I recently resurrected my old Technics 1200 turntable from storage and started to revisit the pleasure of getting out my seat every 4 songs. Soon after, a friend turned me onto discogs.com where you can buy used vinyl records from across the world. If you find yourself lost in a YouTube hole of cool, rare/old records, discogs is the place where you can actually find those records. If the record isn’t available or you don’t like the price, you can add it to your watchlist and discogs will email you when new listings are posted. YouTube has created a market for records that you’d never know about and because of that, if you’re looking for a rare record, it could get snatched up quick on discogs — making their email alerts are very handy.
So, a rare record I’m interested in popped up on discogs and I got an email alert. Unfortunately, it’s an absurdly overpriced version — selling for 113€. That’s not my budget, so I’m waiting for a lower-priced copy. A day or so later, I got another email alert but it was for the same record from the same seller. That’s a pretty annoying first world problem. This will eventually lead me to ignore these emails or disable the alert — neither of which I want to do because I’d like to buy the record eventually. After a couple weeks of getting the same email alert, I replied to the email in a terse, annoyed, not-expecting-any-real-response kind of way:
“I get an email for this same seller+album like every other day” [SEND]
To my delight, I got the most detailed and honest support email I’ve ever received:
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us.
I am sorry to hear about the troubles you’re having with repeat listings and our wantlist feature. Thank you for sending the attachment so we can review this correctly.
Here, I hope I can provide some insight as to why you may see repeated items in your wantlist.
This issue is caused by an unfortunate consequence of the way the Discogs inventory management system works. Some sellers with larger inventories, will manage their inventory with a spreadsheet due to the number of items they have available. These sellers might also be selling across multiple platforms, making manual inventory management a significant logistical issue.
Our bulk inventory management feature enables these sellers to keep their inventory in order. At the end of each day, such sellers will export their inventory, delete the sold items from their spreadsheet, and then upload an edited file. When sellers upload a new file, a new Listing ID is created for the re-listed items. This is what causes the item to reappear on your want list. The system is recognizing these re-listings as new listings.
We are very aware of the issues that this system can cause for buyers with many items in their wantlist. I know how troublesome it can be to see the same items from the same seller day in and day out. I see these same sorts of issues with the items I have on my own personal wantlist. Ideally, the re-listed items would retain the original Listing ID and no new notifications would be sent. Our developers have been at work on possible solutions.
However, the architecture of our site combined with the need for bulk inventory management makes any potential solution incredibly complex. Our attempts to create a fix for this issue have not yet been successful. We hope to have this issue resolved soon, and our developers remain committed to finding a working solution that maximizes benefits for both buyers and sellers, but we can’t say for sure when this solution might be available.
In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience you’re experiencing. Please let me know if you have any additional questions at this time and I will be happy to assist!
Best regards,
Miki | Community Success Team Lead
Wow! OK — they did not fix my problem yet I’m super appreciative that they’ve taken the time to explain this which makes me very understanding and forgiving.
All I can say is — THANKS (and I’ll have to solve this problem myself somehow :)
