How to Automate Common Ground

One copy sells in the shop and has to vanish from five listings

Common Ground, which most sellers write with the domain attached as common-ground.io, is an online manager, eshop and point of sale made for independent record sellers. Vinyl, CDs, merch, and books if you carry them.

A record shop's stock is odd in one particular way: most of it is one copy deep, every copy carries a condition and a pressing, and the same album can be four products depending on which press is in the sleeve. Common Ground keeps that catalogue in the Backoffice, sells it through the Eshop, rings it up on the iOS point of sale, and publishes it to Discogs, Bandcamp, eBay, Meta and Google Merchant.

So the shop exists in five places at once. The record on the wall behind the counter is also a Marketplace listing and a product page on your own site, and all of them have to agree by Saturday evening.

Buying a collection is an afternoon of looking things up

Selling a record over the counter is the quick part. Buying one is not.

Somebody brings in two crates to sell, and pricing them means going title by title through what copies in that condition have actually been going for. A regular is hunting one pressing and has asked you to keep an eye out. A distributor's pre-order sheet arrives as a PDF with a Friday deadline on it. Record Store Day allocations come back and do not match what people reserved. Twelve mail orders need packing, and one buyer says his parcel never came.

Hardly any of that is typing. It is opening a page, reading a number off it, and writing that number down somewhere else.

Common Ground

Offers made from real numbers Every title in a trade-in crate checked against what copies in that condition have recently sold for, before anybody names a price.

The pressing a regular is waiting for A specific copy watched at the condition and price you set, with a message drafted the moment one turns up.

Bins that stopped moving Titles that have sat since March ranked by what they cost you, so a markdown happens while somebody still wants them.

The Discogs import means nobody types a tracklist

Common Ground takes a lot of the keying out. The Inventory Manager imports listing and release information from Discogs, tracklists included, or from the Creators database with audio snippets attached, and books can be pulled in by ISBN from ISBNdb and Google Books. A CSV import handles a migration off another marketplace.

From there, bulk edition finds, replaces, appends or removes properties across the whole inventory rather than item by item, and sticker printing runs QR or barcode labels off in bulk so a checkout is a scan. Sales arrive in one place whether they happened in the shop, on the Eshop or on a connected channel, and a packing list gets them out of the door. The Sales Report covers amounts, tax and what sold over a period, and exports can be filtered by supplier, customer, label or listing.

What all of that keeps in step is your own inventory and your own orders.

It does not go out and read the Marketplace for you: what other sellers are asking for that pressing this week, what a copy in the condition you are being offered actually sold for last month, whether the distributor has posted the pre-order sheet yet, or what a label announced this morning.

Every title in the crate has a public price already

What a copy is worth is not a secret, but it changes from week to week.

The two crates on the counter, every title checked against recent sold prices and against what is already in your bins, so an offer is made from a screen instead of from memory. The rare pressing a regular has been after, watched at the condition and price you set and flagged the moment a copy appears. A label announcing a repress of something you are holding three copies of at the old price.

The calendar matters too. A tour routing published this week that puts an artist in town in October, so the back catalogue is in the racks the week they play. The distributor's pre-order sheet read the day it goes up rather than the day it closes.

Then the end of the trade nobody enjoys. A courier's tracking page for the parcel a buyer says never came, checked before you answer him. Reservations for Record Store Day counted against the allocation you were actually given, so the awkward conversations happen early. Bins that have not moved since March, ranked by what they cost you rather than by how tired they look.

The tabs can be opened by something that does not get bored

That is an hour of tabs, and tomorrow it will be another one. The looking up is repetitive by nature, which is exactly why it slips.

WebRun is an agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Common Ground, the Marketplace, a distributor's page or a courier's tracking site, reads what is on the screen and writes the answer into the sheet or the channel your shop already uses.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it half way. Anything that would change a price or a listing, and anything going to a customer, is drafted and waits for you.

Every workflow below says which sites it signs into and what it brings back.