When you go in with a handful of records you know they will price for £50+ total and they offer £15, or £17 in exchange, it’s a bit of a piss take…
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Whenever I happen to watch the Pawn Stars reality, I feel like looking in the mirror.
People come there to sell a rare thing. The employees call an expert to evaluate the thing. The expert comes and takes a look at the customers rare thing and says that it’s worth a 1000$.
Then the bald dude asks the customer: ”Well, how much do you want for your rare thing?” and almost every time the customer answers: ”I want 1000$! The expert said it’s worth a 1000$!”
What the fuck? How does the bald guy pay rent for his shop? How is he expected to make a living?
It’s the same thing running a shop in Finland. ”Well Discogs says that this album is worth a 100€. I want 100€ for it!”
Well you better sell it on Discogs then.
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I truly believe people just don’t understand until they are on the other side of the counter. It sinks in quick when you have to make payroll!
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I feel your frustration. Discogs is a terrible way to value your records. Firstly, people will always look at highest sold price. Secondly it doesn’t take into account condition of previous sales. I see people putting records up for sale at silly prices and wonder how they ever expect to sell them.
When i’ve been looking at pricing my collection i go to the ‘median’ price on Discogs, then take into account the physical condition. I still don’t believe most of what i have is worth anything like the amount that says.
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This is the same phenomenon you see on a lot of (reverb, ebay) websites where people don’t understand the “sold” vs “asking price” metrics and are not invested enough in getting the item sold to do the research or are so convinced their chocolate bar is worth top dollar when ranked amongst other chocolate bars that they’ll leave it on the shelf for 3+ years growing stale.
In reality, the price that undercuts the status quo is the item that sells the first day.
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I seriously doubt a lot of the ‘sold’ prices on eBay. Who are all these lucky people making such decent cash for their old tat? When i have tried to sell the same things for a decent amount less than the top dollar previous sold listings, even when in better condition, it always hangs about for yonks.
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That sounds like very fair prices. I worked in a record store for many years buying new and second hand records and thats a good price for used records
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Frankly, ebay is about trust, or it used to be. Having a clientele that trusts that what you are selling is good and are willing to pay for that guarantee is a big part of selling on ebay.
I would say this is particularly the case with collectibles because grading is so subjective.
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There are other factors involved too. The perceived trust in different sellers based on number of sales logged vs feedback rating, how many listings of your item are currently on the site, visibility of your listing, etc.
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That doesn’t sound wildly unfair to me.
If the store is going to get £50 for the records it’s because of the efforts they’ve put in to build a brand and hold a place in the market.
That takes work and risk.
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When you look at some of the listings that sell for high prices and the seller didn’t put anything else in the description beyond repeating the title, it starts to seem a bit fishy.
I have had a 100% feedback for nearly 20 years and have a hard time shifting things without taking an absolute bath.
These days with spoof accounts/stolen feedback scores, it’s all very much a gamble, or feels that way. Sometimes when I put something in the post I cross my fingers its not a scam, like for instance getting a sale with a buyer who has been on eBay more than 10 years but still has less than 100 feedback. I always send a message to let them know when I am posting the item, just to try to get a response, to make sure it’s a real person.
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There is fishy stuff depending on what you think it fishy, but a lot of it is “power sellers” with secondary accounts who will buy your shit for a song and then resell the item to their clientele. I once had a guy say to me “oh, my dad is a powerseller” but gimme a break, I knew what the score was.
Also consider the guy who buys a pair of headphones or something, realizes that ebay is kind of a load of crap and only uses the account seldom over 10 years time when he really can’t find that cat shaped back scratcher anywhere else. There are people like that.
There are also people who artificially inflate prices by having friends or possibly farmed accounts bid, but ebay for a long time has had some protection against matching ip’s on multiple accounts so it’s probably the really sneaky who get away with it. Also some who don’t want to lose their item to a low price and are willing to sell it elsewhere and eat a fee by pretending an item sold (bidding on their own item at the last minute) but I believe those would only be in the case of something with guaranteed value beyond the end sale price.
It’s unfortunate but sometimes you (as a buyer or a seller) just never know who is on the other end of the buy button.
I haven’t used ebay in years, for the record, because their changes all rubbed me the wrong way. So there are accounts with a lot of feedback that are 25 years old with no recent activity, you’ll see those also 
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One of the things I really like on Reverb is the sales stats they publicly display, which are super useful for both buyers and sellers. There’s always a disparity between the listed prices and those prices so they’re useful to gauge reality from expectation.
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Yeah, it’s not particularly often but with enough scale of interaction on any sales site I encounter a person who has odd expectations, not a lot of experience with person to person and thus expects an individual on the other end of the keyboard to operate like a large retail establishment.
Usually I can work things out, sometimes shit happens, but one person who approaches you / communications as more a vending machine than another human can cause unnecessary emotional drain for the smaller amounts we’re getting for our time, to generally get stuff into the hands of others and not dump it.
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I also heavily rely on that. The interesting thing is that if you remember a date an item sold, you can actually backtrack (it takes maybe 4 days to log the sale) and see how much an item actually sold for.
For example, checking “sold listings” you see the item sold and the asking price, but looking at the sold history as you’ve posted, you can actually see the precise dollar amount someone accepted in an offer and you may find the market is not what you once thought.
For the record, I confirmed this by looking for items I bought on days that corresponded to days I purchased and specific dollar amounts, an easy way to test this is if you make an offer add like 36 cents to the end of it so it stands out.
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the title of this thread looks so sad on a computer screen
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Thanks for all the interesting replies guys.
To bring this back on topic a bit, say i were to choose to sell via Discogs, piecemeal. What would i want to do to make the buyers pleased that they ordered a record from me? Is there any specific way of packaging and sending a record, would it be worth buying new inner sleeves where the ones i have are a bit tatty/beerstained (aka ‘DJ worn’). Should i get plastic slip cases to put things in? Or are these all extra expenditures that only make sense if i’m asking a market price for the item…
Everything looks sad on a computer screen. Except kitty kats. 
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Also, risking another tangent, what do you do about cleaning records??
I would argue that this particular cat looks to be clinically depressed and is just putting up a front as is the expectation.
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