What is it with Discogs sellers? Post your horror stories here...

99% of my Discogs transactions have been good but one guy I bought from kept telling me to buy insurance. It was odd that he was so insistent. Then when I got the record, it was literally broken in half with the cover folded in half and taped shut that way with duct tape and forced into a battered manila envelope. When I contacted the seller, he said 'I TOLD you to get insurance!' and I never heard from him again. Fortunately, it was a cheap record, but to this day, I am floored by the audacity of it.

 

Hi, i used to work in a record shop and we used to by in loads of vinyl. Most would be only VG/VG+ and so was priced accordingly. Every so often we would stumble across a collection of 70s/80s albums that were truly NM. We bought a collection from one guy of 200+ records that were only played once and recorded to cassettes. All the albums covers were in nice protective sleeves. Labels had no spindle marks. Most had new (at the time) poly-lined inners so there are NM records out there...

 

Just checking you didn't buy that off me...?! - I sold a UK Musitech copy on the 21st April. Same Discogs username as here. I was certain of this copy and I haven't heard anything back from the buyer, but...?

 

Thankfully most of mine have been good as well. But my first one was odd. Looking for the UK version of the Jimi Plays Berkley VHS that included a three song CD with it, found one at a decent price. Sent the guy a note about purchasing it...and never heard back. Tried to ping him twice, no response. Cancelled it, went to the next guy for a couple bucks more, got it within a week.

 

As a seller I always send photos and an mp3 sample of the disk to see if they still want the item. I’ve had nothing but happy customers:

 

My experiences have been mostly good even if I received a wrong item or the grading has been way off. Refunding has worked fine etc.

About a year ago I ordered "Axis: Bold As Love" CD, the old Polydor 813 version with the alternative mix. 8 dollars.
The arrival took quite a while but the seller wrote that the whole Covid-19 situation is to blame.
The package eventually arrived and it contained a 847 Polydor edition. I wrote back and got this answer:

"PDO west-germany not possible for $8. Im very sorry You ordered cheap CD."

And:

"But $8 for this one is nice price. WG PDO is expensive early collectible CD."

It still rankles I didn't give the guy any feedback once I got the refunding settled (he first offered a ridiculously low refund and was very offended when I wrote that he must be joking) but as I read the negative feedback from the others he always called them "evil buyer".
He then thanked me for understanding and wanted to sell me some other great cd's. I declined as politely as I could in that situation (i.e. not very).

 

I've never had a truly bad experience with a Discogs seller. I've had a couple of cases where there were issues, but the sellers went over and above the call of duty to make me happy.

In one case, I bought an NM copy of the Japanese quadraphonic version of Jefferson Airplane's Bark, paying the premium price of $300 for it. (For reference, a copy in VG+ condition sold for $83 on eBay around the same time.) When it arrived, it was indeed NM – aside from a small but vicious scratch that clicked loudly during "Third Week In The Chelsea", which is of course the quiet acoustic track, making it all the more obvious. I contacted the seller, mentioned the problem and the VG+ copy that sold for $83 and asked whether he would prefer me to return it or discuss a partial refund. (I would never solely ask for a partial refund: it can be a dirty trick that bad buyers use to renegotiate the price of a purchase.) Immediately, the seller offered me a partial refund of $200. I told him that was too generous for a relatively mild fault, and we settled on $150, with which we were both happy.

In the second case, the seller was clearly clueless, but also very nice. He had a mono copy of the Split Level's Divided We Stand listed. I emailed him asking him to confirm that it was definitely the mono issue and he replied, "How do I do that?" I advised him to check the label to see whether it said "monaural" or "stereo" but he said he didn't know how to do that and would just send me the LP and refund if it turned out to be stereo – which, needless to say, it was. I asked for a full refund from the seller, including shipping, and to keep the LP as it was worth less than the cost of the return postage. He asked whether we could discuss a partial refund – I would have agreed had it been in better condition than the stereo copy I already had, but it was noticeably worse, so I had to decline. The seller refunded with good grace. However, I'm still left baffled as to why he simply couldn't check the labels before posting it.

 

I've bought 50+ records on Discogs in the past 2-3 years. I've had exactly 1 purchase with an issue (overgraded) and the seller promptly refunded the purchase price and told me to keep the record. I'm not sure if I've been lucky or people in this thread have unrealistic incredibly high expectations...or maybe both lol.

 

I guess the closest thing I have to a discogs horror story is the fact that I almost always hear about the bad transactions and have thus avoided buying anything from discogs.

 

LOL.

 

Discogs experiences-postive and negative*

My latest facepalm-worthy seller was a guy who said he never bothers to play-grade VG+ or better because if one buyer returns it, another buyer will be happy with it.

 

Oh yeah. Just like the guy I bought a copy of the Stones 'Time Waits For No One" LP. arrived with what looked like a big dime sized dimple, like someone tried to drive a center punch through the record and didn't quite make it.
Seller flat out denied my refund and claimed that I was switching my 'bad' copy of the album for His 'Mint' copy.
I just bagged it. Wasn't worth getting a negative. Karma will get him, but it still was a bummer.
Beave

 

I haven't used Discogs to buy all that much, but almost all of my transactions have been great. One of my first purchases was kind of odd though. Shortly before lockdown, I decided to rebuy the US Beatle albums since I foolishly sold mine long ago. I found most of them fairly quickly and for not too much money (I went in not really caring which pressing I got, but most turned out to be rainbow monos). Since my first round of orders went well, I decided to get the few Canadian albums I always used to see in the import bins back in the day. I found a copy of the Long Tall Sally album and ordered it from a Canadian seller. When I got my order, the LP itself was in good shape, but the cover was something else. A very bad photocopy of the front and back covers were glued to a cover of an old jazz album. When I asked the seller about this, he was shocked and didn't believe me. So I sent him pictures and eventually he asked me to send it back for a refund. Well, by this time, we were under lockdown and it wasn't easy to get to the post office. Plus there was international shipping. I explained this and he offered me a $7 refund. I said it wasn't really worth it and to give it to COVID relief instead. I just wrote the whole thing off. The cover was actually rated VG+ in his listing so did he really think a legitimate cover looked like this? Strange.

 

So nothing to do with Discogs at all and thus totally irrelevant to this thread.

 

Thats unreal! This is why I always pay via PayPal.

My experiences have been mostly very good, any issues are usually sorted out with a full/partial refund.

 

I recently bought some David Grisman LPs via Discogs. The one I wanted the most was quiet in terms of the vinyl but had a very pronounced warp. My general conclusion was vinyl remains a pain in the butt. It was only a $10 record and not worth bothering with. I held off on leaving a review / rating.

 

Amusing to me that people oftentimes will criticize the platform instead of the individual sellers who are the real culprit.

And there's something strange about platforms where I *never* see a thread bitching about MusicStack or eBay but always Discogs when my experiences with all of these show no disproportionate number of sellers overgrading on one platform VS another.

 

The ones wearing a Pikachu outfit are especially annoying. That fad is *so* 2005, man!

 

An argument in every single one of these threads that I can't disagree with more.

What would a pic do? Most pics on eBay are taken by amateurs who can't take detailed focused pics to save their lives. Even then, lighting is crucial and 99% of pics are wholly useless.

 

Every time I bring this up I get told off for “generalizing” discogs sellers. Well, IN GENERAL I get over-graded records from Discogs

 

I’ve made over a hundred purchases on Discogs, all vinyl, and maybe four albums were inaccurately graded. In each of those cases, I contacted the seller and they made it right. I’ve found that if I only deal with sellers who have a 100% (or slightly lower) feedback rating, and ask for more detail or photos if the seller is new to me, that helps to limit the surprises.

 

it wasn't you

 

Another invalid argument... unfortunately. I say "unfortunately" because I wish it were that easy.

Lots of sellers with that number of feedback entries have a huge inventory, making them spread thin and rarely able to confirm the true condition of a record. It's also a seldom used technique to operate a extremely powerful light to view defects. Almost all sellers visually grade records with ambient lighting which won't reveal most scratches anyway, rendering that technique inherently flawed and pretty pointless to use anyway.

Moreover, *nothing* will ever beat a play-grade. That is why I play-grade every single record I sell. Yes, I'm a seller on Discogs... and here too. And I do so with my Dynavector XX2 MKII cart with an extremely fine tip. Of the ones who take the time to play-grade, very few use anything but crappy styli of the elliptical nature, (AGAIN!) rendering this method completely useless as it will only reveal the most egregious imperfections of the record.

It astounds me that I'd estimate less than 1% of sellers know this and/or do this.

 

Hi can you PM me your discogs link and i will have a look and see what you have got?

 

PayPal has a program where you can submit to them the invoice for the return postage up to $25 USD, I think 6x/year, and they'll refund you that cost. FYI.