milo bloom

The titles I needed to get over $50 (for free shipping) were out of stock, so I'm going to pass this time around and save my $10 credit for another time.

Got a bunch of vet bills anyways, need to have priorities.

LPMA

Just got a message saying my order shipped!

bobertkay99

Bro... You're most likely sitting in front of a computer. Clicking a button on your mouse, and typing a couple of letters on your keyboard. It can't be THAT MUCH of an inconvenience. I placed my order yesterday approx. an hour after the sale started. Sure, it probably took me that much time to order it since I kept getting that "Something went wrong" error page every couple of steps, but I was using my iPhone and taking care of other stuff at the same time, so I wasn't really sweating it. Orders were obviously getting through while you were struggling to load the pages, otherwise things wouldn't have gone out-of-stock so quickly. Maybe you need to look into upgrading your Internet service or something?

Joe6286

While the site was very slow and I had to refresh many many times, I did get an order in last night. There were a few I wanted that were backordered but I ended up buying Blow Out, For All Mankind, The Thin Red Line, and Videodrome. Haven't gotten a shipping confirmation yet but it is supposed to ship today.

Sondheim

I couldn't get the site to work before I went to work yesterday, and when I got home everything I wanted was out of stock. It was a pretty small order anyways, but I might try again when they send around their new coupon.

As for "we're only giving them a pass because it's Criterion" - well, that's partly true. It's precisely because they're a smaller, specialty company that I'm willing to give them more of a pass than if it happened to a major retailer. Yes, this has been annoying, and they should be criticized for it. One can hope that they'll learn from the mistake. This has been a negative experience (as have their mistakes of the past, like the manufacturing errors in the Three Colors and Carlos discs, etc.) but not a strong enough one to affect my overall opinion of the company. It's not, however, just because it's Criterion - if the same thing happened to Flicker Alley or Cinema Guild or Second Run or Masters of Cinema or Kino or Milestone or one of the other many boutique labels (not that any of those have the widespread name recognition of Criterion) that sell titles on their company website, I would feel the same way. It's an unfortunate planning mistake on their part - and I'm sure they're regretting it, since they probably lost a fair amount of money from people who wanted to make orders but weren't able to - but it's not enough to change my overall appreciation of the company. The things that I like most about Criterion - the generally high quality of their releases and their excellent customer service in the rare instances of problems - haven't been affected.

izatright

I only shop at Criterion for their 50% sales, and even then, only if it's off their sale prices. That they screwed this sale up has made little negative impression on me as a BRAND, even if as a viable venue for shopping.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I guess it must be fortunate if your biggest issue at the moment is a website you have to refresh the pages a few times to get it working. I didn't see any rage at all when Disney was doing the daily deal in December and they were giving out a mystery DVD for 75 points. That site was getting hammered and it took me over an hour to get the order to finally go through. Even then it didn't seem 100% if it went through or not.

LPMA

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the titles that went Out of Stock? I know of Godzilla and Three Colors, but that's it. I placed an order for 10 titles about 6 hours into the sale and everything was still available.

E Unit

Belle Du jour went OOS.

jrsl76

Three Outlaw Samurai
La Jette/Sans Soleil

OOS

RetroFuturist

Stagecoach and The Killing also went OOS.

I have no complaints about this sale. They got hammered for the better part of the day, but I was still able to place an order (without refreshing!) by the late afternoon. I picked up 10 titles, which is the most Criterion I've ever bought at once.

jwstl

A few times? For hour after hour yesterday, no amount of refreshing was allowing me to order anything. "A few times" may have been your experience but please don't try and speak for everyone.
As I said before, what makes a company great is how they respond to issues. And Criterion is one of the best.

E Unit

Just received an email:

Wow! That was a crazy twenty-four hours.

We were so excited for our Valentine’s Day sale, which was supposed to be a chance to show off the new My Criterion features of our website. But as soon as the sale began, we knew we had a problem. With the initial flood of traffic, the site ground to a virtual halt, and our developers spent the day disabling many of the new features in order to speed up the site. The performance improved but still isn’t where we’d like it to be when there are many people using the site at the same time.

We know this has been a frustrating experience for many of you, so please know we take our customer service very seriously and will respond to all of your e-mail questions. Our customer support team is typing away as you are reading this, so hang in there! Also, a big thank-you to the people who wrote in to say they had a positive experience during the sale. Your kind words mean a lot!

If there was something you wanted but you were unable to get your order through before our stock ran out, now’s your chance. We’ve set up a promo code that will allow you to backorder any title that went out of stock before the sale ended, and we'll honor the sale price. No need to rush to the site; the code will be active until 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Thursday, February 16. Quantities are limited to one copy of each title/edition per customer. Please note that we cannot combine these backorders with previously placed orders.

Just enter the promotional code REDO on your shopping cart page at Criterion.com to apply the discount. Please bear in mind that the discount is only for backordered items (you will see a “Temporarily out of stock” message when adding them to your shopping cart). Please note it will take a few weeks for these items to be back in stock.

Thanks again for your patience and support!
The Criterion Collection

bluthswede6

Promo code "Redo" on all backordered items from now until 5et tomorrow. Just put an order in and it was very painless

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

We were all connecting to the same web server and they don't single out some people over others. I did my order shortly after the sale started.

CardiffGiant

I agree with everything you've said. I watched their Facebook page steadily as everything went to a grinding halt yesterday. The person responding to the asinine posts has more patience than I would. After the first dozen or so people asking, "what's going on?" or "TRYING to place and order," I would have stopped responding.

No company is immune from this kind of thing happening and over the years, most of us here have seen it from just about every retailer we use. I respect them for their handling of the situation: sending an e-mail to customers with an apology, a REASON, and a solution (OOS titles can be ordered now through 16th) is just about all I need for my slight inconvenience. For the record, I put an order in yesterday afternoon and didn't have much of a problem after a few refreshes.

I probably take this approach because e-mails to Criterion get answered, they put out a quality product, and I like the simple, yet comprehensive design of their website. I think, more likely, I'm taking this approach because I went through the PSN debacle last year and that is a playbook for how NOT to handle a problem. Also, I have Netflix....and I've ordered from DD(D).

MoviePage

Ended up ordering 3 BDs: The Killing, Island of Lost Souls, and Cronos. Mainly ordered 3 to push my total up past the "Free Shipping" threshold. I probably would've ordered more if they had provided me with the $10 coupon that so many others received.

I also added a "My Criterion" link to my signature here, and I'd be interested in seeing others' as well.

John Galt

^^

I placed my order knowing that I can order these titles from BN for less, but Criterion is worthy of paying a few extra dollars due to the consistently high quality product they provide.

ResIpsa

They acknowledged the problem (immediately). They extended the sale to include backorders (pretty much immediately). Anyone who still wants to hate on them has some serious entitlement issues. No sales tax for California orders > B&N sale.

Shannon Nutt

Be sure to check your discount before checking out...for me, the "REDO" code only worked on the following I wanted:
Traffic
Charade
Godzilla
America Lost and Found

The code did NOT work on the following Blu-rays, even though they're all OOS/Backordered:
For All Mankind
Something Wild
The Thin Red Line

LPMA

I followed suit!

ETA: I guess I still need 21 posts...

crikey

The Killing, High and Low, and Crumb all appear to be working with the discount for me right now. I haven't completed checkout, but the REDO discount is registering for all of them in my cart. FYI.

Gobear

Done and done.

Pizza

I normally totally agree with you on most things but not in this case. I had the same problems and no amount of refreshing was solving it and ultimately gave up trying to order. (I didn't have this issue during the last 50% off sale they had.) You can say if you only refreshed a few times all you want but at some point of getting nowhere I had to give up. I was home all day and kept going back trying to order. I even emailed them about the issue with no real help. I made a conscious effort and it was a fail. Granted that Criterion got caught with their pants down, but ultimately it is still their problem and their pants to pick up.
On another note, I think it's great they followed through with the redo coupon but why limit it to only out of stock items? Some of the stuff I want is in stock so I still can't get the discount and I still won't be placing an order. You can't expect your customers to do battle just to place an order. I'm glad that not everybody had similar issues or were willing to spend the added time to place an order. You earned your discounts. I tried so I'll just wait for the next B&N sale to grab what I want. I'm not anti-Criterion because of this experience and will continue to buy their product, but I probably won't get overly excited when they announce another online sale.

kefrank

REDO code worked for me on Tokyo Drifter, Three Outlaw Samurai, and Rushmore BDs.