WOW HD is an online store that mainly sells physical copies of pre-recorded music and videos.
History
Under its previous name, CD WOW!, 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
British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is the British recorded music industry's Trade association. It runs the BRIT Awards, the Classic BRIT Awards, National Album Day, is home to the Mercury Prize, and co-owns the Official Charts Company with th ...
, 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 the
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 the 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. In September 2008 CD WOW! launched a new front end for all its domains including a new domain in the Netherlands. It also started offering cosmetics and perfumes on all the sites via its wowwoman.com domain.
In September 2010, the ownership of CD WOW! was transferred to a new Australian company,
Elan Media Partners
Élan Media Partners was an Australian e-commerce company. It was established in 2010 after Surrealus, a company run by Paul Uniacke and Edward Nedelko, who at the time owned and operated Video Ezy, Blockbuster Australia and EzyDVD under their ...
, which had acquired Stomp. On 20 February 2012, CD WOW! changed its name to WOW HD.
Since mid-2015, WOW HD has been owned by DirectToU, LLC, who also operate sites such as deepdiscount.com and
Amazon Marketplace
Amazon Marketplace is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Amazon's regular offerings. Using Amazon Marketplace, third-party ...
/
eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...
seller All Your Music.
Business
WOW HD offers customers three ways to pay: through its own checkout using a credit or
debit card
A debit card, also known as a check card or bank card is a payment card that can be used in place of cash to make purchases. The term '' plastic card'' includes the above and as an identity document. These are similar to a credit card, but u ...
, through
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
, or through
Google Checkout
Google Checkout was an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. It was discontinued on November 20, 2013 and the service moved to Google Wallet (now called Google Pay). ...
, so no sign-in is needed to make a purchase.
References
{{Reflist
External links
WOW HD
Online music stores of the United Kingdom
Retail companies established in 2000
Video game retailers in the United Kingdom