Discogs vs Etsy — Where to Sell Records in 2026
Etsy only allows resold records that are 20 years old or more, which settles this for most sellers before fees matter. Here is the policy in full, the real cost of each platform, and how their discovery models differ.
- For most record sellers this is decided by one Etsy rule, not by fees. Etsy does not allow reselling except in three narrow cases, and the one that applies to records is vintage — items at least 20 years old. A 2019 pressing cannot legitimately be listed on Etsy at all. A 1998 one can.
- Etsy’s own wording closes the obvious loophole. Its creativity standards explicitly disallow resold commercially available items newer than 20 years old even if the item is designed to appear vintage — which catches modern 180-gram reissues of 1970s albums, because eligibility follows the pressing’s age, not the recording’s.
- Discogs has no such rule and a much simpler fee. 9% of item price plus shipping, minimum $0.10, maximum $150, nothing monthly and nothing to list. Etsy stacks a $0.20 listing fee, 6.5%, payment processing, a regulatory operating fee and — above $10,000 of sales — a compulsory 12% offsite ads charge.
- Etsy makes you write the listing. Discogs makes you find the Release. Etsy gives you a 140-character title, 13 tags and 20 photos to fight for search visibility. Discogs attaches your listing to a catalogued pressing and sorts newest first, with no ranking algorithm at all.
- Etsy’s seller count is growing while its buyer count is not. In the quarter to 30 June 2026 Etsy reported 5.7 million active sellers, up 5.9%, against 87.0 million active buyers, down 0.4%. That is more supply chasing a flat pool, and Etsy’s own sellers have noticed.
- They are not really competitors. Discogs is the specialist marketplace for catalogued audio; Etsy is a marketplace for handmade, vintage and craft supplies that happens to permit 20-year-old records. Most serious record sellers run Discogs and use Etsy, if at all, for genuinely old stock and record-derived craft goods.
- Cost: £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter). There is no free plan. Relisting, offers and bulk operations are included in every plan, not a paid add-on.
The 20-year rule decides this
Start here, because for a large share of record sellers it ends the comparison before fees are even relevant.
Etsy’s seller policy states that everything listed for sale must be made, designed, handpicked or sourced by the seller, and that dropshipping and reselling are not allowed except in specific cases. Its creativity standards set out those cases, and there are only four buckets: made by a seller, designed by a seller, handpicked by a seller, and sourced by a seller. Reselling records falls under handpicked, which Etsy defines as vintage — items at least 20 years old — personally curated by the seller.
So on Etsy in 2026, a record is eligible if it was pressed in 2006 or earlier. Anything newer is a resold commercially available item and is prohibited. Etsy’s own text closes the workaround people reach for: resold commercially available items that are newer than 20 years old are not allowed even if the item is designed to appear vintage. That sentence is aimed at exactly the modern audiophile reissue — a 2022 pressing of a 1971 album is a 2022 item, and it does not qualify.
Two further Etsy positions follow from the same policy. Records the seller made or produced themselves — your own band’s release, your own label’s pressing — qualify as made or designed by a seller. And things made from records, such as bowls, clocks and cut vinyl art, qualify as hand-altered items.
Etsy publishes no vinyl-specific policy page, so this is the general policy applied to records rather than a quoted ruling on them. But the general policy is unambiguous and Etsy enforces it with automated and manual detection, removes listings without refunding listing fees, and can suspend accounts.
Discogs has no equivalent rule. Its constraint is different in kind: every listing must attach to a Release already catalogued in the Discogs database. If your pressing is not there, you submit it first, and you must physically possess the item to do so. Age is irrelevant — a record pressed last week is fine, provided the pressing exists as a database entry.
At a glance
| Discogs | Etsy | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The specialist marketplace for catalogued audio releases | A marketplace for handmade, vintage and craft supplies |
| Can you resell records? | Yes, any age | Only if 20 years old or more |
| What you can list | Audio formats only — nothing that is not a Release | Anything meeting the four creativity standards |
| Listing fee | None | $0.20 per listing, and again every 4 months on renewal |
| Monthly fee | None | None required; Etsy Plus is $10 and Pattern $15 |
| Commission | 9% of item price plus shipping, min $0.10, max $150 | 6.5% of price plus shipping, plus payment processing and a regulatory operating fee |
| Compulsory advertising | None | Offsite Ads at 12% becomes mandatory for life once a shop passes $10,000 in a year |
| Listing lifespan | Indefinite | 4 months, auto-renewing at $0.20 |
| Photos | Up to 100, square, no reuse across listings | Up to 20, plus one video |
| Title | Supplied by the Release | 140 characters, written by you |
| Search ranking | None — newest listed first | Relevance ranking you optimise for with title, tags and attributes |
| Countries closed to sellers | India, Singapore and Russia since December 2022 | Broadly open |
Fees, with the arithmetic
Discogs takes 9% of the item price plus shipping, with a floor of $0.10 and a ceiling of $150 per sale, published with equivalents in every supported currency. There is no account fee, no seller fee and no listing fee — Discogs states that you are charged only at the moment you sell. Payment processing is PayPal’s rather than Discogs’, taken from the gross payment, and a verified PayPal account is mandatory.
Etsy stacks several charges. A $0.20 listing fee on publish and on every four-month renewal, whether or not the item sells. A 6.5% transaction fee on the displayed price plus shipping and gift wrap. Payment processing by the country of your bank account — 3% and $0.25 in the US, 4% and £0.20 in the UK, 4% and €0.30 in the eurozone — charged on the gross order including shipping and tax. A regulatory operating fee in some markets, currently 0.48% in the UK, 1.14% in France, 0.80% in Italy, 0.88% in Spain and 0.50% in Canada. And a one-time, non-refundable shop set-up fee at account creation.
Worked example: a £40 record with £5 postage, sold by a UK seller.
| Discogs | Etsy | |
|---|---|---|
| Listing cost | £0.00 | £0.16 (a $0.20 listing fee, renewed every 4 months while unsold) |
| Commission | £4.05 — 9% of £45 | £2.93 — 6.5% of £45 |
| Payment processing | PayPal’s rate on £45 | £2.00 — 4% of £45 plus £0.20 |
| Regulatory operating fee | — | £0.22 — 0.48% of £45 |
| Approximate marketplace cost | ~11 to 13% depending on PayPal’s rate | ~11.5% plus the listing fee |
On that example the two are close, which is not the intuitive answer. The differences show up at the edges, and they are large.
At the top end Discogs wins outright. Its $150 maximum means a £2,000 rarity costs 7.5% and a £5,000 one costs 3%. Etsy’s percentages do not taper.
At the bottom end Etsy’s flat fees bite. A £4 single carries the same $0.20 listing fee and the same £0.20 processing minimum as a £400 LP. Etsy sellers make this point constantly; one calculating the load on a $2.25 item arrived at 37.4%, with the more experienced replies pointing out that the arithmetic is 6.5% plus 3% plus $0.20 and that the flat twenty cents is what destroys low-value items.
And then there is Offsite Ads, which is the fee that changes the calculation. Etsy charges 15% of an attributed order for shops under $10,000 of sales in the prior 365 days, dropping to 12% once a shop passes $10,000 — at which point participation becomes mandatory for the life of the shop, with any prior opt-out voided. The attribution window is 30 days from click and the cap is $100 per order. A successful record shop on Etsy is therefore paying roughly 11.5% on most orders and around 23.5% on the ones Etsy’s advertising claims credit for. There is no equivalent charge anywhere on Discogs.
What an Etsy record shop actually costs to run
The fee table above prices a single sale. Running a shop is a different calculation, and Etsy has four recurring costs that a Discogs seller simply does not carry.
The renewal drip. Etsy listings expire after four months and auto-renew at $0.20 by default, keeping their views, favourites and URL. On 300 listings that is $60 a year in renewals before anything sells, and the slower your stock turns, the more of it you pay. Records are slow stock almost by definition: rarities wait for the one buyer who wants them. A shelf of 300 obscure pressings that takes three years to clear costs about $180 in Etsy renewals and nothing at all on Discogs.
The advertising ratchet. Offsite Ads is optional only until your shop passes $10,000 of sales in a rolling year. After that Etsy enrols you permanently at 12%, voids any earlier opt-out, and the fee applies to any order attributed to an Etsy-placed advert within thirty days of the click. Sellers describe the arithmetic on the far side of that line without much affection; one in an August 2026 thread wrote that they could no longer opt out and called 12 to 15% on top of everything else robbery, with the practical advice from replies being to bake roughly 3% into every price. The cap of $100 per order limits the damage on a high-value sale, but for a shop turning over £30,000 of £30 records it is a real percentage of revenue.
The optional subscriptions. Etsy Plus is $10 a month for fifteen listing credits, a $5 advertising credit and some shopfront styling; Pattern, Etsy’s standalone website builder, is $15 a month after a thirty-day trial. Neither is required and neither is obviously worth it for a record shop, but both exist and both are marketed at you.
The one-off entry cost. Etsy charges a one-time, non-refundable shop set-up fee at account creation. Its fee policy confirms the charge exists and that it is displayed during onboarding, but Etsy does not publish the amount on any of its policy pages, so no figure is quoted here.
Set against that, Etsy gives you something Discogs does not: a marketplace where presentation is worth money. Etsy buyers are not, as a rule, price-hunting — the observation from one long-standing seller of rare and collectible books on the platform was that most buyers there are not looking for rock-bottom deals. If your vintage records photograph well and are sold as objects rather than as catalogue numbers, that premium is the thing you are buying with the fees.
There is a strategic footnote worth knowing. Etsy sold Reverb, its musical-instrument marketplace, in June 2025, and completed the sale of Depop to eBay on 30 July 2026, then cut about 12% of its workforce in August 2026. Etsy is now a single marketplace with no music-adjacent property, a seller base growing at 5.9% a year and a buyer base that shrank 0.4% in the last reported quarter. None of that makes it a bad place to sell a 1972 pressing. It does mean the competitive pressure on your listing is going up rather than down, and that music is not a category Etsy is investing in.
Listing mechanics — free text against a database
The two platforms ask for opposite things, and it is worth understanding why before deciding where your effort goes.
Etsy is a writing exercise. You get a title of up to 140 characters, thirteen tags of up to twenty characters each, category attributes, a description, up to twenty photos and one video of a few seconds. All of it feeds Etsy’s relevance ranking. Two sellers with the same record will not get the same visibility, and the difference is the copy.
Discogs is a matching exercise. You find the exact catalogued Release — label, catalogue number, country, year, format, tracklist — and attach your copy to it. The Release supplies the title, artist, genre and format; you supply the two condition grades, the price, listing notes and photographs. Two sellers with the same pressing produce identical-looking listings, and compete on grade, price and seller rating.
Two Discogs details that surprise people coming from Etsy. First, seller photographs are now supported and the rules are strict: up to 100 per listing, square aspect, at least 150 pixels wide and under 10MB, of your own item in your possession, with no reuse across listings even for identical releases, and no stock images, watermarks, text, borders or store branding. Second, Discogs listings do not expire. Etsy’s do — every four months, at $0.20 a time, whether or not anyone has looked at them.
That expiry is a real cost on slow stock. A record listed on Etsy for two years costs $1.20 in renewals before it sells. The same record on Discogs costs nothing to leave up indefinitely, which is precisely the behaviour a specialist marketplace with Wantlists rewards.
How buyers find you on each
This is where the platforms diverge most sharply, and where the honest answer is uncomfortable for both.
Etsy has a ranking algorithm and you can work it. Titles, tags, attributes and photography all matter, new listings can take up to 48 hours to appear in search, and Etsy sells advertising on top. The upside is that a well-optimised listing can beat a better-priced one. The downside is that you are competing against a seller base growing faster than the buyer base — 5.7 million active sellers, up 5.9% year on year, against 87.0 million active buyers, down 0.4%. Etsy’s own sellers read those numbers in August 2026 and drew the obvious conclusion about why views are falling.
Discogs has no ranking algorithm at all. Its Seller Policy states that the default order is newest listed first. There is nothing to optimise and nothing to buy. What Discogs has instead is Wantlists — buyers record what they are looking for, and Discogs tells them when a copy is listed. That is a fundamentally different demand mechanic: passive, precise, and driven by the database. It is also why Discogs sellers describe their stock as sitting until the right person turns up. As one put it in a June 2026 thread on slowing sales: from my experience eBay is much better, all my records on Discogs just sit.
The fair reading is that Etsy rewards merchandising effort and Discogs rewards inventory quality and patience. If you have rare pressings, Discogs finds their buyers without you doing anything. If you have pretty, browsable, decorative stock — which for records usually means the kind of thing sold by colour or by the foot — Etsy’s discovery is genuinely better suited, and one bookseller in a 2026 thread made exactly that observation about the market for curated vintage on Etsy: most buyers there are not looking for rock-bottom deals.
Scale, and what each one publishes
Etsy publishes in detail, because it is listed. For the quarter ended 30 June 2026 it reported gross merchandise sales of $2.58 billion, revenue of $668.3 million, a take rate of 25.9%, 5.7 million active sellers and 87.0 million active buyers, with trailing-twelve-month GMS per active buyer of $124. It also completed the sale of Depop to eBay on 30 July 2026, having sold Reverb in June 2025, and announced a restructuring cutting about 12% of its workforce in August 2026. Etsy is now a single-marketplace company.
That last point matters more than it looks for record sellers: Reverb was Etsy’s music-adjacent property, and its sale means music media has no strategic home inside Etsy at all.
Discogs publishes almost nothing commercial. There is no listing count, no active seller count and no GMV figure — any such number you see comes from third-party blogs rather than Discogs, and should be treated accordingly. What Discogs does publish is community scale: a database of more than 15 million music releases, and 114.2 million items added to user Collections during 2025, its highest year on record, up from 105.7 million in 2024.
Those Collections are the commercially relevant number, because the Wantlists that drive Discogs demand are built from the same data.
Condition, grading and disputes
Discogs requires two condition grades on every listing, using the Goldmine standard. Media condition runs Mint (M), Near Mint (NM or M-), Very Good Plus (VG+), Very Good (VG), Good Plus (G+), Good (G), Fair (F), Poor (P). Sleeve condition accepts all of those plus Generic, Not Graded and No Cover. Discogs also publishes the relative values — VG+ at roughly half a Near Mint copy, VG at about a quarter, G and G+ at 10 to 15%, P and F at almost nothing — so a grade of optimism is expensive in a way buyers immediately see.
Etsy has no grading vocabulary for records. Condition is described in your own words in the description, alongside category attributes. That is more forgiving to write and considerably less useful to a buyer who knows what VG+ means.
Disputes follow from that. Discogs sellers are consistently blunt that the burden sits with them: in a June 2026 grading thread one seller wrote that sealed or not, it is the seller’s responsibility, and those are the terms you agree to when you sell on Discogs. Another noted that contesting a partial-refund request risks a negative review even when the request is unreasonable, and a third argued for a flat policy of no partial refunds — return for a full refund or keep it.
One Discogs operational quirk worth planning for: buyers are given several days to pay after committing to an order, and sellers report a meaningful share never paying. Do not delist a record elsewhere until the money has arrived.
How to choose
Choose Discogs if you sell records as records. Any age of pressing is allowed, the fee has a hard ceiling that favours rarities, listings never expire, the Wantlist mechanic finds buyers for obscure stock without any merchandising effort, and the buyers understand grading. It is the default and there is not really an argument against it, other than that it is passive.
Choose Etsy if your stock is genuinely vintage — pressed 2006 or earlier — and presents well, or if you are selling your own releases, or objects made from records. Etsy’s relevance ranking rewards good listings, its buyers are not hunting the lowest price, and the decorative and curated end of the market is a real one there.
Do not put modern pressings or current reissues on Etsy. It is against the policy Etsy enforces with removals and suspensions, and no amount of describing a 2022 reissue as vintage changes the pressing date.
Do both if your inventory splits cleanly — old and attractive on Etsy, everything catalogued on Discogs. The overlap is the pre-2006 stock, and listing that on both is where crosslisting earns its keep, because it is also where you can accidentally sell the same copy twice.
Running both with FLUF Connect
Both channels have real APIs, so FLUF drives them server-side with no browser extension required. Discogs connects with a personal access token; Etsy connects with a standard authorisation.
The practical work is on the Discogs side, and it is the release match. Your Etsy listing is free text with a title you wrote for search; Discogs needs to know which catalogued pressing you are holding. FLUF strips the condition, format, year and marketing language out of the title, searches the Discogs database on artist and title, and uses a second music database to disambiguate where the result is ambiguous — and where it cannot reach a high confidence score it does not guess, but queues the item for you to choose. A wrong pressing on Discogs is a return, and the seller carries it.
Set your Discogs seller account up first. Discogs requires a verified address, a verified PayPal account, a hobby-or-business declaration, at least one complete shipping policy and agreed seller terms before you can list anything.
What syncs between them
| Event | What happens |
|---|---|
| Record sells on Discogs | FLUF reads the order and removes the Etsy listing. |
| Record sells on Etsy | FLUF reads the order and removes the Discogs listing. |
| Orders | Both channels feed one order list. |
| Price and description edits | Pushed to both. |
| Automated relisting | Supported on Etsy, where listings expire every four months. Not applicable on Discogs, where they never expire. |
| Offer management | Not automated on either. Discogs offers are enabled per listing and answered by you. |
| Execution | Server-side on both — no browser extension needed for this pair. |
The relisting difference is worth a moment. Etsy’s four-month expiry with $0.20 auto-renewal is a slow drip on unsold stock, and automated relisting — included in every FLUF plan rather than sold as an extra — is what keeps that from becoming a manual chore. Discogs needs none of it.
What it costs
FLUF Connect is £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month on Starter. Seller is £29/month and Pro is £99/month; every plan is unlimited on listings and marketplaces, and the tiers differ by how often we check your channels for sales. There is no free plan. Crosslisting, inventory sync, automated relisting and offer management are included on every plan rather than charged as extras. Full detail on pricing.
Sources and verification
- Etsy’s resale rules and the four creativity standards, including the 20-year vintage definition and the wording on items designed to appear vintage: Etsy creativity standards and the Etsy seller policy. Permitted resale exceptions: does Etsy allow dropshipping or reselling.
- Etsy fees — listing fee, four-month expiry, 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing by country and Offsite Ads thresholds: Etsy fees and payments policy and Etsy payments policy. Regulatory operating fee: Etsy help centre.
- Etsy listing limits — 140-character title, 20 photos, 13 tags: how to create a listing, image requirements and using tags.
- Etsy Q2 2026 results — GMS, revenue, take rate, active sellers and active buyers: Form 10-Q filed 5 August 2026. Depop sale completion: Etsy investor relations, 30 July 2026. Restructuring: Form 8-K, 3 August 2026.
- Discogs fees, minimum and maximum per sale, and the per-currency table: what are the fees for selling on Discogs. No account, seller or listing fees, and the 15-million-release database: selling on Discogs. Payment processing and the PayPal requirement: PayPal Payments Solution FAQ.
- The Release requirement: how to sell music on Discogs and database guidelines. Grading values and relative worth: how to grade items. Photo rules: item photos guidelines. Newest-first default sort and seller requirements: Discogs seller policy and setting up a seller account. Countries where the Marketplace is unavailable: Marketplace availability.
- 2025 Collections record: Discogs news, 28 January 2026.
- Seller sentiment: Etsy fee arithmetic (September 2025), compulsory offsite ads (August 2026), sellers reading Etsy’s own Q2 numbers (August 2026), the 20-year rule explained to a new secondhand seller (January 2025), slowing Discogs sales (June 2026), a Discogs grading dispute (June 2026) and unpaid Discogs orders (September 2025). Read 31 August 2026.
- Channel capabilities and sync behaviour: verified against FLUF’s Discogs and Etsy integrations, August 2026.
Etsy publishes no vinyl-specific policy, so the position above is its general resale and creativity policy applied to records rather than a quoted ruling. Etsy’s shop set-up fee is confirmed to exist but its amount is not published on any Etsy page, so no figure is given. Etsy publishes no description character limit or maximum listing quantity. Discogs publishes no listing count, active seller count or GMV figure, so none appears here; figures circulating in third-party blogs are not sourced from Discogs, and Discogs publishes no character limit for listing notes. PayPal’s processing rate varies by country, card type and whether a transaction is international, so no single percentage is quoted. Worked examples convert Etsy’s dollar-denominated listing fee at an approximate rate and are illustrative. Community quotes are individual sellers’ experiences, not measured data. Fees and policies are current as of August 2026.
Related pages
- Discogs vs eBay — the other comparison every record seller makes
- Crosslist from Discogs to Etsy — moving vintage stock across
- Crosslist from eBay to Discogs — release matching explained in full
- Sell on Discogs — the full marketplace guide
- Sell on Etsy — fees, policy and listing strategy
- All marketplace guides
Frequently Asked Questions
Only if they are at least 20 years old. Etsy does not allow reselling except for craft and party supplies, vintage items over 20 years old, and gift baskets. A pressing from 2006 or earlier qualifies as vintage; anything newer is a resold commercially available item and is prohibited. Records you made or produced yourself are allowed as your own work, and objects made from records count as hand-altered items.
Not allowed. Etsy creativity standards specifically disallow resold commercially available items newer than 20 years old even if the item is designed to appear vintage. Eligibility follows the age of the pressing, not the age of the recording, so a 2022 reissue of a 1971 album is a 2022 item.
On a single mid-priced sale they are close — roughly 11 to 13% on Discogs including PayPal, and about 11.5% on Etsy for a UK seller. They diverge at the edges. Discogs caps its fee at 150 dollars per sale, so it is far cheaper on rarities. Etsy adds a 20 cent listing fee every four months whether or not the item sells, and once a shop passes 10,000 dollars of sales it is permanently enrolled in Offsite Ads at 12%.
No. Discogs listings stay up indefinitely at no cost. Etsy listings expire after four months and auto-renew at 20 cents, which is a meaningful running cost on slow stock — 300 listings is about 60 dollars a year in renewals before anything sells.
Not directly. Every Discogs listing attaches to a catalogued Release, so an uncatalogued pressing has to be submitted to the database first, and Discogs requires you to physically possess the item to submit it. Unlike Etsy there is no restriction on how new the pressing is.
Differently in kind. Etsy ranks by relevance, so titles, tags, attributes and photography change how visible you are, and Etsy sells advertising on top. Discogs has no ranking algorithm at all — its seller policy states the default order is newest listed first — and demand instead comes from Wantlists, where buyers record what they want and Discogs tells them when a copy appears.
Discogs requires two grades on every listing using the Goldmine scale, one for Media and one for Sleeve, and publishes what each grade is worth relative to Near Mint. Etsy has no grading vocabulary for records — you describe condition in your own words. That is easier to write and much less useful to a buyer who knows what VG plus means.
For sellers it is getting more crowded. In the quarter to 30 June 2026 Etsy reported 5.7 million active sellers, up 5.9% year on year, against 87.0 million active buyers, down 0.4%. Etsy also sold Reverb in 2025 and completed the sale of Depop in July 2026, and cut about 12% of its workforce in August 2026, so it has no music-adjacent property left.
If your inventory splits, yes. Put everything catalogued on Discogs and put the genuinely vintage, photogenic stock on Etsy as well. The overlap is your pre-2006 records, and that is exactly where you can accidentally sell the same copy twice — which is what crosslisting with sale detection prevents.
FLUF Connect is 1 pound for 7 days, then plans from 9 pounds a month on Starter. There is no free plan. Discogs charges nothing to list, so beyond the subscription your only fixed cost is Etsy own listing renewals.