is no buy button but a PayPal invoice you send them to pay for the item(s). I don't go out of my way to drive sales to "St. Elsewhere", but I do have a store over at a site called Ecrater where a buyer can complete "LP records" a transaction with my total control and both of us in 100% agreement before we move forward.

 

Canadian sellers only world. Or buying from just the big volume sellers such as dodax and decluttr/musicmagpie.

 

I am not noticing a difference on Discogs in the way Discogs gets their cut (fees). I thought with the new system, Discogs would get their cut of every sale as it happened so that there would not be an invoice paid to them every month, that they would already have their cut of the action. But I am still getting the monthly invoice and paying them the fees all in one lump chunk.

I thought that this way of operation was going away?

 

I think they delayed implementation of that idea. I noticed someone mentioning it in the marketplace forums awhile back. I think there were some issue with the PayPal integration and user data/privacy. IIRC, Discogs posted about it in the blog.

 

I finally made the effort to get back into the international sales game (on Discogs) so I figured out some "automatic shipping policies" for other parts of the world. Still working out some "bugs" with these policies but I had too many international sales going on to give them up completely in lieu of Discgos boneheaded interference.

 

I only now, due to cv-19 and having a beautifully reduced workweek load, I started selling at Discogs. I've had to work 12 hours shifts in recent years to stay ahead of debt and poverty. Or it felt like it anyway. So it's refreshing to be able to list things as easy as it is with Ds. It's fun again. But international shipping is a hassle no matter what. I still need to tweak mine, as CDs to UK is buried under the LP cost to the UK and someone told me it looks more expensive (CD to UK) than it actually is under my shipping settings. So I think I'm to reverse the order of them on the UK shipping list. I ship by item and not weight. Apparently, it looks like a pulldown selection to get to CD, it does not just simply show up, from what heard. Everybody hates the shipping module at Discogs. I've not read of one person saying, it's cool ever.

 

Is there enough US/Canadian activity to not bother selling to the UK and Europe? Is selling to South Korea and Japan enough to make up the difference?

 

Canada, Europe and Australia are the locations from which I receive most of my non-domestic orders from. Japan and South Korea are non-players, relatively speaking, compared to those other countries in terms or orders received.

You really want to be able to include as many countries (that have functioning, reliable and relatively "non-corrupt" postal systems) as you can to maximize your potential customer base.

 

The Discogs "automatic shipping policies" are a total hassle. It used to be so much easier when you could just tailor each order's shipping cost based upon the actual total weight of the package that you have assembled.

That said, my method now has been to just set shipping policy rates that grossly overcharge for any order of two or more items and then just refund the difference back to the customer. This, so far, has worked well for me and has helped to begin the process of bringing back my international sales, which were significant before everything went sideways with confusion last year as to how to implement these new, irritating policies that Discogs imposed upon us all.

 

Back in the day, it use to be for psych rarities that those not sold within the US most went outside to South Korea and Japan. I am sure like everything, shifts have happened, markets, regions get saturated, and one must go where the interest is.

 

For many types of music yes. But I have a lot of modern classical (sometimes called 20th century) that has a market which is 90% in Europe, and a bit in Japan. I can really make a lot of my sales of this 20th stuff. So I can't close off international right now.