UK Anime Distributor Anime Limited Discussion Thread

I don't want to be mean, but come on man, look at it. It looks terrible; it looks like a scrapbook with the white outlines poorly cut around the product images.

This doesn't scream "Europe’s leading boutique animation distributor". I can't imagine the Anime Limited staff sitting around a table and thinking this looks good, and giving it the green light. I actually think I prefer the older design, it was bad too, but it wasn't this bad.

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Compare the above to something like Eureka Entertainment, it's so much cleaner and tidier:

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I pretty much want to cancel my subscription as its no longer worth it. (If thats even possible)
The only reason for getting a subscription now would be for the sales or for new members to cut shipping.
If there offering free shipping on orders over £50 they should offer to ship all together when that amount is exceeded.
 
Denny Fisher said:
I pretty much want to cancel my subscription as its no longer worth it. (If thats even possible)
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Yes, it's possible.

Email Anime Limited requesting to cancel your Anime Unlimited membership and wait for a response. If they don't respond in a timely manner, then contact your bank and explain to them you have requested to cancel this automatic charge but the business has not responded to your request; your bank should then take care of the rest and stop any future automatic charges going out to them.
 
BrokenPhoenix said:
Yes, it's possible.

Email Anime Limited requesting to cancel your Anime Unlimited membership and wait for a response. If they don't respond in a timely manner, then contact your bank and explain to them you have requested to cancel this automatic charge but the business has not responded to your request; your bank should then take care of the rest and stop any future automatic charges going out to them.
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My membership was renewed months ago automatically with an order. Im not even sure when as its not even listed in my emails or orders. Bank details don't help as its not listed as £17.99
The issue is when will it run out so i can cancel.
 
BrokenPhoenix said:
I also think Amazon and Amazon Prime have a lot to do with our perceptions of shipping costs (I'm guilty of this myself). If you buy with Amazon Prime regularly, it can be difficult to go to a "regular" retailer that charges £4.99 for standard delivery and takes 3-5 days to arrive.
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Worth pointing out that’s also the case with Amazon if you’re not a Prime member. And that’s AMAZON, they’re making billions more a year than any UK anime distributor. Also Prime shipping isn’t really free since you’re still paying Amazon £9 a month, which is nearly 3x£3.50…

Personally I don’t really begrudge companies charging for delivery, with inflation the way it’s been the last few years their costs are going up as well, it’s not like they can continue to absorb increasing costs forever lest their profits dwindle to nothing. What’s £3.50 even worth now, really? A basic cup of black coffee in a cafe?

I feel like on balance the actual price of anime in the UK has still gone down considerably in recent years and people kinda forget that. An entire series on blu-ray for £20-£30? The me who would spend £90 on six single volume DVDs at £15 a pop back in the ‘00s would be over the moon too bad I’m broke now but that’s hardly the fault of anime distributors.
 
Denny Fisher said:
My membership was renewed months ago automatically with an order. Im not even sure when as its not even listed in my emails or orders. Bank details don't help as its not listed as £17.99
The issue is when will it run out so i can cancel.
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Best thing to do then would be to get into contact with Anime Limited and see what they say, then go from there. Your bank should still be able to put a block on automatic charges as they'll be able to see other charges you've made to the business.

ayase said:
Worth pointing out that’s also the case with Amazon if you’re not a Prime member. And that’s AMAZON, they’re making billions more a year than any UK anime distributor. Also Prime shipping isn’t really free since you’re still paying Amazon £9 a month, which is nearly 3x£3.50…

Personally I don’t really begrudge companies charging for delivery, with inflation the way it’s been the last few years their costs are going up as well, it’s not like they can continue to absorb increasing costs forever lest their profits dwindle to nothing. What’s £3.50 even worth now, really? A basic cup of black coffee in a cafe?

I feel like on balance the actual price of anime in the UK has still gone down considerably in recent years and people kinda forget that. An entire series on blu-ray for £20-£30? The me who would spend £90 on six single volume DVDs at £15 a pop back in the ‘00s would be over the moon too bad I’m broke now but that’s hardly the fault of anime distributors.
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Very true. They also put up their minimum spend for free delivery (for non-Prime members) recently as well. However, for that £9 you're getting free next day delivery or even same day delivery if you order early enough in the day on the large majority of products. If you want next day delivery without Prime it will cost you £4.99.

I pay for Amazon Prime myself (I pretend to be a student, don't come for me Besoz and only pay £4.49 a month), and I think I'd still pay for it at £8.99 as I do buy a fair bit from Amazon, so it pays for itself.

For sure, anime is definitely a lot cheaper now and many UK businesses have shipping charges or at least shipping charges below a certain amount. I pay £3.50 shipping a pop to Forbidden Planet for a single manga, but that's only because their manga arrives in perfect condition every time, so it's worth it.

And to be fair to Anime Limited, they do a great job packaging things with bubble-wrap and other protective material, even if it's just a single Blu-ray. However, as customers, we're always going to seek out the best possible price in most cases. I'll still buy from their website, but I'll see how my spending habits change with the new postage cost; thankfully the Naruto sets are over £50 anyway and I've already pre-ordered Bleach set 2 from AoL due to the new shipping charge at AL.
 
The issue i have is membership.

I spent so far this year £454.50 on 16 orders. Only 2 go over the £50 threshold.
14×3.50=£49
10% £450=£45
£17.99 membership
With the introduction of shipping its not worth membership anymore especially on pre-orders well for me anyway.
 
Loris said:
It's actually quite amazing how much worse the website is. The older one wasn't amazing but man. Why is there so much dead space and so much white.
I'm not sure why but every website redesign lately has been complete and utter dogcrap, always worse than what they replace.

Shipping sucks but it's not particually surprising, just have to be more selective with christmas sales I guess.
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The thing is; they’re presumably still predominantly selling their own products direct to the customer, which means getting the full chunk of retail profit (as opposed to just the b2b or store fraction).
Perhaps there’s some benefit of economy of scale for some (such as rarewaves), but I doubt it’s much in percentage or penny terms. And there remain other small retail-only media outlets with free shipping (hive, thegamecollection…)

I’m inclined to conclude that this relates to their expansion into selling products from other publishers. But my opinion of this so far is that they don’t offer any value or other benefits or advantages.

Hopefully there’s a plan to enhance the (un)limited offering with free shipping, as it’s somewhat stripped down from the original pitch, and this further whittles away the value as discount.
 
BrokenPhoenix said:
I don't want to be mean, but come on man, look at it. It looks terrible; it looks like a scrapbook with the white outlines poorly cut around the product images.

This doesn't scream "Europe’s leading boutique animation distributor". I can't imagine the Anime Limited staff sitting around a table and thinking this looks good, and giving it the green light. I actually think I prefer the older design, it was bad too, but it wasn't this bad.

View attachment 36667


Compare the above to something like Eureka Entertainment, it's so much cleaner and tidier:

View attachment 36668
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I don't think I can go over everything but here's some notes I made after viewing it for a short space of time (looking on mobile in vertical & on 1440p desktop) if anybody disagrees feel free to let me know as I'm slightly rusty on the web-dev front:

Title wise too much padding round the container, it'd be better to add less & add a little more to the icons/burger menu as they seem to be flex-between with 0 padding or margin. On desktop the navigation menu is very squashed together, there's plenty of untapped real-estate left & it could all benefit from being a bit bigger (the social media icons are tiny for me). A little transition animation when clicking to open the menu items would be nice too and the text inside may as well be centered & larger for convience (don't have to move mouse so much).

Carousel & main layout is very janky, the blue background sections don't really make sense the way they're aligned & they've tried to squeeze too many game cases on the screen whilst the font size is too big & yet also seems to have very squashed letter-spacing.

The carousel & boxes in general are far too sharp, they should be more consistent with the logo & maybe have a thin border, definitely some border-radius at least to round the corners.

H2's need to be more central, it's a bit weird seeing them at the left edge, at least offset them more to the middle & "view all" should be more prominent, at least a heavier font-weight again with more letter-spacing as you want people to know there's more.

Using the angled boxes doesn't work if you're clipping them top & bottom, they also need to look a little sharper & remove some of the left over white colouring on the edges; for AL I'd just go with front shots, you can always carousel them to have a side shot, contents shot & back shot on each entry for the user to go through, or even just keep them on the actual product page (In the case where you're paying more for extras make that the primary).

Margin & padding on the footer are huge & it's a bit confusing having stuff like the Navigation (again) in the footer. The social media icons in it are also tiny and the copyright etc could do with being a bit bigger & again, less squished.

On mobile you can drag outside the carousel to shift the site, overflow-x issue maybe?
The navigation on the carousel etc is too small compared to the rest e.g. < 3/4 > should be bigger. It's also unclear what content is in what section visually as there's not enough visual separation (white space doesn't count).

General alignment, especially vertically is just inconsistent, some containers are bigger than others, some have more padding.

Hover is a little too subtle on buttons (anchor tags) it's not bad but a slight colour shift & a little more transform scale % would help, there's also no working :active on it for when it's clicked (if someone's net is a bit slower they might click multiple times due to lack of feedback there) they also have a tonne of top padding.

Colour wise the scheme is kinda all over the place. Black & 2 shades of blue that don't really go together, pure white backgrounds are always a no-no, on some screens they can be painfully glaring and some weird purple scheming at the bottom with text colour that really doesn't go as the weight is too thin & the colour isn't complementary to the purples. That latest news section does actually have a separator above (again looks to be a different shade of blue), it seems kinda a weird place for latest news too though.
Some of the carousel text is the same colour as the background or nearly the same so it's nigh on invisible if not completely. There seems to be some issues with missing buttons too.
There's a good use of some global variables so why are they being overriden or not utilised for stuff like that?

I really hope they didn't pay for this & it's somebody learning to code; in which case I hope this is taken as constructive feedback & don't get disheartened because it's far easier to point stuff out than to build a site (not that I'm an expert myself.)
 
The predictive search isn't working properly. In the example below, clicking on the title for the first predicted option or anywhere on the other two options takes you to the link in the background banner instead (Godzilla). The only part that takes you to Macross Plus is the blank space around the ultimate edition title, not the text or picture itself.

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Correction

Acually worse on mobile. If you open the menu and click any option. Home, Title, Products, Blog. The banner takes priority. Not the menu

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Desktop:

Ah ok looks like they removed the banner that says free shipping on orders over £20

But somehow broken the site by doing so as now clicking any option on the menu (example: Deal of the Week) while on the homepage, opens the top banner instead

Pretty sure this wasnt broken yesterday at 8pm
 
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Nobody likes paying shipping fees - me neither - but AL is somehow special here: Most items are Collector's Editions actually shipped as small parcels, and not just Standard Editions tossed into an envelope.
Still, it's like the second price increase within a year, as roughly a year ago new CE went up from SRP £59.99 to £69.99.

You may also noticed that most CE released in 2024, apart from some of the more popular franchises like Naruto, Bleach & Godzilla, are now exclusive to the alltheanime.com store and not available anywhere else. So if you are buying many CE, the subscription will still be worth it.

It would be nice if AL would extend the early bid phase so that multiple early bids are running at the same time, allowing hard core fans to reach free shipping at least by combining two EB to a single order.

(And, again: If they'd at least implement some shipping discount for larger EU orders during sales - even if free is no longer possible. Plus IOSS to avoid extra feeson the receivers end...)
Kite said:
Especially if they are still taking payment up front for a product which could be delayed by many months for multiple reasons.
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Most recent EB started when the product was almost ready to ship - with some exceptions like Bleach & Naruto.
Whilest Naruto faced approx 2 months delay, most got released almost on time this year. Not like the endless delays like Bookworm or Nadia last year.
 
I actually think they should scrap the subscription service now unless they make changes to it.
Non members who now spend £50 or more on each order are spending almost the same as membership. Unless your buying on sales its no longer worth it.
 
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