- CD WOW!
Infobox_Company
company_name = CDWow!
company_logo company_type =Private
foundation =London ,England
location = Worldwide
key_people =
industry =Retail Record store Ecommerce
products = Recorded music,video s,DVD s,book s,computer game s,beauty s
revenue =
operating_income=
net_income =
num_employees =
homepage = www.cdwow.com [http://www.cdwow.com] |
CD WOW! is an
online retailer, offeringGames ,CD ,DVD andCosmetics . Similar toAmazon.com , it operates websites in and ships from multiple countries including: USA, UK,Hong Kong ,Republic of Ireland ,Australia ,Sweden ,Norway ,Denmark ,Netherlands andGermany . Originally developed by Phillip Robinson, formerly of budget record label, Tring International. CD WOW! was bought by new owners in September 2007.History
The retailer made a name for itself in 2000 when it began operating in the UK and offered CDs and DVDs at lower prices than the high street. Because of their price position they were taken to court by the
British Phonographic Industry , the recording industry association for the UK, for selling CDs at prices that often undercut UK retail prices by 25%. Although the CDs in question were legal, many of them were licensed for sale and distribution in other markets and thus priced accordingly for those markets.The BPI, under severe pressure from the high street stores, saw the lower priced albums as damaging to the UK and European markets and took the company's former owners Music Trading On-Line (HK) Ltd to High Court citing UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. This resulted in CD WOW! having to increase the price of all CDs by £1 at the time, citing legal costs as the reason why they decided not to take the case to court. They are still operating their low cost operation and still offering lower priced CDs and DVDs than the high street stores.
On
29 May 2007 , the former owners of CD WOW! were ordered by the High Court to pay £41 million in damages to the BPI for breaching a2004 agreement over the sale of illegally imported CDs. The damages awarded to the BPI are still outstanding and they are appealing the decision.Since September 1st, 2007 the retailer has been under new ownership and launched a complete new front end. The change of ownership did lead to a dip in customer service but what appears to be mass staff changes has led to a improvement (as of April, 2008).
In May 2008, CD WOW! launched a new site design in the US, Ireland and the UK, and changed it's domain name from cd-wow.com to cdwow.com and from cd-wow.us to cdwow.us. The site was redesigned, but the overall navigation was kept. Customer accounts on the old site were migrated to the new site, although in the first weeks of testing, that was not the case.
As of September 2008 CD Wow has launched the new front end into all the domains including a new domain in the Netherlands and is offering cosmetics and perfumes on all the sites via its Wowwoman.com domain.
External links
CD WOW! Websites
* [http://dk.cd-wow.com/ CD WOW! Denmark]
* [http://www.cd-wow.fi/ CD WOW! Finland]
* [http://www.cd-wow.net/ CD WOW! Germany]
* [http://www.cd-wow.com.hk/ CD WOW! Hong Kong]
* [http://www.cdwow.ie/ CD WOW! Ireland]
* [http://www.cd-wow.nl/ CD WOW! The Netherlands]
* [http://www.cd-wow.se/ CD WOW! Sweden]
* [http://www.cdwow.com/ CD WOW! UK]
* [http://www.cdwow.us/ CD WOW! US]
* [http://blog.cdwow.ie/ CD WOW! Irish Blog]
* [http://blog.cd-wow.com/ CD WOW! UK Blog]
* [http://blog.cd-wow.us/ CD WOW! US Blog]
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