Discogs is an essential tool for music fans and record collectors, offering resources to explore artists' discographies and tools to organize collections. With a vast discography database and global marketplace of vinyl, CDs, and cassettes, Discogs makes discovering rare finds and classic releases easy. It connects a worldwide community of collectors, all helping each other find and share the music they love.
- Discogs replaced the notification system within their monolithic application with Knock
- Discogs chose Knock to power translations to support their global user base
- Discogs reaches users at several touchpoints with cross-channel notifications
Timely notifications are a core feature of the Discogs user experience. Collectors on Discogs add merchandise to their “Wantlist” and receive inventory alerts when the item is available. Independent music sellers rely on a notification feed to see sales and conversations with buyers in one place.
Discogs enables a funk music enthusiast in Japan to do business with a vinyl shop in France, all while the site experience and notifications appear in each person’s native language.
The situation: migrate notifications out of a legacy system
Discogs required a notification system that would allow their engineering team to rapidly deploy new cross-channel notifications, particularly for inventory alerts. However, Discogs’ existing notification system, which was built in the previous decade as part of a monolithic Python application, became a blocker to the team’s ambitious roadmap.
“First we decided to migrate notifications out of the Python application and into its own service” explains Anbazhagan Ilangovan, the VP of Engineering at Discogs. “Then we discovered companies like Knock and decided it would be best to buy this capability rather than spend more engineering cycles building it ourselves”.
The solution: notification infrastructure for marketplaces
Discogs evaluated several notification platforms, including Novu, Courier, and Knock to find a solution that could meet their requirements as a two-sided marketplace. They needed a platform that provided tools for managing the entire notification lifecycle, including message localization for their international user base.
Discogs also required a platform with advanced observability features, so they could gain insights into the performance and effectiveness of their messaging. They wanted to track the entire journey of a notification, from the initial template to the final delivered message, and use this data to provide customer support and optimize their notification strategy over time.
Ultimately Discogs wanted a partner that would help accelerate the development of their notification experiences. Email is the most important touchpoint for Discogs’ users, but the team wanted a provider that would grow with them as they expanded to new channels.
After a thorough review of the market, Discogs decided to partner with Knock because of its powerful localization support, observability tools, and reliable infrastructure.
Reaching users with cross-channel notifications
When Discogs first integrated Knock, the initial goal was to power email notifications. But as the team experienced improved developer velocity, their focused project evolved beyond just a single channel. Next, Discogs adopted Knock to deliver in-app notifications as well.
Using Knock, Discogs was able to ship an in-app notification feed that included comments from the Discogs forum, communication between members, and order and shipping statuses on merchandise.
After Knock proved to be reliable in handling a large volume of notifications, the Discogs team decided to entrust it with notifications generated by the Wantlist, an essential tool for both collectors and sellers. The Wantlist allows members to track music they are eager to add to their collections and receive notifications when items they want are listed for sale in Discogs’ Marketplace.
“We were nervous about how much volume Knock could handle,” Blakely recalled. “Our users rely heavily on these alerts, and we couldn’t afford to have any missteps. But after running both our email and in-app workloads smoothly through Knock, we felt confident. So we moved our Wantlist alerts to Knock—and everything worked flawlessly.”
Now Discogs delivers over 48.5 million notifications to its users every month, across multiple channels, ensuring music fans never miss a beat.
Improved customer service
Knock delivered value to not just Discogs' engineers, but also their customer service team.
“The level of visibility Knock provides into our notification system was a game-changer. Our customer service team can now easily access the entire history of a notification, from the initial template to the final delivered message."
This enhanced observability has improved Discogs' ability to provide customer support. Previously, the only data a support team member could discover was if a message was successfully delivered to a user. Now with Knock when a user reaches out with a question or issue related to a notification, the customer service team can view the original notification template, see how it was populated with user-specific data, and track its journey through the workflow history.
This level of detail allows them to identify potential issues and provide more accurate, context-aware assistance to users.
Next: mobile app notifications
Discogs isn’t done growing with Knock. Adding to email and in-app experiences, Discogs will soon implement mobile notifications using Knock Mobile. Knock’s mobile SDKs, customizable in-app feed components, and lifecycle device token management will enable Discogs to effortlessly engage users on their mobile devices. As Discogs grows into mobile, Knock’s tooling will help the Engineering team provide end-users with granular control over their notification preferences.
Next: localization automation
"Localized notifications are a critical requirement for our global marketplace. Knock's API will allow us to use a service to automate localization, as well as maintain DRY principles in template management."
Knock’s translation support was designed in a way that lets teams maintain a single file for each language that needs to be supported. By contrast, in notification systems that compete with Knock if you have a welcome email template written in English and you want to support it in Spanish and French you must create two new email templates—one for each new language.
This was a dealbreaker for Discogs. Their marketplace supports nine languages. In Knock, the Discogs team only had to maintain nine translation files, while in other tools they would have had nine translations per template.
Discogs also plans to use Knock’s API to pull down templates into their codebase, automate the translation using a third-party service, then push them back into Knock using the Knock CLI. This streamlined workflow will save Discogs hundreds of hours in template and localization management.
Impact: increased velocity for shipping new product experiences
By adopting Knock, Discogs decoupled their notification system from their monolithic Python application, enabling them to rapidly expand from email-only notifications to delivering engaging user experiences across multiple channels.
Knock gives Discogs' non-technical teams visibility into the notification delivery process. This allows engineers to focus on core product development while other teams service customers.
As a result, Discogs significantly accelerated the delivery of new notification experiences to their user base. Knock proved to be a reliable and scalable notification infrastructure platform that grew with Discogs as they achieved milestones on their product roadmap with more agility.