Featured Amazon.co.uk Customer Review
Isobel from Penrith, June 24, 2008
I have been an Amazon Rental customer for nearly four years. Early in my rental adventures I tried out LoveFilm to compare. I quickly decided that Amazon was the bees knees. Their selection system is (or should I say was!) perfect - you listed your required DVDs in order of preference, if a DVD was unavailable it would tell you whether there was a short or long wait. I would say that 99% of the time I got my first choice DVDs when I wanted. It was easy to set up and when you were sending a DVD back you could simply look online to see if your No 1 choice was available and you knew that if it wasn't on short or long wait you'd get it. Yippee! We watch a lot of television series which obviously come on between 3 and 6 discs. Each disc was added to your rental list separately so you had complete control as to when you received them.
LoveFilm's system works on you giving films or series priority ranking - High, Medium and Low. But within those rankings you can receive any film/series, it is completely random and up to LoveFilm.
I am now a LoveFilm customer - as they have acquired Amazon's business and if things continue as they have started I won't be for very long. Within two days of the transfer I have absolutely no idea which DVDs are going to be dispatched, until it is too late to do anything about it.
The selection process seems a complete lottery. Maybe some people like the randomness - but I don't. If you went into a rental shop you would make the choice not the shop. If you're first choice wasn't available you would choose your second, you wouldn't give them two lists of 20 to the shop and say choose one from whichever list you like!
I've only given the Value rating 4 stars because it is actually an Amazon package.
I may be being a bit premature - I will give it a few months or so, but I'm not impressed.
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Claire from Edinburh, September 17, 2008
I'm a former Amazon DVD rental customer, and was swapped over to Lovefilm when it took over that part of Amazon. The only problem I ever had with Amazon was in getting hold of certain titles, for example the first disc in series 3 of Arrested Development. But I could live with that, because there were plenty of other titles I wanted to see. Lovefilm has been horrendous. Not for getting me the titles I want - no problem there - but for the quality of the discs. About one in two of the discs they've sent me has skipped badly, and hasn't been remedied by wiping it with a soft cloth, as their website suggests. I suspect that they either ignore reports of faults, or - worse still - knowingly send out discs they know to be faulty. My best hope is that the reason is that people don't bother reporting faults.
We all know how disappointing and even upsetting it is when we're looking forward to settling down and watching a DVD and it turns out to be almost or completely unwatchable. If I report a disc as faulty, I expect a free replacement. Lovefilm has done that once, on my request, but that is not its usual policy. I'm looking around for other DVD rental providers.
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J from London, September 15, 2008
I was an amazon customer for 3 years and very happy at first but then so annoyed I switched to LoveFilm who treated me amazingly in the trial period, then the problems started immediately after I became a regular customer:
- Almost every film I wanted became unavailable;
- The online accounts page is all over the place and almost none of the entries reflect whats going on in my account (I don't believe they are deliberately tried to cheat me but that's the result as things get messed up);
- They have clearly outsourced to the same place that amazon did as I have identical problems with them - they do not read your emails and keep sending you the same reply back to a different question and it's hard to tell if they dont understand or just dont want to give you a straight answer. (The phone service is great though.)
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Neil from West Midlands, September 16, 2008
What a waste of time. Things went downhill after LoveFilm started doing the DVD rental side of things. The quality of some of the discs I received was atrocious to a point where I wasn't sure any of them would play.
Obviously joining a rental service like this means disks will get scratched as they travel all over the country - that's inevitable - but LoveFilm disks look like the company's waiting for the dye to fall off before the disk gets replaced.
I only set up a LoveFilm password to cancel the account since I know being a former Video Island and ScreenSelect customer how rubbish the service was then especially the "priority" list, and it looks like four years on nothing's changed.
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Cathy from London, September 6, 2008
Steer clear of this one, not worth the hassle. On occasion waited up to 3 weeks for rentals to be dispatched. Poor Customer Service team not very effective. Such a shame they took over my account from Amazon rentals.
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Adrian from Cornwall, September 2, 2008
I couldn't agree more with the comments below, I was really happy with amazon for years and absolutely hate LOVEFILM (Hatefilm)The priority system only benefits themselves, any decent company could offer the dvds customers wanted, not just the ones they have knocking around. I like to see latest releases when they come out not when LF feel like it. Is there a company that offers a similar service to amazon as they all now seem to be much of a muchness.
Lovefilm have slowly taken over all the better rival companies so there substandard service doesn't look so bad, Soon we will have no choice and lovefilm will rule the world of dvd rental and then the prices will start rising.
The end is nigh.......
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Liz from London, September 1, 2008
I was very happy with my Amazon DVD rental service until it was taken over by lovefilm. Since then, I've received several discs that won't play, or won't play properly (I never had a single duff one from Amazon) and I HATE the design of their website. It's fiddly and annoying to navigate, and the customer interface is nowhere near as intuitive as the Amazon one. So I have cancelled my account and will have to shop around for a new one. Not easy, as lovefilm seem to be taking over .
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Used to be one of the top services, but complaints skyrocketed since takeover by Lovefilm
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