Anyway, as some of you might remember, I blogged about Video Ezy, a new online DVD rental service in Singapore, sometime ago and also sent them a suggestion e-mail. The reply (from the General Manager himself no less) took 10 days which is not bad especially considering that they sent me another e-mail before this telling me that my suggestions had been forwarded to the relevant people (and no, that wasn’t a auto-replier either).

Now, the surprising thing is that they mentioned my blog in the reply… I used a Gmail account and I made no mention of my posting here, so they must have really done their research. XD

Hi,

Thank you for signing up with Video Ezy Online and blogging us on your blog, we appreciate your support and interest in our “beta” online rental service.

Your comments and observations on our online rental engine & title selection are truly appreciated and you will be happy to know that we are working feverishly to address the Firefox compatibility issues. Our buyers will be adding more titles to our online library in the weeks to come.

You also noted our lack of Japanese anime titles and again you are right. We have found difficulties in sourcing for legitimate DVD products (non-pirated or from the rights owners) and getting censorship clearance from the MDA for a majority of the anime titles. If you have a list of titles that you think that we should have as a foundation, please email a list to our buyer at [snip].

Thanks again for supporting Video Ezy Online.

Sincerely,

David Yip
General Manager
Video Ezy Singapore

Rent It. Buy It. @ Video Ezy

My original e-mail:

Hello, I just signed up for your company’s video rental service. While I am very happy that there is finally a local solution to NetFlix, as an amateur web designer I must say that the website feels quite unpolished at the moment.

The website is quite buggy and lacks a lot of features common to online shopping websites, such as the ability to sort the movies by ratings, age group and vintage. The bugs I have noticed so far are:

1. The search function is very inflexible. Searching for “usual suspects” or “the usual suspects” will return no result, but searching for either “usual”, “suspect” or “suspects” will return the result “The Usual Suspects”. This is not very intuitive, especially when searching for the full title doesn’t get you any results.

2. On the main page, press the enter key defaults to submitting the sign-up form, regardless or where your typing cursor is currently located. On other pages, it defaults to the sign-up form. This means that when the user types in a keyword for searching and presses enter (as it is common practice with most other website forms), the user will be redirected to the sign-up page or the page will simply reload and does nothing. This applies to all browsers. This is most likely because the text fields are not associated correctly with the submit buttons assigned to them.

3. Whatever Javascript the site is using to update certain information does not work with Firefox. For example, clicking on the “update” button in the rental queues page to update the queue order does not work. Clicking “rent” on any page does not update the DVD count at the top right corner automatically unless you click it twice. These two problems are unqiue to non-Internet Explorer browsers. Although IE has a major market share, commerical sites like Amazon always make their sites work across all platforms. The first people who adopt your company’s new online service are going to be the tech-savvy ones and I believe the number of users using alternative browsers is going to be relatively higher than the overall market distribution.

Thank you for your time. Hopefully this e-mail will reach the relevant people and help to make Video Ezy better.

Man, not only did they address my original complaints, they also read my blog entry and address those complaints as well. I’m scared of what they might do next. XD

Seriously, I have just received my second batch of DVDs yesterday and I’ve been quite happy with Video Ezy’s service so far. ^^

Now, I think I’ll accept his suggestion and e-mail them a list of my anime demands~

Anyway, Video Ezy has set up an online DVD retail service in Singapore. (About time…) Basically, just like Netflix, you sign up for an account with a flat monthly fee. Then you get to have any DVD in their catalogue mailed to you in a return-paid envelope. You can only have a certain number of DVDs on-hand at any time and each time you mail back one DVD, the next DVD on your list is delivered to your mailbox.

I signed up for one month to test the service. The movie library seems quite acceptable, although it lacks a lot of Japanese movie. The anime stuff also seems quite haphazardly chosen, but all the big-title movies are there (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed and a lot of Ghibli stuff). However, it does have all but one of the twenty or so IMDb Top 250 titles I tried searching for. The one that it didn’t have was Pulp Fiction.

Since I watch most DVDs only once anyway, this could save me a lot of money and keep me occupied during the school holidays. The downside is that I don’t end up with a nice row of DVD casings to display on my bookshelf at the end of the day… XD

The website is somewhat buggy though, especially on Firefox but also on IE for certain things. Hopefully they do something about those bugs after receiving my complaint suggestion e-mail.