Observations about the Discogs marketplace

One feature that Discogs has is that it allows people to sell copies of items that are listed in the catalog. In theory this works very well: people describe an item in the catalog, a seller then picks the right item from the catalog (possibly first adding it to the catalog), describes anything that is special about the particular copy, sells the item and gives and receives feedback about the transaction and all is well.

Except in practice this is not what happens. Instead what I see is that sellers just pick some items from the marketplace, then describe the differences with the listed item instead of first adding the right item to the database (which is against the terms of the marketplace) and let the user figure it out. As I said before: I can understand why some sellers are not adding items that are not in the database, as it is a lot of work (and it would help a lot if it could be made easier), but for buyers it can be very frustrating to not get the item they thought they would get.

There are even some sellers that go further and change existing releases in the catalog to match their store, instead of adding to the database (this release is a good example, although you will have to log in to see the change history).

There are sellers that edit existing releases in the catalog to match their store instead of adding new releases to the database.

There are also sellers who confuse the Discogs catalog with the marketplace and see it as some sort of eBay, where you list the actual item that you have for sale. They simply do not understand that there is a central catalog from which you have to pick. This is why they submit duplicates to the database with commit messages such as "nice copy with minor sleeve damage" or similar, even though in the catalog that particular release was already added years ago.

Some sellers confuse the Discogs catalog with the eBay marketplace.

Some people think Discogs is the marketplace, others see it is the catalog, and yet others think it is the company, and they would all be correct, and it makes it clear to me that Discogs is suffering from brand confusion. They should have separated the marketplace from the company and the catalog, but because of the way Discogs grew that is not what happened.

Discogs is suffering from brand confusion

But enough about sellers being bad. Other people can also hurt sellers in ways that the sellers are probably not aware. You see, it is not just the sellers that make mistakes in the catalog. There are also users that adapt existing releases in the catalog because it doesn't match with their collection, instead of adding the new item.

And this is a risk to sellers. Even if a seller has done everything correct and has picked the right release that matches the item for sale and then someone else changes the catalog, then there is a mismatch. If a buyer then buys the item based on the changed (and now incorrect) information on the release page the buyer will think he got the wrong item and be unhappy and give the seller a negative review, which could hurt future sales for the seller, as people tend to judge a seller based on the amount of positive and negative feedback and shy away from sellers with negative feedback.

Sloppy editing of the catalog by users could hurt the reputation of Discogs sellers even if the sellers do everything right.

This means that as a seller you also need to stay on top of edits of the catalog that you offer for sale on the marketplace, to avoid negative feedback, which is a challenge if you have thousands of items on sale. It might also be worth adding the state of the release history (for example: the revision number) when offering an item for sale so you can always refer to it. Or, it would be great if Discogs could automatically add that information to the sales page.

The way the Discogs marketplace works is not ideal and in retrospect perhaps it should have been done in a different way. The idea is obviously great, but it only works if people exactly follow the rules and the rules are actively enforced. Until that time: sellers and buyers beware.