Selling & sync8 min read

How Discogs sync works

What moves between Discogs and PalmFlow, and what doesn't — listing statuses, the 18 order statuses, the 9% fee and how it's split, per-listing currency, and why Discogs sales skip the ship queue.

Once Discogs is connected, PalmFlow keeps your inventory and your record sales in step on its own. This page is the exact detail: what moves, which direction, and the handful of places Discogs behaves unlike every other channel.

Into PalmFlow

Listings — every record you have for sale becomes an item, priced in the currency you listed it in, with its media condition, your comments, the label, the catalog number, the format and the sleeve image.
Orders — a sale arrives with the buyer, the shipping address, the postage, and the commission Discogs charged, sitting against the record it sold.
Fees — the real figure from Discogs, straight into your profit numbers.

Nothing goes back out

Discogs is import only, and unlike Shopify that isn't a scope we're missing — it's the shape of the integration. PalmFlow will not create a listing, revise one, or take one down. Editing an item in PalmFlow changes the item; your Discogs listing keeps what it had.

Only eBay accepts edits back out, and only the title, the price and the photos. See How eBay two-way sync works.

One listing is one record

Discogs has no quantity field. Two copies of the same pressing are two separate listings, so every record imports with a quantity of 1, and the multi-quantity and low-stock behavior described in Adding items simply doesn't apply to them.

This is also why the fee on a two-record order has to be divided rather than doubled — see below.

Where each listing lands

For sale → the item is Listed.
Draft, Expired, Suspended, Violation → In Stock. The record is off the market but still on your shelf, which is what In Stock means.
Sold → skipped on purpose. A sold listing carries no buyer, no postage and no fee, so importing it would create a record marked sold with no money behind it. The order owns that record instead, and turns up with the whole sale attached.

Take a record down on Discogs and the item drops from Listed to In Stock on the next sweep. Nothing is deleted.

Order statuses, and where each one lands

Discogs has eighteen order statuses. PalmFlow maps all of them:

New Order, Buyer Contacted, Invoice Sent, Payment Pending → order pending, record Sold. The copy leaves the marketplace the moment an order exists, so it is spoken for from here on.
Payment Received, In Progress → order paid, record Sold.
Shipped → order shipped, record Shipped.
Refund Pending → still paid, deliberately. A refund the seller has begun but not completed hasn't moved any money, and marking it refunded would strike the sale out of revenue early.
Refund Sent, Cancelled (Refund Received) → refunded, record Returned.
Cancelled, and the non-paying-buyer, per-buyer's-request and refund-pending variants → canceled, record back to In Stock.
Cancelled (Item Unavailable) → canceled, and the record's status is left alone. That status means the copy could not be supplied, and we don't know whether it's broken, lost or sold elsewhere. Guessing would be worse than leaving it.
Order Changed → treated as still open. It means you edited the postage or the price, not that the order went backwards.
Merged → skipped. Discogs folds several orders from one buyer into one, and importing the folded-away ones would count the same records twice.

An order never moves backwards. If a status arrives that would demote a shipped order, it's ignored — so a delivery you marked by hand survives the next sync.

A canceled order sends the record to In Stock rather than back to Listed. eBay relists automatically and Discogs may not, so the listing sync — which reads what is actually up for sale — decides that, on the same tick.

The 9% fee, and how it's split

Discogs charges 9%, and the part sellers routinely get wrong is that it applies to the shipping as well as the record: on a $12 record with $5 postage the fee is 9% of $17, not of $12. There's a $0.10 minimum and a $150 cap, so above roughly $1,667 the commission stops growing.

PalmFlow doesn't estimate any of this — Discogs reports the actual fee on the order and that's what gets stored. On an order with several records it's split across the lines in proportion to what each one sold for, because an even split across a $200 pressing and a $5 single would misstate the profit on both.

The same schedule is in the public fee calculator, including the payment processing that Discogs Payments adds on top.

Currency

Each Discogs listing carries its own currency — there's no shop-wide setting to read once and apply to everything, so a Berlin seller's listing stays in euros. The item keeps what it was actually listed and sold in, and the inventory list converts for display.

Exchange rates are locked onto an order at the time of sale, so a March sale is still valued at March's rate when you open it in July.

No tracking, and what that means

The Discogs order object has no tracking number, no carrier and no fulfillment record anywhere in the API. Sellers buy their own postage and mark the parcel sent themselves, so there is no carrier scan coming — ever.

PalmFlow takes that at face value rather than pretending otherwise:

Discogs sales never enter the ship queue. An order parked there would wait forever for a scan that was never coming.
A Discogs order goes straight from paid to shipped, on your say-so.
Nothing is registered for delivery tracking, so no delivery alerts fire on them. See Shipping and tracking for the channels where that does apply.

Buyer details

Discogs exposes no buyer name and no email anywhere in its API — the username is a handle, and PalmFlow won't pass a handle off as a name. What it does give is the shipping address, and the first line of that is the name the parcel is going to, which is the name you'd write on the label. That's what lands in the buyer field; the rest becomes the address.

How often it runs

A scheduled sweep runs on its own, and Sync now on the integration card runs it on demand. Orders are always fetched before listings, for the reason in the callout above.

Discogs counts its rate limit per source IP, which means every PalmFlow workspace shares one budget. So pages are fetched strictly one at a time rather than in parallel — deliberately unhurried, and the reason a first import of a large shop arrives in stages instead of all at once.

Very large shops

One run imports up to 4,000 listings and 2,000 orders. Anything past that continues on the next run, and while an import is truncated PalmFlow skips the step that drops records to In Stock — pages it hasn't read yet would otherwise look like records you'd taken down.

If your shop is bigger than your plan's item allowance, the import fills the allowance and stops cleanly rather than failing.

Common questions

Do Discogs orders show a tracking number in PalmFlow?

No. The Discogs API carries no tracking number, carrier or fulfillment record on an order — the seller buys their own postage and marks the parcel sent. So Discogs sales skip PalmFlow's ship queue and are shipped the moment you say they are, rather than waiting on a carrier scan.

How does PalmFlow handle two copies of the same record on Discogs?

As two separate items. Discogs has no quantity field — one listing is one physical copy — so every imported record has a quantity of 1 and the low-stock machinery does not apply to them.

What fee does PalmFlow record on a Discogs sale?

The real one Discogs reports on the order, which is 9% of the item price plus the shipping the buyer paid, with a $0.10 minimum and a $150 cap. On a multi-record order it is split across the lines in proportion to what each record sold for.

Does a Discogs sale in euros get converted to dollars?

No. Each Discogs listing carries its own currency, and the item keeps it. The inventory list converts for display, and an order locks its exchange rate at the time of sale so reported profit doesn't drift later.