DVD & E-Commerce Survey

DVD & E-Commerce: A review of the survey findings

Over the course of four weeks in October and November, DVD Talk ran four individual surveys asking people about their shopping experiences at each of the industry’s four leading online DVD retailers: 800.com, Amazon.com, Reel.com and DVDExpress. A total of 3,445 surveys were completed.

The survey results opened insights into the power and success of coupons on the Internet, the important role of prices, and the individual strengths and weaknesses of the leading online DVD e-commerce companies.

Thanks to everyone who took this opportunity to voice their opinions about shopping online for DVD's, we hope you will find these results as facinating as we do. Also a special thanks to i-OP the company who helped make this survey happen with thier new cutting edge Java-based survey technology

Key findings:

Reel.com has emerged as the leading e-commerce site for DVDs. It appears that they have built this leadership by focusing on coupons and pricing. This position has also been re-enforced by a strong selection and pre-order availability. But customer support is also important for customers, and here Reel.com appears to be very weak, especially compared to companies such as Amazon.

In the selection process for DVD movies, Reel.com, DVD Talk and 800.com are the most visited locations

Not only are many customers visiting Reel.com, those who did were far more likely to consider this site as their favorite for DVDs than customers visiting other DVD e-commerce sites

Coupons and price were important elements in influencing the selection of favorite web sites

We asked Reel.com customers how often they used coupons when they purchased DVDs -- almost half of them always used coupons. 77% of them also said that the availability of coupons was very important in determining when they purchased DVDs

We also found that DVD customers are extremely sensitive to prices -- we found that the upper limit of the acceptable price range for a mainstream DVD movie to be only around $18.50

The third most important area for customers for DVD site was selection -- Reel.com and DVD EXPRESS were considered better than 800.com and Amazon in this area

Pre-orders were also considered important to most customers

In the pre-order area, Reel.com was perceived as much better than other sites

As a result of leadership in coupons and other areas, we found that Reel.com customers were the most loyal

To estimate this loyalty, we asked customers if they would still buy from a site even if they could get the same movie from another site for $1 less. Reel.com customers were more likely to buy at that site even at the slightly higher price.

But, when asked what was important after price, customer service and speed of delivery ranked very high among our respondents

A surprising number of customers experienced problems with delivery of DVDs from Reel. com. Amazon appears to be doing the best job in this area

A quarter of all Reel.com's customers have had to return products back to the company -- much higher than any other company

And those who returned products to Reel.com found it more difficult than with other vendors

In part, due to this, Reel.com customers had to use customer support call centers much more than other customers -- 2.5 times greater than Amazon customers

And overall satisfaction with Reel.com call center was lower than all of the others. Amazon had the highest level of customer satisfaction with their call center

this summary was prepared with the support of i-OP, a company that is creating powerful new ways to listen to customers.