Discogs... things are about to change

I don't think there is a physical need to leave, just don't bother updating your shipping policy, your goods would be 'greyed out' and unavailable for sale, no more fees for 'discogs' .

 

I have been selling on Discogs for years now. 4,222 items sold there, 2,892 items presently in my stock, a seller rating of 2,208 (sure would be great if more people would bother to leave feedback.)

At this point, I can't see any chance that I am going to continue on with international sales (the only sales, if I attempt to stay on Discogs as a seller at all, will be within the USA.) There is no way I am going to go through the preposterous headache of trying to figure out and set rates for each individual country. There are just too many variables that effect the weight and shipping price for each individual order and I have no desire to under or overcharge buyers with static rates and "increments."

Buyer places order, I assemble items and weigh it all on my scale with the right packing materials for that individual order, quickly calculate price, send the updated invoice to the buyer, buyer pays invoice, I package and address package and then send it off in the post. Pretty damned simple. Now it will all be completely complicated and Byzantine in structure and who the hell has time for that?

My stock will be "greyed out" for who knows how long (at least until I can figure out how to navigate Discogs' stupid system to be able to sell again in the USA.) At that point, overcharging postage on orders that have multiple items added, to some degree, will become the new (unfortunate) norm.

Part of me is hoping that this whole new program on Discogs' part will turn out to be a total fiasco for them and a complete turnaround back to the way things have always worked will come about, but I am not counting on that at all. Guess I'll see how things go for a while as I lose all of my Discogs sales and rely solely on Ebay from here on out.

What a ******* drag.

 

Almost the exact same situation here (though my inventory, sales history, and fb are far less than yours). It's a pretty rotten thing to happen during a pandemic when all of my touring and most of my writing work has already pretty much dried up. Discogs was one of my last remaining lifelines (along with Bandcamp), so this is a pretty big blow, and I know I am not alone in feeling this way. I did try to figure out the new system but it was like reading tax code. Spent an hour trying to set the new shipping prices before giving up in frustration.

My "hack": I put my intl shipping rates at $1000 to deter anyone overseas from buying anything until Discogs figures out a way to make Automatic Shipping less of a baffling ordeal. Like you, I'm not holding my breath. But at least I can still sell domestically and (hopefully) won't get greyed out on 10/1. Whatta nightmare!

 

So you can’t choose to only ship to USA and leave international shipping incomplete? This is what I tried to do - guess I’ll see on 10/1 if it worked.

 

You can click on the "incomplete" Entire World policy and then delete it. Voila. You don't ship internationally.

I managed to get "complete" policies set up for US, Canada and the parts of Europe I'd consider shipping to without too much trouble. We'll see if they actually work for the real world cases (where a person somewhere wants to buy 1 or 2 LPs or singles). For the stupid "All Formats" part where we are required to price shipping in advance for someone who wants to buy our entire inventory including formats I would never list in the first place (like cassettes), I just called that shipping method "Please contact me to discuss" and set the shipping costs ridiculously high. No normal order should trigger that rate ever being shown, since the regular rates should override them. But just to be sure, I put in my terms that if they see a stupid high shipping price it's Discogs's fault, and if they message me we'll work it out.

 

Well, I guess that I now have "automatic shipping policies" set up for the USA. I have, at this point (come Oct. 1) scotched all possibility of selling items to other countries, as the factors for setting up an "automatic" shipping policy for anywhere else risks all sorts of inaccuracies and possible over/under charging for each order. It was superb when I could take the short amount of time to craft and weight each individual order for overseas customers and invoice them but that method has now been rendered dead and buried by the Discogs brass.

Maybe I'll figure out some sort of international shipping price methodology over time but for the time being it will just be a domestic affair.

 

Maybe it’s time for MusicStack?

 

Do you have experience selling through them? If so, tell me more.

 

I don’t, only as a buyer, but owner Dave Stack seems to be approachable, accountable and honest, so I moved my meagre inventory over as the platform already exists.

 

Discogs got people to build their database for free with the intention of starting a Marketplace which they now have and are now screwing those same people over in the process.



yay......

 

You can probably do it if you simplify things by offering one or two shipping options. E.g. below/equal to $X then $Y postage, over $X then $Z, where Z, for example, includes tracking and insurance due to the higher dollar value. You still might miss out on some sales but it won't eliminate all of them.

Or you can just have one rate that includes tracking and insurance so you have coverage if something goes wrong. Again, might miss out on lower value sales but it will at least get you sales for some of your pricier items. You can also exclude certain countries still.

Just an option.

Perhaps this is just coincidence but last week I was looking at some items on my want list that generally have the same sellers with no movement, but I noticed on a few items, there were more "not available to Canada" greyed out sellers, that were not there before. It really did feel like some of them just simplified things and moved to a shipping within own country policy. At the time I hoped it was a trend starting.

 

I don't believe it's only coincidence Eddie. I've purchased from a couple of grayed out to Canada listings and I've asked the sellers why. Their responses were both the same. They told me they had either received negative feedback or complaints from impatient buyers due to long arrival times. This COVID business has severely screwed up international mail courier coordination between mail systems. It's not so prevalent within Canada, but with the USA and the rest of the world it's a nightmare. A couple of examples are I sent 3 CD's to a USA Forum member uninsured due to low value and they arrived in the mid USA within 8 days. Another Discogs sale to Russia is going on 2 months and counting. Thankfully the Russian buyer is very understanding about what is happening and realizes he has 180 days through Paypal before he has to be concerned.

I'm not certain exactly what I'll do but I'm leaning towards nothing and letting my Discogs sales die. A lot of USA buyers are scared in these times to buy from us and I sure don't want to have to charge for our very expensive tracked shipping on everything just to cover my butt from potential scammers. I've already tried Music Stack a couple of years ago which lead to zero sales so I closed my account after 2 years. I guess I'll just be selling here on the Forums where some trust between buyer and seller still seems to exist.

 

@Dave I should've made it a bit more clear in my post, I meant coincidence with respect to the new ASP that Discogs implemented and not postage/postal issues in general.

I pulled the few listings I had on eBay when all this kicked off and I'm still not comfortable about selling again, especially with lower value items that I would ship without tracking and insurance. I was considering testing the waters with Canada only sales as well.

 

I understood. I was just being overly descriptive and what I believe other sellers are doing overall in regards to the upcoming ASP by Discogs along with troubles since January. It could be an early move by some sellers. Of course the long wait shipping has been even more pronounced for awhile longer and I guess some sellers simply no longer want to take any risks.

I do that here on the Forums and Discogs unless the buyer says they want tracking and insurance and I do always offer it. I know most of the buyers to be 100% trustworthy even with pricier items as far as Russia and China. No claims in selling here for 14 years so far or on Discogs for 8 years. I tend to think a majority of people are honest, but.... I guess there could always be a first time. Time will tell.

 

Dave, just to clarify: you were able to order from a seller whose listings indicated they don't ship to Canada?

The reason I'm asking is because just yesterday, upon listing a CD, I was contacted by someone outside of the US (which is unfortunately the only place I'll ship to now) asking if I'd ship to his country. I thought that if you've indicated in your settings that you don't ship to a certain area that one cannot place an order from that area.

But if I'm understanding correctly, I'm wrong about that. If so, I find that troubling.

Now, I don't mind anyone asking me if I'll ship to their location. But if that person is able to disregard my response and go ahead with an order anyway, that's a problem. I genuinely wish I could still ship internationally (I used to), but things have changed too much and there are now too many potential problems. Paypal scams being just one of them.


Of course, if your seller normally doesn't ship to Canada but you were able to work out an exception with them...



Never Mind!

 

Exactamundo! I contacted the seller and asked if he'd ship to me because I had purchased from him in the past with positive results and I'm a patient type so even if it takes 4 months to arrive it's no biggie to me.

 

What a relief.

It didn't make sense really, but I figured with the inevitable bugs that come along with system changes, maybe one could indeed order from a greyed out listing!

 

I see this benefiting no one other than those mega sellers like Popmarket that delist and relist their inventory every night. It sucks as a buyer too as I have already seen at least one CD I was interested in and the seller had the shipping set to 150 Euros because they obviously didn't want to deal with this nonsense either. So Discogs also goes the way of Amazon of catering to the big guys. About the only good thing for me personally is my rare CD want list is now down to a dozen or so, so I've chipped away at acquiring most of them before this took place.

 

The introduction of mandatory ASP has been postponed by Discogs staff:

Shipping Policies Timeline Extended To November 1 | Discogs

Also sellers won't have to move to the new PayPal platform in 2020.

 

ah geeze. i guess they listened... sort of?

 

You said it, man. It should be simple. If you have a positive experience, leave good feedback. It's really easy. Irks me to no end when people don't.

I've just decided to ship within the U.S.A. It's too much of hassle internationally to set up an individual plan. I'd like to give people to option to pay for insurance or not too, but since I can't get the shipping policy editor to do that, I'm just charging more for insured shipping no matter what. So dumb.

 

Seems to me if you are selling something to be sent by post, and you intend to recoup shipping costs by adding those to the price of the item (which seems the right thing to do), then you should know what those shipping costs will be so you can tell the buyer.

I so hate it when I want to buy something online and it's not until I finish the checkout procedure and get asked to confirm payment that I found out what the amount really is, meaning that if I choose to cancel I have wasted all that time. Bring it on, I say. And while we're at it, make it mandatory for all online retailers, not just people selling music.

 

yeah, sure. in theory i don't think anyone really disagrees with that. the problem is more that discogs' ASP is poorly designed and implemented. as so many of have said repeatedly here and across discogs itself.

 

PayPal has been a convenience boon to me, but there have been times they've made me furious over an insane, exploitative policy on international transactions. So I still have a US based credit card and used it to buy something from the US. Sales price in US dollars, payment in US dollars. No exchange or conversion. But still, simply because I live outside the US PayPal still charged me whatever their "foreign conversion transaction" fee was...3% or something. So angry.

But for me, anyway, the plusses still outweigh the minuses for me with regard to PayPal. People don't take checks, and international money orders, while reliable, are just a tremendous, time-consuming and expensive hassle, at least when inexpensive items are concerned. Nothing is simple. Paying direct with a credit card is sometimes what I still do, but in this day and age of hacking, it makes me nervous.