Pricing when bundles include D2Ds

[rydiger]

Bought a Jurassic World bundle with two full-price movies and one D2D movie (couldn't avoid it). The two full-price movies were, as expected, lowered in price to $6.99 each. The D2D movie increased from $4.92 to $6.99.

Question: Is increasing the price for the D2D movie the expected behavior?

The description of this bundle for sure reads "pay only $6.99 each", so technically it is exactly as advertised. That said, it does come across as a little odd to actually have to pay more for a movie in this way.

 

[cinelife]

When the movies got coded for the bundle sale, the D2D price was changed with others. There is nothing preventing changes to D2D pricing, it usually doesn't, but there's no legal/contractual reason preventing a change.

That all said, this might be something that was unintended, and might be corrected.

Jim

 

[rydiger]

Yes, I'm curious if this is by design - if so, all is good - or if it is an unintended consequence they want to correct.

 

[MikeKobb]

The way this is supposed to work is that you are charged the lowest price available. If the bundle price is lower, that's the price you're charged. If you have a Disc-to-Digital offer or Upgrade pricing that is less than the bundle price, that's what you're supposed to be charged. So you won't save any (additional) money on a Disc-to-Digital title, but it counts towards the minimum number of purchases to qualify for the bundle.

I would recommend contacting our support folks so that they can check exactly what happened here. It doesn't sound correct to me.

 

[Transepoch]

I think I've seen that before in prior bundle sales, so intended or not, it is consistent.

 

[rydiger]

And the jury (support) is in: Bundle movies are fixed price, D2Ds only applies to singe purchases. So the observed behavior - increasing the cost from $4.92 to $6.99 for the D2D movie - was correct.

 

[MikeKobb]

No, that's not quite correct, and neither was my answer above.

One of my colleagues sent a very thorough answer that I am going to just post here verbatim because I think it is clearer than any summary I might attempt:

Lets say for the sake of argument that there is a collection of movies A, B, C, … each normally priced at $20, with a disc-to-digital price of $5, and we put up a bundle offer with buy 4 or more for $10. Say you own A, B, C on disc.

If you select A, B, C, D then at purchase time you will pay the non-bundle price of 5 x 3 + 20 = $35 because that is cheaper than 4 x $10.
If you select A, B, D, E then you pay $40 since the non-bundle price would be 20 x 2 + 5 x 2 = $50.

If you select more than 4: say A, B, C, D, E then the code sorts them in descending order of non-bundle price D(20), E(20), A(5), B(5), C(5).

First it calculates which is the better deal for the first 4 (bundle or non-bundle pricing).
If it is non-bundle, then you get all the movies at the non-bundle price since the remaining ones are the cheaper ones that must be less than the bundle price.
If the cheapest option for the first 4 is the bundle price, you get that, and then for the rest, you get the cheaper of (bundle price, non-bundle price).

In this case, you would pay $45 for A, B, C, D, E

To summarize: the store works very hard to ensure that you pay the most favorable pricing available. To meet the bundle requirements, we can't charge less than the bundle price for any movie that counts towards the minimum purchase count (which is why the first example is not $5x3 + $10), but if you save money by buying the minimum number of titles at bundle pricing, you will then pay whichever price is lower for the remaining titles.

I remember now that we talked about this internally as being a little bit like a much more pleasant version of the Alternative Minimum Tax -- we basically calculate your purchase price under both formulas, but unlike the IRS, you pay whichever is lower.

 

[rydiger]

Right, so I think I get that explanation but it doesn't reflect what I experienced with the Jurassic World bundle. I think.

I had 3 movies with D2Ds at $4.92 (the original three), and two movies with original price (the two Jurassic World movies). When I clicked "select all" and "proceed to check out", the summary screen listed all five movies at $6.99. According to the above explanation, it should have suggested three movies at $6.99 to trigger the bundle, and then the last two at $4.92. Yes?

I am assuming here that the summary screen with the individual prices shows the correct pricing breakdown, and that the magic described above does not happen after I've initiated the purchase.

That said, I didn't manually add up the individual prices shown to see if the total purchase price actually was $6.99 x 5 or $6.99 x 3 + $4.92 x 2. I took it for granted that the individual prices listed were the components of the shown total. That is the case, right?

Edit: just to be clear, I cancelled that "buy all" purchase and went for just the two most recent movies plus one to trigger the bundle.

 

[MikeKobb]

This was using the web store, yes? Sounds like it. I'm going to forward your question to one of the web developers because I'm uncertain of how the UI behaves in that situation.

The mobile application gives you a running total as you select titles, but one thing it doesn't currently do is show what you're paying for each movie. (It shows the pre-bundle price, so you have a sense of what sort of savings you're earning, but others have noted that it would be nice if this were changed once you qualify for the bundle, perhaps with a strike-through of the original price or the like. We're considering making this change.)

 

[MikeKobb]

I had 3 movies with D2Ds at $4.92 (the original three), and two movies with original price (the two Jurassic World movies). When I clicked "select all" and "proceed to check out", the summary screen listed all five movies at $6.99.

So I just tried this for the Fast & Furious bundle that's on the store right now. Here's what I got. I don't see anywhere that it's listing the movies at $7.49 each. It just lists the movies. It does reiterate the overall bundle terms in the white box at the top. Is that what you're referring to?

In this case, I don't own any of the titles in any format, so the $89.88 total is just 12 * $7.49. If, however, I owned three of these titles on disc with a $4.99 disc-to-digital offer (making numbers up here), this screen would look identical, except the price next to the "Purchase 12 titles" text would be $82.38 (9 * $7.49 + 3 *$4.99).

 

[rydiger]

Yes, I'm indeed using the web store. Here's a screen shot of the current Toy Story bundle - I selected all and proceeded to checkout:



As you can see, the movies are individually priced at the right. That's the list that, for the Jurassic World bundle, was $6.99 x 5 when the D2Ds should have applied to two of them. Unfortunately the D2D prices for the Toy Story movies are too high, so I cannot see if the same is actually happening now. (Alternatively - the bundle prices are too low for this experiment, darn it!)

I didn't have any of the Fast & Furious movies before buying all, so couldn't check there unfortunately. Maybe someone else can, if the D2D price is lower than $7.49?

 

[MikeKobb]

The Toy Story sale is not what we call a "Super Bundle" -- there's no "Buy <n> and pay $<x>" component to it. So the UI you're showing is just the multi-item purchase flow.

The UI in my screen shot is what you get when you're shopping one of the "Buy <n>" offers. No price is shown there.

 

[rydiger]

Fair point, Mike. But the price calculation rules are the same for regular bundle and super bundle, in that the lowest possible price combination should prevail? So it should be impossible to find a cheaper way of buying a bundled set of movies, by juggling how they are combined?

 

[MikeKobb]

No, a regular "bundle" (i.e. just buying an ad-hoc collection of movies) doesn't do any special price calculation. You pay the full price of every movie, except in the case where you have an upgrade or DtD offer. Said another way, you pay the same price you would have paid if you bought every one at a time. It's just more convenient.

Super Bundles have the special pricing structure where you get a discount on the movies if you buy at least <n>, and that's where the logic detailed above is employed to ensure that you get the most favorable pricing (potentially less than paying the special bundle price for all movies, if there are digital offers/DtD in play).

 

[MikeKobb]

*every movie one at a time...

 

[rydiger]

Right, I need to correct my vocabulary here, I'm creating more confusion than necessary by using "bundle" incorrectly. I think we are actually talking about the same thing.

* An ad-hoc collection of movies - no rules, regular pricing
* Collections that have "limited time pricing" - no rules, just individually lowered prices for a set time
* Special pricing unlocked when buying n movies - fixed (really low) price for each when unlocked, potentially even lower if you've got D2Ds.

It should not be possible to buy a combination of movies in a cheaper way, if they all are part of an offer in the last category - which is always called a super bundle (didn't catch the precise naming before now).

 

[MikeKobb]

One minor addition to your point 2: if there's a sale (limited-time pricing), but you own a version of that movie and therefore have a digital offer/DtD offer, that offer price could be lower than the sale price. The store will automatically charge you the lower price.

I agree with your final statement -- if the movies are all part of a Super Bundle, the store will pick the lowest possible price for the movies you have selected.

 

[MikeKobb]

Howdy all. In case you didn't see the new thread I started, the mobile app now has some new user interface around how it presents pricing for digital offers and Superbundles. Have a look! The prices are updated dynamically as you select and de-select titles, so you can see what price you're paying for each item, and the app will even tell you if you've selected so many movies with digital offers that you're actually paying less than you would have by paying the Superbundle price.

I have some colleagues reviewing a little PDF explainer document that I just finished. Once it's finished, it will be added to our Knowledge Base.