Another way of looking at this is that, yes, the majority of rentals are for new releases.

But, almost everyone has older releases that they missed that they want to rent.

If they chose one of the monthly rental plans, then for sure they are going to want to rent some older releases.

The reason a lot of that doesn't appear on your radar screen is that for each person, it is a different older release that they missed or just heard about for the first time.

Whereas, in contrast, almost everyone wants to rent "Snatch" or "Unbreakable" or "Hannibal" when they come out - so those get noticed, and are tracked more carefully in terms of how much quantity to buy. And, since they are new, the largest amount of rentals are in the first couple of weeks, and so you can estimate pretty closely based on the total membership count, how many copies to order.

In contrast, when you first buy the older releases, you can't know how much your membership is going to grow 8 months from now.

So, problems in getting more stock of older releases, and problems in knowing how much demand is out there (ie how many people have a title on their Wish List), are more critical than they look at first glance.

Everyone is going to have these problems, they just have them with different films, so it doesn't show up as one overall problem, even though it is that.

The reason that I joined RMD and, previously, NetFlix was to get a hold of discs that I can't get in my local store. I can get big releases with no difficulty, as can anyone living in any area in the US. I would hazard to say that a great deal of your customers join for the same reason. The problem is that the very discs I'm coming to you to rent are the very discs that you seem to give a rat's patootie about. I can guarantee you that if you continue to ignore catalog titles, then you will end up in the same boat as NetFlix. Please don't let that happen. Your company has been very good about asking for our opinions. That means a lot. However, you seem to spend most of the time on this board responding to people's wishes by saying, "Our business consultants tell us that this isn't what people really want, so we're going to keep on doing what we're doing." If everyone you ask here is telling you differently, could it just be that your high-paid business "experts" are wrong? Listen to your customers and do your best to please them. In the end, they're going to be the ones who decide your fate.

In response to RMDInc:

I dont think most members are having trouble getting new releases (I got Thirteen Days without any problems) but rather with older, yet popular, releases. My wishlist has a lot of older releases such as:

The Usual Suspects
This Is Spinal Tap
A Clockwork Orange
Clerks
Apocalypse Now
Reservoir Dogs
Die Hard
Platoon

Which have ALL been out out of stock for the past week. RMD should maybe concentrate some more on these. Although, I am renting some very good dvd's from RMD, they arent always the ones that I really want, but the ones I will settle for.

PS- It's great that you guys are taking advice directly from customers to help improve your business.


Edit-I just saw that 2001: A Space Odyessy shipped so I removed it from the list. Looks like some of those older dvd's just take a little more time to get than the new releases.

you guys were great for awhile not you suck as bad as Netflix as far as having anything in stock..I switched to you guys cuz you offered single rentals but in the last month or so you never have anything im looking for in stock like new releases

Are there any promotional codes for me to try out for the first time right now?

OK guys. I give up. Barely any of the titles on my list are available. I returned my last discs a week ago and they still haven't shown up as returned. I emailed you about the problem yesterday and didn't get a reply. One, two, three strikes, YOU'RE OUT! Sorry, NetFl... I mean RentMyDVD.

Ive had the exact same problem. Apparently one of my shipments was lost in the mail. I got an email from Roy Derham stating that RMD got it back but for some reason RMD is still only shipping 1 title at a time. I've sent 3 emails to RMD over the last 2 weeks and not one response since that first email. I guess my last resort is posting here since my emails go unanswered. So far I've been very happy with RMD service and selection but for over 2 weeks I've paid for the 2 out plan and have only been able to have 1 out. I know that you check this board often and would really appreciate a email regarding this matter.

Thanks-David

Matt,

I think the bottom line for alot of renter's is plain and simple. They want what they want and they want it now. Concerning the wish list when one is continually getting a selection from the middle of their list or near the bottom its a little unsettling. Now when one walks into a brick and mortar and see's an abundance of a new release but its out of stock on your site this becomes an issue with a renter. Are we getting what we want which is movies as you stated sure we are but alot of the times we are waiting a month to a month and a half for a hot new release. For me as of late its been Thirteen Days that has me EXTREMELY impatient lately waiting for over a month on this one. Before that Unbreakable, and the Legend of the Drunken Master to name a few. Family Man is another title but its just been released within 2-3 weeks.

Look at it from this view point. Being a movie buff. If its a title I wouldn't buy renting it first or borrowing it from a friend then viewing it, if its good I'll buy it and normally a DVD title is cheaper within the first week of release based on promotions and hot sales at stores.

Sure you can manage a list and be able to ship out movies based on some expert management system. But from what I've seen lately and I'm only speaking for myself. I can consistently get middle to bottom of the wish list titles from rentmydvd on new releases. Ones that aren't hot items. Occassionally I'll get a DVD that is higher in my queue or you do something special and put a title on hold for someone.

Last but not least DVDs I ship to you seem to take a little bit longer than dvds coming to me. I know I know you have no control over the post office. A part of me wants to do a tracking on a package to you. But I haven't maybe one day when I want to waste the cash I will.

The out of stock on new <b>HOT</b>releases and lately returns seem to be taking an extra day or so have been the only issues for me.

Steve

quote from sm8680:

"Now when one walks into a brick and mortar and see's an abundance of a new release but its out of stock on your site this becomes an issue with a renter. "

This is precisely what I was referring to in my original post about what seems to be an increasing problem with out of stocks. As a new RMD member, my original reference was actually about my experience with Netlix. I would have new releases on my list that were listed as "Long Wait", then I would walk into my local Blockbuster and see 30 copies of it. That prompted me to quit Netflix and try RMD. My 1st few weeks at RMD were a major improvement but in the past 2-3 weeks things seem to have taken a turn for the worse.

quote from RMD/Matt to my earlier post:

"When it comes to the New Releases and the big titles that you want to see are you getting what you want? I'm not asking if you are getting it on day 4 of its release, I'm asking if you are getting the titles that you want to see in a reasonable amount of time. Is this the situation you find yourself in? I honestly don't think anyone can say that this is the case. "

Actually a lot of people seem to be saying exactly that and I think they are being honest. What is a reasonable amount of time to wait for new releases? (At some point they become just another old release). Again I think the key point that moves online renters to go back to the renatl stores is if their choices are always out of stock online but sit there staring them in the face when they walk into Blockbuster. The store may not have it on New Release Tuesday but they seem to have them in stock and in sizeable quantities much faster than their online counterparts.

I will grant you that Blockbuster is more expensive and places time constraints on their rentals, not to mention the inconvenience involved in picking up and returning discs. As a result most of us will stick with an online source if that source can do a reasonably good job of providing titles - but there is a point where continued difficulty in getting titles you want will send buyers back to the brick & mortars.

I have to say, what I think is happening is RMD is getting bigger fast and it's hard to keep up. That is the same thing that happened to NetFlix. The only difference I see is RMD is willing to at least open a forum and request feedback. NetFlix would be difficult to even find a phone number.

Anyway, RMD if you are having the growing pains we all believe you are, just admit it and say, "sorry we're working on the issue"
At least that way we don't feel the same way about RMD that we do about NetFlix.

I was very satisfied with the service RMD was providing for the first few months, but I think you are getting bogged down with requests and emails that are affecting your customer service.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to see how you resolve all the problems I've been reading about lately.

2 Problems that I experienced w/ RMDVD
 

I am using Rentmydvd.com for over 5 month, no complaints till ... well... till last 2 weeks.

Problem #1: Sent back 2 titles, after 5 days of "delays", I e-mailed customer service. Prompt respond was received.

But ...

I reported that to RMDVD customer service, here is the excerpt from my email:

I sent back "Pledge" and "101 Dalmatians" in one envelope. And then "Quest For Camelot". According to your inventory database you have received 101 Dalmatians and Quest for Camelot on 8/2/01, but NOT Pledge. Please check your database.

Problem #2. On my wish list "Head over Heels" and "Saving Silverman" were #1 and #2 choices.
Today, I received AGAIN "101 Dalmatians" and "Quest for Camelot" even though Order history shows that I have out "Head over Heels” and "Pledge."

Response that I receied back is beyond believe:

I have accessed your account and found all DVD''s checked back in. If you have any further questions or concerns please contact me.

Regards,
Roy Derham
Customer Service Manager

Did he NOT read that I received the same title again plus "Head over heels"? According to him ... I can just keep the freebies.. hmm so much for caring.

Well, good thing I am not taking advantage of the system and sent back the movies.

P.S. On 8/13/01, marked another movie "Delayed in mail, received response on 8/16/01. They received the movie before the email.

Plohish - this is so common place on the web now. I can't tell you how many times I have sent emails to customer service at one company or another and gotten back a reply that showed that they did not read one word of the original email!! It is simply amazing (as well as infuriating!). There is no excuse for it. Maybe Matt (RMD) will have a comment on it when he gets back from vacation.

Well it's all been taken care of. Spoke to Roy Derham on the phone and he explained why my emails went unanswered. I guess they need customers to ONLY contact them through RMD's website (or by phone). I was was just sending a reply message to Roy's initial email and I guess that just kicks it to outlook express at RMD. He gave me half a month's credit so I'm pleased with the final result. Roy was very understanding and friendly. No comparision between netflix and RMD as far as customer service is concerned. THANKS RMD :)

Roy Derham has always been very professional.

well, from all my experiences, everyone at customer suport has been very good. Not only compared to just Netflix (who sucks) but speaking in general terms. They want to succeed with this thing and it shows.

Don't know if anyone else has ever had a similar problem, but here is an e-mail I just sent to rentmydvd:

This is now my third e-mail on the same subject. I have not received a reply yet.

On Tuesday of this week you received a movie I returned. The movie was "V". Instead of sending out the next available title in my wish list, I received an e-mail stating that 3 movies were sent to me. These 3 movies were at the bottom of my wish list and are still there even after you supposedly sent them. Something clearly went wrong here. I have not received these 3 movies in the mail, so I assume they were not really sent.

In addition, my order history shows 3 movies out, which is correct. This means that I am still due 1 movie to replace the one you received from me on Tuesday.

I also feel I am due some sort of credit for this mixup. I trust that I will hear from you today regarding this matter. Thank you.

I have had a very good experience with rentmydvd overall, so I'm not really upset about the problem itself. Not getting a reply to my e-mails bothers me.

See my above post.....

Are you sending your email through their site or are you sending it through your regular email server. If youre not sending it directly through their site they probably aren't checking it. Here's a link to the CS page at RMD. You'll need to log in first then click on "contact customer service" and send your message directly through RMD.

http://www.rentmydvd.com//service/se...=&sa=21&fcat=0

Hope that helps.

Amplified,

Thanks, I have done it both ways. An update to my last post is that I received one of those lovely canned replies that had absolutely nothing to do with the problem at hand. I'd rather get no reply than get one of those type. They absolutely infuriate me because I feel like I am being patronized.

Matt,

I know you will be back from vacation soon. I hope you can shed some light on what happened. Or for that matter, get the problem fixed since it looks like nobody else can look at my account and see that there is a problem. I now have only 2 DVD's out when I should have 4. My account is messed up for sure.

Why don't you advertise on DVD Talk?

Hi Everybody. I am back from my whirlwind vacation and, I suppose luckily, the forum seems to have some common themes to it, so, in this one instance, instead of addressing everyone on an individual basis I will ramble-on for awhile about the following topics:

Title Availability
Customer Service over the last few weeks
Minor notes to a few of you

First, per justwantmymovies' request: Sorry everybody. We are having growing pains. We are working on all of our problem issues. We hope that you will all help us continue in our efforts and hopefully through growth we will actually be able to better serve all of our customers. I say this in all sincerity and while brief, concise sentences are obviously not my style, I think that they are warranted here.


Now, let's to it:
Our exception files are now in place. The more popular titles that are older and/or smaller on customer Wish Lists are found by the system and reports are generated and orders are placed. This has been going on for about a week or so. If we get backorders or have other availability issues through our distributors we are going to purchase the titles on the retail market.
We are going to have to do away with some studios' title libraries. The simple fact is that these (smaller and few) studios are not making quality DVDs in terms of actual physical discs. No matter what, the discs break on their first or second shipment. Carrying these titles is simply not worth the trouble, and there is nothing worse than opening your mailbox to find a broken disc. These titles will first be made 'Not Available' and then will have the breakage reason listed in the title description on the site.
One problem with availability will still be something that HepDude alluded to in an earlier post: if very few people have a title on their Wish Lists it will, at least for a little while now, be "below our radar" and may go unnoticed. We are going to take care of the popular stuff first and then work our way around to the less-in-demand.
New Releases have almost reached a balance, but we're not quite there yet. Availability is still high and the wait is supposed to be short- the situation should be improved (because of some changes we are going to make to the internal order and shipping process) by mid-September.

Customer Service over the last few weeks:
We screwed a few things up when we changed-over from direct e-mail to web-based correspondence. Things are still a bit screwed-up as far as I and some customers are concernd, Things will continue to be screwed-up for a little while longer. We are going to further change the web-based customer center and it is likely to lead to a bit more confusion; however, at least this time I won't be on vacation.
First, there was supposed to be an auto-generated message to anyone that sent a non-web based message saying "Hey, use the new customer center on the site." This message generation was faulty and nobody caught it- so e-mails went unanswered because we thought everyone that went about it this way was getting the auto message.
Second, since I was out of town and not answering calls and we got a deluge of mail on the web-based system, some non-CS people tried to help out and more confusion ensued and some people got responses but no action and vice-versa. The situation is now mellowed considerably and we should be back to a high level of CS very soon. I apologize to anyone and everyone that got shafted or frustrated with us because of this. We did some unprofessional things regarding our change-over and our methods and I am sorry. Do keep posting if you do not feel that it improves (or if you feel that it does, of course).
Now, just to make sure that everyone did (eventually) get what was wrong fixed, please use the customer center once more if you are still experiencing a problem. I realize what a pain it is to have to keep doing it, but if there's still a problem with your account then we screwed-up even more and we will fix it.

kirky:
Just ask in the Customer Service Center. Someone will hook you up with a code.

And by the way, everybody here, that goes for anyone that hasn't yet used a coupon....

gkleinman:
Just so that you know, it was probably 6 months ago or so now, but I did pass your advertising information on to our marketing department. If you would like to re-send the information I will pass it on to them again or you can contact us and we can put you in contact with them. Call the customer service line (510) 739-2660 and just explain the situation.

___________________________________________
Talk to you next week; same matt time, same matt channel.....
-Matt

Another at the bottom of the list selections being sent to me today in part of rentmydvd. Had 14 titles in the wish list. I simply no longer can continue to recomend rentmydvd.com. We even stated what would happen before the stock issues became a problem like they are now. Which is very disheartening because rentmydvd.com even though they have this thread were most stores don't were advised what would happen before it happened. AKA the reason why most of us left netflick.

Thirteen Days going on another week. What an oxymoron huh.

Anyways titles from the botton of my list were sent. If your looking for a rental solution I'd highly recomend waiting a month or 2 until rentmydvd.com can sort out these obvious problems. If its a matter of buying more stock when more people come on board buy more stock. Its not something where you let more people come on board and have them rent from existing stock which results in long waits on titles.

Also right now there are titles higher in my queue that are available in my wish list. But thats another issue I will address. Regardless of their availability or stock site. This is a bigger issue with me than bottom of the wish list choices being sent. If I receive bottom of the wish list choices I SURE AS HECK don't wan't to see anything above those choices in my wish list as in stock regardless of their situation for it makes me feel slighted.

(The above paragraph was a mainstream stock redistribution) Based on seeing the order history and wishlist and refreshing as the stock was being redistributed. I'd recomend not showing the mainstream stock redistribution.

Then I just refreshed the screen and 9 of 12 selections are out of stock. 2 have status of coming soon. So I saw my wishlist in mainstream as the stock was being redistributed for today. So its apparent that rentmydvd.com uses some sort of expert system analysis that tries to get the most amount of DVDs flushed out to the users as a whole which is good for the whole but terrible for the individual. In essence if I have a selection that no one else wants in my wish list or a title that has low want list numbers then I will definitely get that selection. Even though a choice like Thirteen Days was available to me it wasn't shipped to me due to high demand for I had titles in my wish list that were of low demand and those low demand titles were shipped in order to maximize the stock redistribution. I'm going to state that if they don't do something with their inventory and if more people come on board then their will come the time when they won't be able to ship anything out to individual renters due to high demand on titles.

Sorry for the rant just very disheartened here. I hope some of the above makes sense.

Here's another customer service request I sent to RMD today regarding my problem explained last week in this thread:

Ok guys, there is still a problem with my account. It appears that my account is not releasing a new movie after I return one. I sent several previous e-mails explaining this last week. You had to "manually" release two movies for me. Another movie was received by you on Thursday but nothing has been released from my wish list. Two things need to be done here:

1. My account needs to be fixed.
2. I should receive some sort of credit because movies have not been released from my wish list in a timely manner after you receive in a return. This started on Monday, 8/13.

And please do not miscontrue this e-mail as being about mailing times or out of stock issues. That is not what I am talking about here. Thank you very much.

This is pretty good, especially the change to purchase at retail as a last resort.

If - at some point in the future - you can extend this to all titles that are on a Wish List, so that a report is generated for any title that is on a Wish List for more than x weeks, that would completely cover the remaining situations.

By the way, another thing that needs to be done is that someone needs to go through the multi-disc sets and re-order all those titles that were not shipped originally. You mentioned months ago that there were multi-disk sets where you were missing some volumes because the distributor did not have them, and so only shipped some of the volumes. In most cases, this makes your multi-volume set useless. So, it would be cost effective to "fill in" now, for example you can rent 6 disks for the price of the 3 ones that you are missing.

Too many disks unplayable
 

I've only been a member for < 2 months (switched from that OTHER conmpany) and already I have had 3 out of 8 titles be defective. This is pathetic.

Me, Myself & Irene, Record of the Lodoss War (part 2) and Family Man.

Looking at the disks, I noticed a few things:

1. Your stamping "rentmydvd" on the PLAY side of the disk
2. It looks like you (or customers) are using brillo pads for cleaning these things.

There is nothing more frustrating than getting disks that are unplayable. It's not worth the 5 day wait to get another disk...much easier to go to blockbuster and rent the darn thing.

These disks are so bad, I find it hard to believe a customer wouldn't have complained when they sent them in BEFORE I RENTED THEM.

tman

Kinda off topic, but I'm always amazed at the condition of some of the discs. I just can't even begin to understand what people do to the discs to cause them to look like they do. I've had 3 bad ones from RMD so far, Contender twice and something else once (can't remember what it was, it started locking up at the end and it turned out to be a sucky movie so I didn't care that I didn't get to finish it). One of the Contenders was cracked, the replacement had scuff marks all over it like someone dropped it and it skidded across their driveway. My worst ever though was Enemy at the Gates from Blockbuster (this was before they showed you the discs). It looked like someone literally took a knife and was doodling on the bottom of the disc.

I kind of agree, I would think RMD would take a few extra seconds and look at the bottom of each disc when its returned/before its rented. If it looks scuffed to hell they need to give it to someone to test out before shipping. Like a dedicated employee that watches a couple minutes from each chapter break to make sure they all play. I can see discs cracked in the mail, but they shouldn't be able to get scratched/scuffed that way.