discogs marketplace?

is this usually OK to use? looks to have a much better selection than ebay, or does anyone know of any good alternatives?

(sorry if this has been asked before, couldn't find anything when I searched?)

discogs imho is in the same league as Gemm and Musicstack--generally a slightly more esoteric selection, but the pitfalls and price-gouging remain the same. (i.e. it's a number of individual sellers and so it's dicey no matter what. I guess that's why there's a feedback system? I've never used discogs.)

i assume you're looking for vinyl? discogs is usually fine, but i wouldn't buy anything labeled below nm-, unless you've scanned the seller's profile and s/he seems like a saint

yeah just vinyl and CDs that you can no longer get elsewhere really, thanks for the warning!

i started using it a few months ago and have found it to be pretty great in general though i would agree about not buying below mint. out of about 30 purchases i've only had to deal with one person who ripped me off. i now look on discogs before ebay if looking for a record.

I was able to score a highly OOP release from overseas, and as long as you have PayPal, you're quick, and you're picky about feedback ratings, you should be fine. (same goes with Gemm and the like.)

via discogs that is. Granted, I've only bought one thing from Discogs marketplace, but it was a simple and quick transaction, especially for overseas.

+1 to discogs: they don't have Gemm's crappy UI (Gemm usually contains these impossibly long forms with checkboxes and radio selection buttons all obfuscated while you're trying to buy or sell through them.)

i buy and sell on discogs. have only had 1 bad experience with a guy who tried to charge me 10 dollars to ship a cd single from Canada.

i've shopped quite a bit on Discogs, 30+ purchases or so, and I have been satisfied in all but one. And in that instance I filed a claim through PayPal and got my money back. As long as you use PayPal you should be fine and protected, prices are high though and I don't buy anything under NM-, like everyone else here has said.

I've used it once so far without problem. There are some rare and/or hard to get things on there, but the prices seem a little over the odds a lot of the time.

lol last post on thread: http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?seller=musicberlin

Um, someone want to try and explain this to me? Also WRT his feedback rating/comments?

hahaha. so weird. just 5 seconds ago i sent my friend a link to a record that is also $1540.00. 2 days ago it was $15. something's wacky.

holy shit, so weird. it's actually the same seller. wtf

discogs allows you to bulk upload items to your marketplace account for sale via a .csv file. I guess with an inventory of 25000 items this is what that seller does and that their prices got out of whack somehow in the process.

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

should that weigh less than a non white label?

xp OK that probably explains that

titchy are you saying that's over the odds? It's not if you consider postage plus if you have to buy a mailer!

i suppose. but white labels are still cheaper than normal lps.

i do like discogs though, the offers system is good too. some of the prices people put on their records though is ridiculous (and i do wonder if they do end up getting the prices they ask for).

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Thursday, 17 September 2009 20:36 (18 minutes ago)

Postage rates have nothing to do with discogs though, they're entirely up to the individual seller, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being inflexible. You should contact the seller if you think they're charging over the odds.

I happily both send and receive offers on prices via discogs, often the listed price is just a ball park, or best hope, or even a stab in the dark if you're the only person selling an item.

Again, if you think something's over priced then just speak to the seller. No big deal. If they don't like your offer they'll ignore it or let you know. Easy as pie.

well i mean the indvidual seller obv, yeah.

I need to get rid of lots of dance vinyl - some desirable, some considerably less so - and ebay seems like a busted flush for this kind of thing: a few tumbleweed auctions surrounded by acres of Buy It Now postings from professional retailers. Has anyone here used it for selling recently? Is it better than ebay now? Does stuff shift fairly quickly or sit around for months?

I use discogs for buying and selling fairly often. For dance vinyl, I'd say it's def better than ebay. It's really quick and simple to list items, and there are no fees unless your items actually sell, whereas Ebay charges a listing fee. I have some things on discogs that have been sitting for quite a while now, but it all depends on what you have vs. how many others are selling the same item.

Best to put them on Discogs a couple bucks below whatever is the cheapest copy if you want to move it immediately. if you're in no hurry, put it at a good price, offer a discount for multiple items in the Comments field and wait.

Good advice. Thanks. Tbh I'm more interested in offloading most of it than making big £££.

ive put some stuff around the lowest price theyre listed at on discogs but still waiting to shift them. starting to think im possibly the only person buying old grime or dubstep 12s.

what does it mean when there's a color bar to the side of a release in discogs.

there's yellow, grey and orange here http://www.discogs.com/artist/Rolling+Stones%2C+The

If you hover over them it tells you.

ah! thank you. i've been searching for hours

So, if one were selling off a few hundred records of the psych / noise / jazz / indie variety, discogs over eBay, for sure? My issue with discogs (and, for CDs, Amazon) is the fact that things sell in spurts, with no deadline. It tends to make packing records and regular trips to the post office a full time job. Any advice?

i dunno, i always buy on discogs, sell on amazon. i don't want to wait for people to stumble over what i'm trying to unload, and on average, i get really good money from ebay sales.

i think the upside (sale price) on ebay is (or can be) higher, but the ease of doing stuff on discogs might be better, depending on how much hassle you're willing to go through

Yeah, I find Discogs has rarer stuff in the first place, and then for a more reasonable price than Amazon. If what you're selling is aimed at the collectors market or folks that may not look at Amazon first, Discogs is the way to go.

Thanks!

it feels good to sell rare-ish things on ebay for +£££s to people who don't know about discogs ;)

Coincidentally they just linked to this via their Facebook page:

http://www.discogs.com/blog/339369-top-30-most-expensive-items-sold-by-month

Advice on this:

Person contacts me on Discogs about an item that I am not listing for sale, offers me a large (but not obscene) amount for it, then paypals me with his "brother-in-law's" account and wants me to ship it to his sister (he's in Europe). Obviously I'm not going to ship it to anyone other than his brother-in-law (since anything else violates PayPal's Seller TOS) but should I even do that? Is this some sort of crazy elaborate scam to get a CD single? His Discogs rating is fine... but the whole thing seems pretty suspicious.

Obviously I will not accept the payment if I don't ship him anything btw.

I would just make sure to do delivery confirmation/insurance so he can't say it never arrived and file a claim with Paypal. That's the only scam I could think of if he already paid. Unless he somehow got hold of someone else's Paypal account but that seems far fetched.

Does seem a little suspicious to have done enough business on discogs to have a rating and yet you don't have your own Paypal acct?

Thanks for being such a big part of the Discogs community. If you’re anything like us, you collect more than just music.

With that in mind, we’re developing databases for other things we collect. We want to invite you to be one of the first people to see the work that only a few collectors and Discog’s staff members have built.

To get early access to the beta, just click what you’re into below and start submitting!

Submit My First Book

Submit My First Comic

Submit My First Film

hmmmm

hmm discogs is really a good database and have often thought it would be nice to be able to look up different editions of books/comics/movies instead of just doing ebay-searches but not sure if this seems like a greedy move or an enthusiast move, also not sure if such databases/market places already exist

also, any thoughts on whether the new tax policy will be very harmful to the 2nd hand market place? (apparently Discogs will add 25% tax or something for all orders going from US to EU)

Whoa- what? Really?

It's VAT that's now payable on *fees* paid by sellers at their local rate if they are in the EU. Fees are 8% of sales prices.

So it only applies to sellers in the EU and it's nothing to do with where orders are going. I think it works out to no more than around 1.8% on the price of a record in practice. Presumably VAT registered businesses would be able to claim it back as well so no need to pass it on to customers.

I'll give Discogs credit for hooking me up with a good guy from Norway who had a Neil Young tribute LP I'd been trying to get for eight years (Everybody Knows This Is Norway. It's worth more than I was prepared to pay, so he ripped the CD, put it up on Soulseek, and I got it from him that way.

The other thing I've listed on my want-list is a Velvet Underground tribute that came out in the late '80s. I get an e-mail every few weeks saying one's up for sale, but it's always around 20 pounds, which after conversion and shipping is just way out of my buying range.

It seems to be a good place to buy from. I've only had one negative experience I can think of where a cd arrived shattered because it was sent with neither jewel case or adequate padding.
May have been others but that is the only one came to mind. Think I got a refund but not the cd I wanted.
Discogs is also a reasonably ok resource though it does have gaps. I use it frequently when EACing cds I've bought when they're not in the EAC database. Tends to have tracklisting down for main release version at least.
Gap can be in what releases are listed though.
Would be useful to have reviews of lps and individual release versions too. I think there are some reviews on site but sporadic. There is rateyourmusic I guess. But would be useful.

I actually appreciate discogs more because of the lack of reviews. Everyone on Rateyourmusic considers themselves geniuses but they're really just a slightly better class of youtube commenter.

I had someone buy from me in Argentina but wanted me to ship to his sister in Chile as you are 'not allowed' more than two foreign packages a year or some such.

So I did, and it all went fine.

JUst thinking that it would make it a full resource if people said what they thought of the lp since it could help one work out which lps by an artist were worth getting. also which pressings/releases of which lp.
BUt I guess that most people going to discogs are doing so to buy material they're already aware of. Particularly marketplace.
Just thought if it was done right it could help the experience. But not sure how 'doing it right' would be achieved anyway since I can see what johnny's saying about rateyourmusic being true at least to some extent. Ego/opinion outweighing info etc

Do wonder where you get information on the best sounding versions of things from since it doesn't seem to be fully utilised on RYM and Amazon just mixes all reviews for all releases under a title together.

Of course anyone can post reviews on there and the entire database is user populated. The process of submitting release data excludes editorialising though, which is as it should or it would never get done and.disagreements would be endless.

I like that the site still feels a bit down-home and ungentrified. Not unlike this place really. My impression is that the staff are still enthusiasts for the most part.

discogs are reviews are great, it's either:
a) old school clubbers reminiscing and being crazy hyperbolic about old school house/rave
b) a bunch of people posting "repress please?" or "you gougers should be ashamed or yourself" (hip euro "underground" deep house 12"s on small labels)
c) some person posting "the label on my copy is more periwinkle than violet and 'chuggin gasoline' is about 6 seconds longer than on the original uk chiswick issue"

I'm a buyer in France, saw a record listed by a seller in Germany for €30. For some reason the listing said "unavailable in France", I thought that was odd so messaged the seller. He blamed the shipping tool and confirmed he was happy to sell it to me. But because it was listed as unavailable in France we couldn't complete the transaction on discogs. He's a long established seller with a 100% rating so I thought it would be fine. We agreed a price, he sent me his bank details, I made the bank transfer, he sent me the record.

All seemed fine until I opened it up and found to my dismay that he'd sent me the wrong version. There are two versions, a retail and a limited web-only version. His listing was for the limited version which was the one I wanted, he sent me the retail version. It was sealed so he probably wouldn't have checked it before listing. Emailed him with a photo of the record and asked for a refund. He admitted the mistake but offered me only a €5 refund, saying that "sending it back is too expensive". I guess that means he's not willing to refund my return postage costs on top of the €30 I already sent him (which included postage, obviously). I'm tempted to ignore his derisory €5 refund offer, walk away and chalk it up to experience. Because the transaction took place off the grid I obviously can't leave him negative feedback.

You would honestly break his 100% positive rating over that?
How much more valuable is the web-only version?

No difference, they go for the same price. He said he "hoped I could live with the standard version" which isn't really the point.

Yeah, that's his fuck up. If he wasn't sure of which version it was he should have listed it as the standard black.

If this was on Discogs, you probably wouldn't have to leave him negative feedback because he would do the right thing to maintain that 100%. Dick move.

I sold a record back in December, it was NM condition (both sleeve and the vinyl). Buyer contacted me over a month later (after leaving me good feedback) saying he played the record and it was all messed up on one side, unlistenably noisy and scratched, and he wanted a refund. It certainly wasn't like that when I mailed it, which I stated, but said I'd refund him if he shipped it back. Two weeks later and he hasn't responded or sent it back. Maybe he realized his stylus had bitten the dust or something. But I think at this point, as a seller, I'm not obligated to refund the guy.

you paid a total of €30 for the record and shipping, and he offered to refund €5 because it was an alternate version that's worth roughly the same price. am i getting that right?

how much does it cost to ship a record within france?

Yes, that is correct. And I have no idea, but this record went from Germany to France. And he quoted me an all-in price, he didn't split it between the record and the shipping.

I think my point (and maybe yours too?) is that he is expecting me to accept the alternate version rather than the one I wanted. And I don't see why I should have to accept that.

i am just trying to understand the basic facts so i can judge how much of a discount €5 is. how much did it cost to send the record from germany to france?

oh, sorry i am still waking up.

it looks like it costs around 15 euro to mail a record from germany to france, but let's assume he got a good deal and only paid 10. so that means he's offering you a 20 euro record for 25% off. i think because you sound pretty disappointed, there's no harm in making a counter offer: "hey, i really appreciate that you're willing to work with me, but i really had my heart set on the other version. do you think you could refund 10 euro instead? that way i could give this copy to a friend without losing too much, and keep looking for an alternate copy for myself."

i'm not saying you "have to accept" anything, except the transaction is over, it happened outside of discogs, the record is in your hand, and you don't have any official recourse. so you do have to accept it actually. but it sounds like the guy is still willing to be in contact and refund you, when he could have ghosted you, so use your head and try to make the most of the situation.

I agree that the buyer should not have to accept the wrong item, but because they went off Discogs and off Paypal (the unavailable in France thing is probably just a missed setting in the admittedly way overly complicated shipping setup for sellers) he doesn't have much recourse. I'd say take the 5 euro and stay on the platform next time.

just been offered $400 for my copy of this - i guess it's legit? still too weird for me to take seriously though

https://www.discogs.com/release/5835390-Natural-Snow-Buildings-The-Night-Country

people are really into that band, idk

It's a CD-R, so to avoid a headache later I'd give it a quick play test. At that price, I might also offer an additional digital copy, just in case.

yeah check it and then accept the offer, wtf.

Perhaps *offer* to make a digital copy, but the buyer might not want that if its strictly limited status is the draw

It's actually very easy to find digitally fwiw

ha yes, and free

https://vulpianorecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-night-country

thanks folks i guess i better message them back!

lol @ this feedback i just had from someone else:

"Prompt dispatch, accurate grading. Service indicative of a kind soul and a wholesome spirit"

*blushes*

I have two discogs accounts, one for CDs and one for LPs and singles, etc.

Just now, I got emails on both, with this message:

We've cancelled the order(s) you recently received from <redacted> at this time. This user has been banned from the site and it's advised you do not continue the transaction with them.

.. the redacted name was different on each.

So, have you had similar, discogs sellers? I don't recognise either...

In fact, I have just received another one, for the LP email account. Curious......

It seems that the buyers named, have bought stuff from me in the very distant past.

Obviously, my definition of "recent" does not match theirs.

Got that message too, from someone that ordered something from me ten years ago. I’d guess discogs is culling inactive accounts, but it lists last user activity as today, so ???

Weird, I got one for someone who bought 3 LPs from me last year. I specifically remember them as being a good customer! 100% ratings. The transaction currently has a status of "Cancelled (Non-Paying Buyer)"

I've just had six of these messages in the last hour, all referring to different buyer IDs that don't even look spammy.

gotta be a glitch

I've been checking my historic cancelled orders. It looks like they are all buyers whose orders were cancelled years ago, due to non-payment at the time.

so these are not for new orders under those names, like the accounts had been hijacked?

bit extremely old orders that had been completed? (i meant to add)

I got one, too. Thought it might have even been a spam email until I checked my Discogs page notifications. And similar story: no memory of this seller who allegedly bought something from me at one point god knows how long ago

I've now had an apology email from Discogs, confirming that it was a glitch.

Yep.

oh, wonderful, I guess now this giant red alert message will be popping up on my page for the foreseeable future every time I refresh it or click on something

Your account was among a group impacted by a fraud prevention effort that produced unintended side effects. You may receive emails or see incorrect status regarding previously-completed orders, creating a potentially inaccurate seller rating. Our Community Support team doesn't have specific information at this time, but we are working to resolve these issues and apologize for the inconvenience and confusion.

Like, thank you for letting me know, this could have been a simple one-time notification. It doesn't need to be a banner ad

Ts: one banner on the website vs emails to everybody

I did get an email, because I raised it to their support email link.

Is anyone else having major issues trying to use your account? Looking at old purchases in my Dashboard for example they all say Cancelled (Non-Paying Buyer) and then trying to look at other parts I keep getting “Authentication Error You are not allowed to access this page.”

I’ve also suddenly been given auto negative feedback as a non paying buyer on months old and completed orders.

I've seen people on reddit complaining about this happening, but it was a couple of weeks ago so I had figured they'd fixed it by now, but I guess not

Seems that they flagged both my accounts - possibly because they are almost the same email.

At Discogs, protecting your account and the integrity of our marketplace is a top priority. As part of a fraud prevention sweep on March 6, 2026, our systems identified a series of suspicious accounts.

Your account was unintentionally included in this group, resulting in it becoming temporarily inaccessible, but has now been fully restored to active status.
What to expect next
We’re taking additional steps to ensure everything is back to normal. Over the next few days, we'll be working to fully reinstate your feedback and ratings. You do not need to take any action for this to occur.
About your orders
As part of this action, your completed and active orders were caught in an automated cancellation process. We are evaluating ways to restore order statuses and will reach out with details when this is finalized.
We realize this has been disruptive and sincerely apologize for the confusion this has caused. We are committed to maintaining a safe and trustworthy marketplace and appreciate your patience as we complete these steps.

Thank you for being part of the Discogs community.

I know we usually just complain here, but I am SO GLAD that transcription discs are finally relegated to the "Miscellaneous" section instead of cluttering up the album timelines

you should have seen the Metallica entry, ridiculous

I have a few high dollar records I need to sell. What's better these days, Discogs or Ebay?

I'm going to list them one at a time, not in a rush.

I've never sold on Ebay and I do have some positive seller points on Discogs, so that might answer my question right there.

eBay for common titles, discogs for the goods

I’ve got an Azelia Banks record that has got to go before it gets reissued!

i've found things sometimes go for more money on ebay.

i think if you're just going to sell a handful of things, discogs is your best bet. if you had a larger amount, and especially if there was a kind of theme to the offerings, an auction on ebay could result in more money, but there's also greater risk there. i'd say if you're not looking to do an auction, discogs would be easier as you won't have to take photos of every individual listing.

on the other hand, listing on ebay and providing your own photos COULD inspire more buyer confidence. so it's a trade off based on how much effort you want to put in.

Noticed recently looking for some clothes that there’s a fair bit of vinyl on Vinted, but searching there is a bit of a lottery.

Anyone else having trouble with it loading right now? Or pages being unavailable?