Fulfilment Speed, Or Something about Having the Right Stuff to Go around an Anime Corner
The Kannagi thing has RACS owner posting a butt-hurt rant. He is justified and it is something that he would, and maybe should, speak up against.
However the subsequent fan responses makes me think: Just what kind of people root for anime stores (or their favorite niche net retailer)? Just what makes up which kind of customers? Who is more loyal and who isn’t? What makes each store more attractive to which kind of people? What kind of personality types make up the loyal customers of either retailer? Does that influence how vocal these customers are?
I know one thing for sure, though, and that is my own buying habits and media consumption habits do factor greatly in terms of which retailer I choose. Of course, price is always a factor so let’s just ignore that point. Given two stores of similar aspects, the one that sells for cheaper overall will win, right? And to play in the free market competitors have to differentiate themselves to survive, so we move towards an apple-and-oranges comparison. Blah blah blah marketing blah blah blah.
As a fan, this silly protest is kind of, well, silly. I buy and sell stuff from where I like to buy and sell, and I wouldn’t think anything other than that for anyone else. I would like much more if everyone got around to watch or otherwise check out Kannagi at their leisure, on their own terms, in a way that’s fair and just. But what is just and fair vary from person to person. To Bob it’s obviously nothing “exclusive” and I think there’s nothing wrong with that opinion, or with charging more money for exclusivity especially when that comes with $ attached for the people making the exclusive deal. It isn’t like Right Stuf is a horrible vendor either, there’s no real problems here.
As of this writing RACS managed to get a bunch Kannagi volume 1 at Right Stuf prices and is selling it at cost. The inner lawyer inside of me snickers at this obvious marketing gimmick. Com’on Bob, Aniplex paid a bunch of money to get people to buy DVDs, presumably, by making Yamakan available at Otakon and running their Nagisamafanclub site and what have you. If I was AnimeNation I would probably mark it up by a small amount, and just do it without ranting on your blog, because it’s the classier thing to do? When competitors decide to take a bullet and softens the exclusivity bit by reselling those DVDs, in essence they’re marketing Kannagi for Aniplex and reaffirming that the exclusivity thing is good for the retailer in the exclusive equation. Hey, isn’t that a good thing? Or rather, isn’t Bob playing right into Right Stuf’s schemes? It’s like the sound of one-handed clapping? Bandai is squished in the middle of all this, given their relationship with RS, Aniplex and what have you…and they take the burn. Oh well.
Let me just repeat it once more if it wasn’t clear the first time: If Aniplex wants an exclusive deal with Kannagi via Bandai, Right Stuf is the natural choice. If Right Stuf wants an exclusive deal, they have a lot of leverage because they basically run distro for Bandai; you can’t reasonably expect to sleep with your mistress when your wife is on the other side of the same bed. I guess it’s back to the Animevillage days.
As an aside, the vendor selling it at Otakon also was dealing it as a convention exclusive, and they would sell it to you today at retail if you give them your secret handshake. If I were you I’d hunt them down at their next con and see if you can get lucky…
I guess it’s good to remind myself that exclusive sales contracts are hardly uncommon and they are not a recent development. This is a particularly interesting junction in fandom though because this brouhaha lets one industry guru reveal some interesting statistics, and I quote Chris B.–
You know, as an aside, having read more of Robert’s stuff over at his blog, I can’t help thinking that this is helping him all that much. Maybe with some of his loyal customers, but it’s like appeasing the base rather than gaining “mainstream” acceptance.
I had only a mild business relationship with him once when we did an affiliate thing. It didn’t pan out because most people here didn’t buy from him. They had the choice, we rotated banners, text links, etc. but people just didn’t go there. So that experience is not coloring it at all. He was pleasant to work with but there wasn’t anything I could really do to make people go there.
So the second part of this post asks: why is Right Stuf that much more popular over at the ex-AoDVD/Mania crowd? I guess the simple answers are:
- These people are bargain hawks. AoDVD does function as a deal site to some extent. Invariably a large portion of AoDVD’s function is consumer research, and it’s definitely a valuable resource for those of us who do business with preference for cheap as long as we get what we’re after–the DVDs. And it’s undeniably the case that RACS is rarely cheap compared to the usual Deepdiscount summer sale or Right Stuf’s 25 for $100.
- Do we not care about service? I’m sure we do, but bargain hawk types assign different value to things like service and ease of mind than those who don’t bargain. Well, it’s built into the concept. By shopping for cheap, bargain hawk types implicitly acknowledge a level of risk and is willing to bear it in exchange for a lower price [/corporate lawyerspeak]. It isn’t to say there’s no value to risk, but rather…
- Speed is not something we care that much about, at least not that kind of speed. Let’s break it down further. The average AoDVD mad collector does something people like Ed Chavez wants you to do with his books–pre-order. Right Stuf, like RACS, ships preorders as soon they’re in, which is often way before the street date. Remember, we are hardcore animu consumerzzz and I’m sure there are people who are regulars on that forum that own like, 50%+ of all anime released in the US or some such. You don’t do that without arming yourself with the data AoDVD provides, and you don’t do that without trying to preorder sometimes. (As an aside there are no sites out there that can rival AoDVD still.) So the risk of “speed” here is not exactly all that threatening. And pre-ordering is an act of large risk as well, given the replicator problems we’ve been seeing. Oh, we should also remember that Bandai and ADV use Right Stuf for fulfillment…so RS is fast when it comes to pre-orders due to that advantage.
- Speed is also not something we care that much about, and even “that” kind of speed. People always say if you order from RACS you get it in a couple days. That’s wonderful. But if I were to partake Right Stuf’s ongoing sale right now I don’t particularly mind if it took them 2 months to fulfill it, simply because I buy DVDs primarily for archival purposes. I’d say a good 1/3 of my DVD collection is still in shrinkwarps. Even if I want to watch it, my backlog is a mile high. I can afford to wait. This is another reason why “good service” is not so cracked up to be for the average AoDVD person. As long as a threshold of quality has been met, it’s all good.
- And it isn’t to say nobody from AoDVD orders from RACS. Speed and quality of service is always important. It’s just not very often when you really need that speed that you would be willing to pay for it. Bargain hawk types plan out their purchases ahead of time. They are not casual buyers who do it out of fancy, usually. So if they knew if they ordered this thing they need by date X earlier and can save some money, they would. Now of course this is not always possible and stuff happens, and that’s when we might go to RACS for DVDs. It’s just rarely the case.
- To be honest, RACS prices are not horrible at all; but if you have 400-500-600 anime DVDs, it adds up even if you can save half a dollar per disc. Price becomes even more important for serious collectors.
I wonder if this particular mentality as I described is even true. But here you go.
I forget which American businessmen famously proclaimed, “There are only bastards in business,” but the basic idea still holds today. If anything, business is seen as the spiritual successor to warfare, and leaving someone out if there’s no benefit in cutting them in should hardly come as a surprise.
PS - the AoDVD statements come as a bit of a surprise. I’ve certainly been there before but I don’t recall consciously using it as any kind of reference. I’m not indiscriminate with my purchases, though, so I might just not be the sort of “hardcore anime consumer” that you mean.
The Kannagi thing does not appear to be exclusive to RightStuf — AnimeNation also lists Kannagi, and Bandai is selling Kannagi through their own Amazon store. My guess as to the “exclusive” is that Bandai is no longer set up for dealing with relatively small orders (unless they get to charge retail prices, as through their Amazon store).
As to the “order it Sunday have it Tuesday” stuff — good heavens, 75% of the DVDs I buy are ordered months in advance of their release date. I have a list, sorted by publisher. When RightStuf’s publisher-specific sales roll around, I order enough to get the free shipping, and cross those titles off my list, all because sale prices apply to pre-orders, too. Sometimes this means I get the DVD or manga a few weeks before the official release date, sometimes I see it on the shelves at Borders or Best Buy (for twice the price I paid) a week or two before my copy ships. No problem, like you, a fair number of these DVDs go on the shelf, since I’ve already seen the series in some other form, have a backlog that’s two miles high, and I have something of a backlog on manga, too. Plus, they ship when things arrive, instead of waiting for your entire order to arrive (sometimes combining shipment of items from multiple orders).
The other thing is that RightStuf’s site makes it pretty easy to keep track of what you’ve ordered through them. If you sign in before browsing, they mark the pages of things you’ve ordered. Your order history is also (fairly) easy to browse. That means you can use your order history there as a one-stop check on those intangible pre-ordered items.
Just to clarify for people who don’t know, Kannagi is an exclusive for Right Stuf in that nobody else can order it as retailer. Retailers can still buy it at retail and resell it for more. The amazon marketplace seller is actually just Right Stuf.
TRSI is a fine retailer… if you’re in the US and Canada.
The buying experience if you’re an international customer, at least in my experience, is something else entirely. The first time I ordered I was required to ‘prove’ I was a real person by emailing a photocopy of my driver’s license and credit card. Of course they give no information about what they do with this (the combo is more than enough information for a fair amount of identity theft) and acted as if I was being silly when I asked for reassurances that they would destroy the copy properly. And this is despite them having asked for a CVV2 number - CVV2 is printed on the back of most cards and is designed to do exactly this.
In addition, TRSI’s prices are far short of good value most of the time. I import all my anime DVDs (Australian anime releases are crap) and usually purchase via discount retailers who sell at around 35-40% below retail price. International shipping costs from TRSI are also retarded - $10 + $2 per item. That’s roughly double what my usual retailer charges.
And then there’s the actual service levels. Whenever I order with them, they take weeks to get around to actually shipping the bloody things. They mail me an invoice separately which arrives a week or so after I get a shipping notice, and then it’ll be a 2-3 week wait for the actual discs to arrive. So I’m paying for shipping that costs double what other retailers charge, yet takes at least twice as long from order to arrival. And when the package arrives, every single time I have ordered from TRSI, the box has gone through a savage beating. It will be covered in scuff marks, usually have holes and rips in it, and the cardboard has a softened feel, like it’s been tenderised like a piece of meat.
I had resolved to never order from them again after receiving a package that was so badly damaged that Australia Post had to tape it back together before delivering it but with Kannagi being exclusive and because my own personal principles are that when a reasonable DVD set for a show I enjoyed in fansub is made available, I should buy it, I ended up ordering again. Maybe they’ve improved. Given that they still overcharge for shipping I doubt it.
In the end, especially when it comes to niche products, exclusivity agreements don’t help anyone. Putting up artificial barriers that prevent the entire purchaser base to obtain your product is counter-productive. It might make sense if this was a mainstream product, but it’s not, it’s an overpriced sub-only romance-comedy anime release aimed at an extremely specific market.
I don’t know if Australia counts as something they’re aiming for, that’s the thing. But you do make a good point.
True, Bandai totally doesn’t care about non-US markets (I’ve had to re-purchase bad DVDs from them because they won’t replace them :\ ). But if that’s the case for TRSI as well, then perhaps they should stop calling themselves The Rightstuf International. :P
Well, Canada is not America last checked :p Sort of like the World Series amirite.
Bandai and TRSI don’t really have to care about the International market since there’s very little money there, plus lol copyrights.
Besides, if they really had to care, they’d be shut down so fast it won’t be funny. They’re not supposed to care unless it makes them lots of cash.
I find Robert amusing to read, but I’ve never dealt with his company, nor do I ever plan to do so. His prices just aren’t competitive, and I feel no need for rapid-fire shipment - free shipping is free shipping, and you pay for it with a laid-back attitude towards time.
Also, TRSI encourages path-dependence with their GotAnime discount. Once you’ve ponied up for the yearly fee, the inclination is to pay down the fixed cost with as much usage of the discount as is practicable. About the only thing that blasts me off of TRSI for anime dvds and most manga is the storied Deep Discount biannual sales. (They’re including fairly decent-looking DVD shelving in the sale this year! I’m furnishing my new condo’s TV room on that sale next month.)
I didn’t start out as a collector, but after a couple years of trafficking with TRSI, I find myself with the need for copious amounts of DVD shelving. The stuff piles up when you’re paying liquidation prices.
And I can’t see how someone who buys regularly from the discount side of TRSI wouldn’t have a significant backlog. Don’t these people have jobs, family, or friends? Not necessarily all three, but at least one of the above?
RS is definitely primed for bulk-purchasers who just want a lot of stuff at a lower price. I was talking to another guy on the internet just the other day and for people just picking up stray titles here or there, sites like Deepdiscount would be the way to go. The Got Anime thing does help to stack up the savings, but that doesn’t break even until you’ve spent a few hundred bucks…
The reason why Right Stuf support is so strong on AoD is because they host the Right Stuf forum. Robert talks to people on the blog, Right Stuf talks to people on AoD. Their service might not be superb, but that’s the nexus for their feedback, and has been for years.
Just finished the subs for volume 2…
Nice to hear about vol. 2 :D
I think even if AoD does support for Right Stuf, it doesn’t justify all their traffic even from AoD folks. It’s just one more factor I suppose.