Based on my initial trial selection with ZIP and various anecdotal reports, I came to the conclusion that ZIP likely didn't currently own all the titles listed in their "15000" listed inventory. After a fair bit of effort I managed to get in touch with Wayne MacLaurin, ZIP's VP of Operations. Please note the following from an email he sent me:

ZIP.ca's ability to satisfy our customers movie requests is our most important measure of success. That is the metric to which our service will be measured and how successful we will ultimately be[...]The details on how we manage inventory levels is not a topic we are prepared to discuss publically at this time.

So please treat any conclusions I draw about ZIP's inventory situation as my own suppositions, and not in any way confirmed by ZIP.

It would appear that they are taking what might be called a "virtual inventory" approach, where they actually have stock of a subset of what they display. Presumably this is the equivalent of one of the other large Canadian companies, and is sufficient to satisfy most of their customers' initial requests. People like me who are requesting only older, more obscure backlist titles, or the people who went 0 for 24 on music videos or 0/80 on other specialty stuff, are uncovering some of the holes in the inventory. I can only assume the bad experience these sorts of customers have is something they are willing to live with.

One can only assume that for the titles it doesn't actually have, ZIP is ordering them in, some perhaps on their own, others as customers request them. This might be a workable approach, but it isn't one I appreciate.

The major question would be what actually triggers a purchase of a title ZIP doesn't already own. The situation I'd find unacceptable would be having a title in my queue where ZIP neither owns a copy nor has it on order. This might happen for instance if they wait for a minimum number of requests for some titles.

My best guess is that the Queue's "Availability" indicators mean roughly as follows: "Now" means they probably own it, and that it is either available or a copy is likely to return fairly soon. You can still have "Now" items passed over when it is time to ship you a DVD. "Short Wait" likely covers both their owning but having all copies rented out, and not owning any copies but having it on order.

It will be interesting to see the pattern of how "Short Wait" titles transform to "now" and then actually ship. As of March 29 I have seen one of my "Short Wait" title turn into "Now" ("Claire's Knee").

In April I had a couple email conversations with Rick Anderson, another ZIP VP. He said that:

If just one member suggests a DVD title which is available in Canada, or that we can source abroad for Canadian use, we add that title to our library. We do not wait for multiple requests to acquire it: we do that if just one member adds a title to their ZipList. This means we own or have ordered at least one copy (and in most cases multiple copies running into the hundreds), of every title in our library that has ever been requested through a member's' ZipList.

They also took a list of titles from my database that they didn't have, and have loaded them all and put them on order. This certainly is promising!