Type Private Headquarters Worldwide | Founded London, England | |
Industry Retail
Record store
Ecommerce Products Recorded music, videos, DVDs, books, computer games, beauty Website | ||
WOW HD is an online retailer, offering Games, CD, DVD, Books and Cosmetics. Similar to Amazon.com, it offers websites in and ships from multiple countries including: UK, USA, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan and Germany. WOW HD offers free shipping worldwide on all products except cosmetics which attract a handling fee.
WOW HD is owned and operated by Élan Media Partners. They have offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Hong Kong and operate in 15 countries, hosting its servers in Australia and Jersey in the Channel Islands. They have 70 staff worldwide.
As a pure-pay online only store, WOW HD offers three ways to pay: through its own checkout using a credit or debit card, through PayPal, or through Google Checkout, so you don't need to sign in to make a purchase.
An affiliate company of WOW HD, Access Digital Entertainment, will become the first online retailer to offer UltraViolet-enabled digital content in the UK when it launches WowHD.tv, partner site of WowHD.co.uk. The new platform will offer download-to-own and video-on-demand content compatible with Ultraviolet (UV), marking the first time UV copies of movies and TV shows will be made available for purchase as a standalone offering - rather than sold as part of a bundle with physical discs - in the UK.
History
Under its previous name, CD WOW! launched in the UK in 2000 under MTOL HK Ltd. CD WOW! offered CDs at lower prices than its competition.
The retailer began operating in the UK in 2000, offering CDs and DVDs at lower prices than the high street. In 2004 the company was 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% as 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, acting on behalf of its members, 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! being ordered not to sell titles that were not licensed for sale in Europe, and claiming it had to increase the price of all CDs,
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 a 2004 agreement over the sale of imported CDs.
On 1 September 2007 CD WOW! was bought by Stomp Pty. Ltd. In May 2008, CD WOW! launched a new site design in the UK, Ireland and the US, and changed its domain name from 'cd-wow.com' to 'cdwow.com'.
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.
In September 2010 Stomp AU and Stomp HK went into voluntary administration and sold the assets of the business including CD WOW to a new Australian company, Élan Media Partners. Élan Media Partners Pty Ltd owns and operates online retail sites cdwow.com, chaos.com and play4me.com.au.
On 20 February 2012 CD WOW! changed its name to WOW HD! As stated in their announcement, "We have decided that we need a name that reflects our passion for bringing you MORE entertainment across a range of formats. WOW HD represents: MORE music, MORE Games, MORE entertainment, MORE value, MORE interaction and MORE news!"
On Facebook WOW HD posted a message on 23 September 2015 being "Under new management" since 1 August that year. A lot of their customers were complaining on their Facebook page that they had not received orders from prior to August 1st, nor refunds. This gives the impression WOW HD went bankrupt and now is under full new management. WOW HD replied to customers that as they were under new management, they had no control on any orders prior to 1 August 2015 so they could not fulfil orders pending from the previous ownership. WOW HD changed their site, forcing members to change their password to reflect the new site, and have since introduced a Wish List function.
Since mid-2015, WOW HD has been owned by DirectToU, LLC, who also operate sites such as deepdiscount.com and Amazon Marketplace/ebay seller All Your Music.