Page 22 of 44

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:08 am
by rockysds
When you scroll over the Free Membership, it lists among others "Limited access to PDF booklets" and "Limited access to exclusive content", so presumably there will be a another tier with non-limited access.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:20 am
by perkizitore
tenia wrote:Few unfortunate things :
- the new search function is a bit of a hassle seems it seems to look by default in the product description instead of just the titles, which makes it twice slower than the older semi-automatic search.
- the order transfer, at least in my account, creating triplicate of some orders, while some of my never-checked-out carts have been turned into orders, including a £24900 order for 1000 Carrie LEs (when I wanted to see if the old website had some kind of limitations based on the stock quantities).
- Wishlist was nice because you could see in a glance which newer pre-orders was on-stock early. Now, the In Stock status isn't showed anymore in the wishlist, creating the need to go specifically on the product page.
- About In Stock status : it looks that all pre-orders are currently incorrectly showing as In Stock.
- It doesn't look like you can have access to a full branch listing (like from A-Z for the whole of Arrow Video output). Instead, you'll have to search the title you're looking for. This'll be fun during sales... EDIT : found it. It's still there.
- Minor design quibble : on the wishlist, the cover are vertically squished because the thumbnails are square instead of being portrait.
Also you have to create and name your wishlist before you can add items to it!

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:40 am
by tenia
perkizitore wrote:Also you have to create and name your wishlist before you can add items to it!
I don't have issues with that, it's customary in many other websites to do so, so that you can have multiple wishlists in parallel. I don't use it myself, but why not. My concern is more how the new design makes the wishlists less practical and accomplishing less than in the past (which seems silly for an update to do).
This really is a step that just feels going backwards.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:49 am
by dda1996a
All I cared about was Second Run and free worldwide shipping. Very disappointed....

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 3:55 pm
by Ribs
The shipping thing, by far, is the biggest disappointment, as it's really taken the wind out of the sails of pre-ordering direct from Arrow during sales always being the best price for buying on release with very rare exception. Apparently it applies to everyone, including within the UK, which is just totally crazy as I can't think of another retailer of this sort that doesn't have some kind of cutoff to avoid a surcharge within their home country. Hope they reconsider this as it being combined with a general rise in shipping rates seems unnecessarily cruel.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:16 pm
by dda1996a
Considering Amazon is now cheaper with shipping I'll probably not only buy less, but order from Amazon as well

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:25 pm
by rapta
Ribs wrote:The shipping thing, by far, is the biggest disappointment, as it's really taken the wind out of the sails of pre-ordering direct from Arrow during sales always being the best price for buying on release with very rare exception. Apparently it applies to everyone, including within the UK, which is just totally crazy as I can't think of another retailer of this sort that doesn't have some kind of cutoff to avoid a surcharge within their home country. Hope they reconsider this as it being combined with a general rise in shipping rates seems unnecessarily cruel.
They're gonna have to sort out free UK shipping at least. I seem to remember HMV having to charge for shipping and people stopped using their site, so it was eventually closed down (before they went into administration). They relaunched a couple of years ago and offered free 1st Class postage, which dropped to 2nd Class, and now is longer (about 4-5 days). Arrow were using TNT before now, and that was fine with me since it was free (and I'm fairly patient).

The only other label that charges for shipping is Indicator. I've only ordered one title from them and that's because it was £10, and postage was £1.50 on top of that. I would order less in sales from Arrow if there was postage factored in, especially since they're scrapping points for sale items too.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:35 pm
by swo17
How do we know anything yet about how points will work during sales?

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:39 pm
by Ribs
There's a disclaimer that says points are accrued "on non-sale items" under membership info. It could be filler text, it could be an error, it still doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility they'll retain double points on non-sale items during sales. I'll do a bit more poking around and send a short email explaining some of my concerns with the new site and some of these changes a bit later, and advise anyone who's disquieted by some of these choices to do the same.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:41 pm
by swo17
Sale items were only worth half points before.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:57 pm
by Ribs
No, they were worth double points, but as they were half off those were the same amount of points you'd get buying it not on sale.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 8:47 pm
by Ribs
Some of the Booklet stuff is already up; Three Brothers' absolutely excellent Millicent Marcus essay is on the page if you press the "Members" tab. If you go back to the releases from 2015-16 or before, they seem to be there for the most part.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 5:51 am
by tenia
I thought they were going by the oldest first, but it's not exactly the case, since the very oldest Academy titles don't have any Members content yet (for instance, Siegel's The Killers, Petri's L'assassino, Sullivan's Travels), but Salvatore Giuliano, Siodmak's The Killers, The Killing, The Manchurian Candidate, Network, 3 Women, La grande bouffe, Hard to be a God have.

For the Video section, Blind Woman's Curse (a 2014 release) has its booklet online, like Audition and the 2 Nikkatsu Diamond Guys. Other Video titles : Rollerball, Rabid (which interestingly is a release showing as "Limited Availability"), The Comedy of Terror, The Incredible Melting Man, The Visitor, Sheba Baby, Nightmare City, Buckaroo Banzai, Mona Lisa, Coffy, Massacre Gun.

The Car, The Wild Geese, Howling II & We Are The Flesh, seem like they soon will have their booklet online but while they're showing a Members section, they don't have the PDF in yet.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 7:29 am
by tenia
Agreeably surprised : small orders shipping fees to Europe have decreased. 2 products cost now £1.85. I believe it was before between £3 and £4. It looks to be weight based.
First is < 250g non tracked (£1.85) / < 500g tracked (£8). You can place 4 STD releases in this.
Second is < 1.25kg (£5.5 non tracked / £9.5 tracked). I tried having 11 STD releases in the cart, and this was still the options offered.

The issue with such a type of fees will obviously come from boxsets. The Godard / Gorin set is heavy enough to activate the 1.25kg option. While in the past, at £50, shipping fees would have been offered, this set now creates £5.5 shipping fees.
I tried recreating my last order, since it was mostly boxsets. The 7 products cost me £222.93, they now cost £235. Shipping fees were £6.9, they now cost £12 (3kg tracked, no other option).

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 11:13 am
by swo17
Oh no, they've made their shipping charges more fair

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 11:46 am
by tenia
Depends for who and for what.

Mind you : as a whole, I'm more bothered by the practicality lost by the move to the new sites that the differences in prices and shipping fees that I found mostly to be differently balanced that just being "more expensive" as a whole. But I'll probably tone down doing big orders direct from them (especially for boxsets) because of how significantly more expensive these will be, while standard releases purchases look more interesting than in the past, so there's still that at least.

It's also interesting to see that while Arrow does this on shipping fees, MoC still does free worldwide shipping without any limitation so I'm wondering why they can and Arrow can't.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 12:09 pm
by Ribs
Essentially, the cost of any box set shipped to the US has increased £7.50, or ~$10, as a good portion of the sets were always at or near the free shipping threshold. If you have the capability to combine orders with regularity, great, it's not that much of an inconvenience; I've bought the smaller box sets with individual releases just to bring the cost of the Rohmer set down to a manageable level using points because I really can't spare the full expense of it and they've come back and made a substantial increase on its cost practically overnight.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 1:40 pm
by Drucker
MOC has always been the only company to offer free worldwide shipping. Whatever the reason, BFI, Indicator, and now Arrow have no free shipping option, so it's probably safe to say there's no way for that to be economical for them which is a huge let-down.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Nov 28, 2017 1:53 pm
by matrixschmatrix
Is Arrow still pocketing the VAT difference? My understanding was that not taking that out was why MoC more or less broke even on shipping- if Arrow is charging a fair amount for shipping AND failing to refund VAT, I don't have much incentive to buy direct instead of through Amazon.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 1:44 pm
by TMDaines
Let me know when you find any label that does free shipping from the US to the UK. Thanks.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 5:24 pm
by Ribs
A particularly egregious change on this site is you no longer get the balance worth of points on items you apply points to. So even if you spend apply 2000 points to get £20 off something that's £100, you'll be stuck with a rewards balance of 0 rather than the 800 you'd have gotten on the other site (1600 during a sale). This entire website redesign has spiked the actual cost of ordering direct from Arrow (which used to be, at least most of the time, consistently close to the lowest price available) by at least 25%, by my estimation, before factoring in the shipping changes as well.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2017 4:46 am
by tenia
Ribs wrote:You no longer get the balance worth of points on items you apply points to. So even if you apply 2000 points to get £20 off something that's £100, you'll be stuck with a rewards balance of 0 rather than the 800 you'd have gotten on the other site (1600 during a sale).
This is getting worse and worse every day.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 9:13 am
by Ribs
I have good news! You now get points when an order ships, not when it's processed. As such, my earlier report that partial points don't give points back was incorrect. Even better, you receive the full balance for the order (so you order something that's £20, you'd get 200 points back, but if you use points to bring down the price to £15, you'll still get 200 points back.) It doesn't quite make up for some of these other lingering problems but it's far better than what I'd thought.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:56 am
by TMDaines
Arrow Festive Sale is live.

Lots of all time lows prices.

Hoping to get booklets although Arrow and other retailer have removed all reference to them for all but the newest items, where they are marked as First Printing Only - but how big is the print run?

Seems like no UK free shipping now and no points awarded for buying in sales.

Re: Arrow: Cheapest Prices/Best Places to Buy/Pre-Orders/Dea

Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 11:16 am
by rwaits
I'm late to the party, but was just about to check out when I realized they're no longer offering free shipping ... and no more double points??? As they also don't remove VAT for non-UK customers, I can't see myself ordering direct from Arrow again. Am I understanding all this correctly?