criterionforum.org

For £12-24, you can currently buy this film + 6 other amazing Sirk films in a new DVD boxset on Amazon UK (£1-74 each). Or for £7-75 extra, just this one film on blu-ray. That may not faze the rabid fans, most of whom probably post on this forum, but to the average customer it's just not competitive pricing. Baring in mind also that most Universal catalogue titles sell on blu-ray for £6-£8. I worry not only for my own wallet here, but for future Sirk releases on blu-ray when this one under-performs.

Related to this, the last few times I've pre-ordered MoC titles on Amazon the price has then dropped within 48 hours of release. The obvious response to this, unfortunately, is not to place pre-orders anymore.

I have that set and I bought it as a stop gap as it is not perfect. I'll definitely be buying the new MoC Blu and any other Sirk Blus they release in the future.

bdlover wrote:For £12-24, you can currently buy this film + 6 other amazing Sirk films in a new DVD boxset on Amazon UK (£1-74 each). Or for £7-75 extra, just this one film on blu-ray.

With a ton of exclusive extras. And on Blu-ray. (I thought you were the Blu-ray guy.) And it's already available for only £13.99 from Moviemail. And it will surely be available for that price (including shipping) direct from Eureka shortly.

I assume you would find a price of £2 or £3 to be more fair? In that case, please demonstrate how MoC might manage to turn a profit with that kind of pricing.

£13-99 on Movemail is okay, but I imagine MoC shift far more discs through Amazon so should be making more of an effort to control pricing there or this will impact on sales.

Right click delete the internet

Gregor Samsa wrote:They're typically a few pounds cheaper (with free worldwide shipping to boot) on Eureka's site, too.

It is most likely to drop around £14-15, as usual, indeed.

As, as swo perfectly said, it's on HD, with a shitload of extras, is available free of shipping worldwide (probably more interesting for me being in France than others but still) and will likely be shipped 1-2 weeks earlier than the release date. Plus, all the money goes to MoC, and you get Kevin for CS, which is the best CS guy I've ever known.

I'd rather pay £1-2 (because Amazon never dropped more than this VS MoC for a new release) to get all this (and give all this to MoC).

I mean, at some point, it would be nice to compare what's comparable (not to sound like a fanboy, but really, come on...).

bdlover wrote:Related to this, the last few times I've pre-ordered MoC titles on Amazon the price has then dropped within 48 hours of release. The obvious response to this, unfortunately, is not to place pre-orders anymore.

The last Criterion I pre-ordered from Amazon.com dropped price within a few days of release. The obvious response to this is, unfortunately, not to place pre-orderes there anymore. \:D/

bdlover wrote:For £12-24, you can currently buy this film + 6 other amazing Sirk films in a new DVD boxset on Amazon UK (£1-74 each). Or for £7-75 extra, just this one film on blu-ray.

You do realize that you can get MoC releases for free, don't you (cumstain)?

You can actually get most of them for free legally too. I think something like 80% of the time that you place an order direct from Eureka, they accidentally send everything twice and then tell you just to keep the bonus copies.

And on top of the double shipment, you might also get double free gift movie ! \:D/

You're all of course extremely clever for shopping around. Regardless of what you think about it though, Amazon will account for the bulk of sales. You might say consumers are lazy, or you might say they have better things to do than scour the internet for the best price on every purchase they make, registering with an endless string of small e-tailers who may go bust the following day. Therefore if Amazon overcharge and discourage pre-orders on MoC titles that's going to have an effect on sales. Since I'd personally like to see more Sirk on blu-ray the problem seems worth pointing out, but each to their own.

Amazon's prices fluctuate constantly. It's not likely to stay at this price, so I'm not sure why you're so fixated on it. If you'd rather buy it from Amazon, just wait until they lower the price.

Most people probably know this already, but there are also excellent tools for keeping track of Amazon price fluctuations, such as Pricenoia and CamelCamelCamel.

Isn't this tempest in a teacup irrelevant, since if you pre-order the disc at whatever price from Amazon, you'll only end up paying whatever the lowest price happens to be over the intervening months? Or don't they do that any more?

They still do.

I think he's worried that he'll be sold the disc at that price, and then a couple of weeks after that the price drops even lower.

If you really seriously need to get something the day it comes out, I guess initial higher pricing is just a law of the marketplace you'll have to live with. Personally I try to save my pennies by almost always waiting for the price drops (I think the Third Window Kurosawa disc is the only thing I've ever pre-ordered). I hope to balance that decision out ethically by ordering directly from everyone who offers that possibility (Eureka, Cinema Guild, New Wave, Third Window)

Then, it's just a question of paying for one's impatience.

I mean, when I buy something at a "high price" on Day One, I know I'm just paying for my eagerness, and that it's likely to go down within a few weeks.

Even at Eureka : I pre-order almost everything from them when it's possible, but I know it will drop at some point, and it does. All the BDs they have reduced the price this week, I bought them full price. I'm not unhappy with it, but I know I could have waited to get them cheaper.

I just didn't want to wait, and I paid the price for it. That's the rules of the game, that's it.

tenia wrote:Then, it's just a question of paying for one's impatience.

I mean, when I buy something at a "high price" on Day One, I know I'm just paying for my eagerness, and that it's likely to go down within a few weeks.

Even at Eureka : I pre-order almost everything from them when it's possible, but I know it will drop at some point, and it does. All the BDs they have reduced the price this week, I bought them full price. I'm not unhappy with it, but I know I could have waited to get them cheaper.

I just didn't want to wait, and I paid the price for it. That's the rules of the game, that's it.

At least at Eureka they don't drop the prices 2 months after they've been released.
The stuff Eureka have dropped the prices on this week have been out for a year or more.
When you buy a Eureka title you can be confident that the prices are going to remain the same for a long time. There have been a couple of exceptions but not too many.

Take alook at Arrow's store. They've dropped the prices on all their 2013 releases(to date) to around £8 or £9.

Used to be that distributors and e-tailers wanted to encourage pre-ordering, because it allows them to better estimate the level of demand for a product. A good pre-order price also means that customers can buy the disc as soon as they hear about it, rather than waiting around for a better price and maybe forgetting about it or spending their money on something else in the interim. For these reasons, dropping the price a week or even a day after a disc is released and thereby strongly discouraging pre-orders just doesn't strike me as in the interests of the distributor, but maybe things have changed.

bdlover wrote:Used to be that distributors and e-tailers wanted to encourage pre-ordering, because it allows them to better estimate the level of demand for a product. A good pre-order price also means that customers can buy the disc as soon as they hear about it, rather than waiting around for a better price and maybe forgetting about it or spending their money on something else in the interim. For these reasons, dropping the price a week or even a day after a disc is released and thereby strongly discouraging pre-orders just doesn't strike me as in the interests of the distributor, but maybe things have changed.

There is a couple of things mixed up here.
Having a low price for pre-order who increase artificially the demand. yes, it allow to pre-order more, but the point is now to have a crazy first month, and then dropping to almost nothing. It will attract a lot of "day one" customers who are happier than ever to pre-order as planned but at a lower price, and a few other people, but honestly, not a lot of extra people. If you're not interested, you're not buying. You might attract a few people willing to give it a shot, but that's all.

However, keeping for a long time a "high" price might, indeed, make some people put this title aside and then, look for something else and "forget" about it.
However, what I just wrote above also applies here : if you're interested, you're likely not to forget about it, you'll just avoid a really high price, but the usual price should be most of the time quite fine.

I don't know how many sales are done on a normally discounted price VS RSP VS hugely discounted price but I would be surprised to learn that normally discounted price is not the major selling price.

Finally, I'm unsure about the role of the distributor here but I'm quite sure that MoC / Eureka are not especially responsible for the price of a release dropping on Amazon 1 week after its release day.

Bürgermeister wrote:Take alook at Arrow's store. They've dropped the prices on all their 2013 releases(to date) to around £8 or £9.

Which left me quite disappointed because I pre-ordered most of them earlier at a nice discounted price, but not discounted by so much. But even so, Arrow does regular promotional sale with pre-orders, bundling 2 movies together (2 De Palma, 2 Jack Hill, etc etc) for a nice price.

Bürgermeister wrote:Take alook at Arrow's store. They've dropped the prices on all their 2013 releases(to date) to around £8 or £9.

Those are sale prices, only good through the end of the month.

For the sake of one's sanity, it's much better to focus on paying a fair price for a product than the all-time best price. You'll be able to pick up any new MoC Blu from Eureka itself for around 13.99, which is a fair price for any of their releases. Unless you don't want it that much, and then you get to wait until it cycles around to a sub-ten-quid sale price.

Everybody loves a bargain, but if you really want something, just go for the first decent price and save yourself lots of angst. Occasionally an incredible bargain will coincide with an urgent need, but most of my greatest deals have been on things that I might never have bought as MSRP, or only came onto my radar when the price dropped into silly-money territory.

Once I've bought something, I don't think of its price anymore (unless my wife asks me about it). ;~}

Pre-orders for Simon Killer, The Tarnished Angels, and La Notte are now available via Eureka's site.

And a short-time bonus offer:

[O]rder all three in the same order before Midnight Sunday 4th August and you will receive a copy of Two-lane Blacktop absolutely free!

Idk what's sadder, that MoC have so many copies sitting around of Two-Lane Blacktop they're giving them away or that somebody out there might actually be persuaded to buy and then to watch Simon Killer because of it.

bdlover wrote:For £12-24, you can currently buy this film + 6 other amazing Sirk films in a new DVD boxset on Amazon UK (£1-74 each). Or for £7-75 extra, just this one film on blu-ray. That may not faze the rabid fans, most of whom probably post on this forum, but to the average customer it's just not competitive pricing. .

The "new DVD boxset" isn't new at all - it came out in 2007. And when it did, the RRP was something like £70!

Also, none of the transfers in that box is especially stellar, and the discs are all barebones. So it's a useful stopgap (and I bought a copy myself when it dropped to its present price), but it's hardly competitive with the quality of the MoC disc, especially considering the tsunami of extras.

And £19.99 is a perfectly fair RRP for a brand new special edition like MoC's - not least because few people besides HMV customers will actually end up paying that much. Independent labels like MoC, especially ones who demonstrably put a vast amount of work in their release, can't charge what a major label can charge because they don't have either the economies of scale or a handful of huge hits to subsidise that kind of discount.