I hadn't seen this posted yet. I received a note in a letter from CH today that states beginning April 15th they will no longer offer preferred shipping and processing to members who have fulfilled their purchase commitment. It also states CH is removing the $15 max SH per order. Looks like this is just another reason not to keep an account after is has been fulfilled.

wait a minute. You can keep an account open after buying the fulfilments??

In reality though the only people this really affects are their regular core customers. I really cannot remember the last time I paid shipping on a non-FunCash order anyway so this doesn't really affect most of us I would assume.

This doesn't seem good though. I would think if they are trying to increase profits in this way that they would tighten up in some other areas, such as the B1G1 codes and all the others goodies we take advantage of.

But than again we always worry that they will change something to make the deals less attractive and so far it's not really happened. Fingers crossed though

What an odd policy change. The max S/H encouraged some massive orders, which were no doubt very profitable for CH. And why in the world wouldn't they want to make folks who'd already fulfilled think that by staying beyond their fulfillment, they could get a "deal"?

One more reason to not hold on to any fulfilled accounts.

Agreed. This one is going to bite them in the ass.

I figured this would happen. BMG does not have a max ship charge and it is nearly impossible to get free shipping with them. CH just got far less attractive to me. This just killed a lot of their sales.

Even if Columbia House DID get rid of free shipping AND did away with BOGOF sale offers, we could still get DVDs for $5.76 (K7L) or $5.86 (LMT) each. That isn't a good deal? (Over in the Bargains forum people wet themselves if they can buy a new release DVD for less than $15!)

We are getting spoiled by the current $4.15 average cost sale offers! And we don't yet know if these deals are really going away. The 99¢ shipping and $15 shipping maximum are irrelevant for most of us here.

IMHO, of course.

^ Well put. It wasn't that long ago when we thought the 7.16 per title "standard" was unbeatable. Spoiled indeed...

^ And for years before that we happily averaged $9.28 with 7CY and its predecessors. $5.86 isn't too shabby.

I just want to know what HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc prices are going to be at Columbia House... DVDs are obsolete!

I agree with you, but I still think it is a bad move for CH. It's only going to encourage more people (not us, we do that anyway) to close their account immediately after they fulfill.

I doubt this effects us. Hopefully we will continue to see free shipping offers, which they might even offer more often without $0.99 shipping,

Yeah, I got one of these today. In a letter from CS telling me that that Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was not in stock and that they weren't expecting any, so sorry, order cancelled. Yeah, um, well, last time that I checked... Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a pre-order for June 13.

I'm probably one of the few people who hasn't taken the time to cancel/rejoin CH dozens of times. I've had 1 fulfilled account for about 3 years. The main problem is that DVDs I want usually fall into 2 categories: ones I want to buy right away or ones I won't buy until they're dirt cheap. The ones in the first group I get locally unless CH just happens to have a special going. This means at any given moment I'm extremely lucky if I can find 3 or 4 titles I want at CH, even at $5.76 or $5.86 each, and that's why I don't bother to cancel/rejoin. I end up averaging $7-$8 which is a bit more, but it's less work for me as I only buy a few DVDs per month. (Another issue is that the latest dataminer CH database never seems to be accurate for me. When I find a title I want, it often doesn't show up on CH's site. The database is full of obsolete and incorrect entries.)

I've only placed a handful of orders over the last few years, and every one of them has been a deal like $4.95 + 99c shipping or B1G1F deal with free shipping (especially the buy a $7.50 title, get a $19.95 title for free). So I don't think this shipping price change will affect me much because I only jump in on special offers with free or cheap shipping. The Buy 1 at regular price, get unlimited at 60% + normal shipping never has and never will interest me.

Also, if CH doesn't run any specials for a long time, then I might someday have 6 enrollment titles I want in which case I could cancel/rejoin as long as they haven't taken the good codes away.

AlfB's dataminer has a column called "Selection Available" that checks the titles on the member's site to see if they really are available. Having data on selections not available is useful because it lists titles that WILL become available but haven't been posted by Columbia House yet.

Since you aren't interested in those not available, just sort your spreadsheet by the "Selection Available" column using the descending option. This will put all the ones that are available ("yes") first in your spreadsheet. You can also sort them by "title" as a second option to alphabetize the list.

Lizard, thanks for explaining the dataminer list to me. I should've looked harder for the legend on how to read the columns.

^ You're welcome.

$4.15 is not cheap enough(for me anyways) i get the majority of my dvds by borrowing them from the library(free as long as I get them back within two days to avoid late fees). The only drawback is that they dont have that many new releases(most dvds are at least a year old) and almost no tv seasons.

Well, this does affect me in a big way, since I've had one single steady account open with CH for five years. The whole join/quit/rejoin strategy is frankly just too much trouble for me - not that I begrudge anyone else who does it, as I can certainly understand the usefulness. I have been quite satisfied getting the usual good deals that CH offers ongoing customers, plus the accumulation of Fun Cash, which usually pays off in the long run as well. I end up averaging out a bit more than $5.86 per disk - probably in the range of $7 or so with bonuses and extra good offers, but that was fine by me.

However, this change in shipping charge policy is really ridiculous. As mentioned above, it really only discourages the members with a single ongoing account who buy lots of DVD's in one go - which you'd think are the ones on which CH makes the most profit. This is most certainly going to be a discincentive to keeping an account open on an ongoing basis. I'm glad I am almost to the end of my wishlist, both released and unreleased. My permanently quitting or scaling back use of CH is looming in the not too distant future thanks to the changes that BMG has been making. And that is definitely their loss, as I am sure they made much more money off me (and other similar types of member accounts) than the standard CH member account.

The only explanation for this I can see is that perhaps CH is trying to discourage people from abusively buying and reselling. I can see where there might be accounts where people are buying hundreds of titles in one order (or however many orders it might take) at the max $15 shipping. I don't know if CH limited the max number of titles that could be purchased in one order (as I never maxed out an order), but if they didn't, there may have been resellers who were abusing the $15 max shipping.

Yes, it is hard to beat the prices of borrowing from a public library, and I speak as a trustee of our local library district. But here our small rural library has fewer than a hundred DVDs, all of them donated (we don't buy DVDs for the library). I have been giving the library some older classics, purchased from, you guessed it, Columbia House.

So, we don't have much that is new, as you say is the case with your library. And we purposefully don't want to compete with the local video rental store. By the way, we lend our videos and DVDs for a week, not just two days.

I buy DVDs to build my own "library", as is the case for many of us here. However, your way is the cheapest!

I doubt this is the reason. The maximum number of titles per online order is only 20. I can't imagine that too many people are ordering hundreds of titles over the phone. But even if so, CH could easily just flag those accounts.

Well, if that isn't the reason, then I'm at a loss for why they would do this. Everyone knows that CH's S&H is inflated anyway to recover some profit margin. They obviously do not pay $15 in postage to ship a box of DVD's via media rate mail anyway, let alone what the new charges will be.

With the new rates, if you order the maximum 20 titles, you'll be paying $42.79 in S&H (and that's not even accounting for higher rates for box sets). Columbia House must be joking. There isn't an online merchant that does anything remotely that ridiculous. CH can say goodbye to a lot of business unless they start running a lot more free shipping promotions or lower their per disk prices to offset that.

I guess that BMG must want to just kill off the DVD club altogether...

It sounds like you buy titles with a fulfilled account when there are good specials, just as I do, rather than cancel/rejoin which is a pain to save about $2-$3 x 7 DVDs (or about $20 for a lot of work). Since the usual buy 1 at full price, get unlimited at 50% or 60% off isn't a good enough deal for me (because I'd have to have dozens of other titles to get at 60% off and I'm usually lucky to have a couple I want), I always wait for other deals... many of which have included free or discounted shipping lately. I've never ordered enough to hit the soon-to-expire $15 limit in shipping fee, and in the last 2 years I don't think I've ever paid more than 99c shipping per DVD, and I usually get free shipping (for 3 or more DVDs when they run that common special).

My advice (unless they change the way they've been doing things lately) is to wait for a shipping promotion. I'm finding that most of the time patience pays off. If you can't get it from CH then often within a year BBY or CC will have the titles as $6.99-$7.99 weekly specials.

It's the same way where I live when I checked the libraries a couple years ago. Each library told me their funding for new media acquisitions (CD and DVD) was cut to $0 going forward, so there would be no new releases. In fact, their older titles were disappearing too because so many people didn't return or destroyed them. One of the library people told me the number of CDs/DVDs that got lost/destroyed by people each month was quite high (several dozen per month as I recall).

The only "new" stuff that shows up are donations, and unless you live by the library and check it frequently (which I don't) you'd never know what "new" stuff shows up, and chances are someone will snag it long before you do. In other words, I haven't been to the library for years. Besides, there's too much traffic where I live to make unnecessary trips for anything.

Are most other people's libraries like mine and Lizard's (i.e. a dismal CD and DVD section) or are ours the minority?

The reason is probably getting them more in line with how BMG operates. BMG doesnt have a max ship charge and it is nearly impossible to get free shipping. Much of their profit is probably made on shipping and handling.

BMG seems to have the music club locked down where your average cd cost is pretty much fixed and will never get to cheap.

CH has had many codes that get you better deals. I wouldnt be surprised to see these go away.

As for resellers, I doubt this is aimed at them. They probably open multiple accounts at P.O. Boxes, and join, fulfill and rejoin. As you see the average cost for that is cheap.

Make no mistake, this will hurt their sales.

I dont play the join, fulfill, rejoin mainly because as others have said, it is a lot of trouble. Looks like I am going to have to start though if I want a good deal at CH

Our library gets 2 or 3 copies of new popular releases like War of the Worlds, plus they are buying many TV sets, especially PBS mystery series like Sherlock Holmes, all the Sopranos, and Six Feet Under sets. Even anime. It definitely depends on where you live -- some municipalities really value library services, and some don't. Our property taxes are very high compared to many states, so we should at least get something for our money. I don't use the parks or golf courses. And I don't have kids in school. My only revenge is checking out lots of CDs and DVDs for free from the library.

This is distressing news about the shipping. Why would they do that to loyal customers? Thank you for buying from us. Here's a kick in the head.

Perhaps BMG's experience is that many people don't notice or pay attention to the shipping charge. My impression was that Columbia House was aware that their high shipping charges were a turn-off to some, perhaps most, customers. Hence the 99¢ preferred member shipping and the periodic free shipping deals.

If predictions here are correct, CH should see a drop in business from existing customers. If that happens, we might see some adjustments in the future. Remember that we CH membership optimizers are just a tiny fraction of the customers. It is the average customer — the one who thinks "50% off, when you buy one at regular price" and "Director's Selections" are good deals — who will determine the outcome of these new policies.