Thursday, April 21, 2011

Blu Ray Media Stores: RunTechMedia Review

Blu Ray blank media guide : Best Blu Ray media stores
Best Blu Ray Media Online Stores Part 12: RunTechMedia Review

In the process of doing comparative shopping for Blu Ray media, we frequently encountered RunTechMedia on shopping engines. We were impressed by the site's broad inventory, and were hoping that we could qualify it as a primary or main supplier for Blu ray media. We were a bit disappointed, but are keeping some hope for the future.   



Site and usability
Blu Ray media can be found on the RunTechMedia site under CD/DVD/Blu Ray Media -> BD-R/RE, BD-R/RE DL. Site speed is very good, with 1.8 seconds per page average to display a left-clicked SKU, but the site made the huge mistake of not allowing right-clicks on category pages, resulting in a very painful browsing experience. This caused us to change our speed test, to start with 10 store tabs and use one left click in each tab, since we were not able to spawn new tabs from right-clicks on products. Of our wish list of 13 types of sorting and binning, RunTechMedia provides the most choice in the category, as 12 of these modes are available. The only missing capability is sort by best selling. On the other hand,  there is a Blu Ray media category, it is possible to select type (BD-R/ BD-RE), single/ dual layer, manufacturer, speed, quantity and printability, sorting can be done by price, rating, and most reviews, and user ratings are displayed on the category listing pages. These are very good site capabilities for RunTechMedia, although, unfortunately, there are too few user reviews at this time for the review-based criteria to be useful.

Inventory and price
RunTechMedia carries a large inventory of 13 Blue Ray media, 4th lowest in the category after Amazon, MediaMegaMall and Buy.com - a very good performance when one considers that both Amazon and Buy.com are merchant marketplaces on top of being retailers themselves. RunTechMedia stocks 43% of our 89 Blu Ray test media, 3rd best in the category, barely behind MediaMegaMall and Amazon - another excellent score. RunTechMedia prices are on average 23.4% higher than the best price across our surveyed stores for media stocked by multiple stores, which is on the high side in the category. It matches best price for 4 SKUs for media stocked by more than one store, which is in the middle of the pack.  RunTechMedia stocks 5 of the 6 media we selected as best Blu Ray archival grade media, for an average price 24.5% higher than the best price across the category for this basket of media - we find this a bit too high.

User reviews
RunTechMedia lets its users file product reviews. At this time, however, we only found 20 user reviews for all Blu Ray media, which does not allow for any significant evaluation of user feedback for its SKUs.

Customer Service
RunTechMedia does not have any ResellerRatings review, a very disappointing finding which can only be due to small retail volume for the site at this time. We were able to locate a bit over 400 reviews on Google Shopping (they were hard to find) for the site, for a very good rating of 94%. However, while Google Shopping aggregates user reviews from multiple locations (including ResellerRatings when they are available), our experience is that  its ratings are often significantly better than ResellerRatings and do not always give us a full picture of the CS issues for a site.  As its ResellerRatings rating is nonexistent, RunTechMedia  receives a low 46% ConsumerPla.net predictive CS rating, which we expect to go up rapidly when the site starts aggregating ResellerRatings reviews. Until then, we do not believe that we can properly estimate RunTechMedia's strength in customer service.

Table: RunTechMedia Blu Ray media review (see legend below)

Conclusion
RunTechMedia appears to be a recent entrant in online electronic media retailing. The site capabilities are impressive, and the inventory is excellent. We are less impressed by the average price, that we find a bit high. We are awaiting a reasonable track record for the store on ResellerRatings to  finalize our judgment on customer service. Until then, we consider RunTechMedia a site to look at and experiment with,  but we are not ready to recommend it as a primary supplier for ongoing Blu Ray media purchases.

Next we review SuperMediaStore for Blu Ray media... So come back soon!  

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Table Legend:
Total inventory: total number of Blu ray media SKUs on the site
Inventory %: percentage of ConsumerPla.net list of 89 Blu Ray media that can be found at the store
Inventory % for selected archival media: % of SKUs that we selected in our Blu Ray Media review for archival grade
Site sorting: how many types of sorts and bins are possible on the site (out of the 13 we listed in our wish list)
Average query speed: the average speed to display a right-clicked SKU  - measures browsing speed
Average overprice: How much % over best price, for all media present in more than one store

Average overprice for selected archival media: specifically how much % over best price for the media we selected for archival grade
# lowest priced SKUs: how many SKUs in the store equal best price (if more than one store carries them)
# user reviews: how many user reviews we found on the site for Blu Ray media
Predictive CS rating: our worst case analysis of the likely Customer Support rating for this store
, explained
here

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