[Text Revision in progress - last modified March 29, 2005] ZipList

Lack of Queue ordering

Unlike most rental companies, ZIP doesn't allow you full control over the preferred order of the movies in your queue (or as they call it, the "ZipList"). Instead, you can designate movies either as "ASAP", "Standard" or "Park" priority ("Park" titles do not ship out to you). You can designate 2 or 3 movies as "ASAP", which they try and fill first when sending you a movie. After that, in theory there is no publicly stated requirement to try and deliver the Standard titles in any particular order. In practice, they do seem to consider the order as listed when you sort by the "Priority" column, although it will be quite dependent on what you have listed and what is available on the day. If so, this is better than nothing, but there is no easy way to alter this order - it seems based on the order you added the titles to the ZipList.

For people who really don't care what they get from their ZipList this probably works okay - if they really want something they ASAP, otherwise they get pot luck. For others (like me), this is the most frustrating ZIP design flaw, since we usually have things that we are much more interested in at any given time. Of course the set of titles that ZIP might be able to send you on any given day depends on a lot of things, including what they have on hand and their obligations to the many other customers getting discs that day. But I still should be able to indicate my preferred order. If you Park a title, Update, and then change back to Standard you can sometimes move it to the bottom of the Standard display listing, but I don't know if this is affecting the information actually used in shipping considerations.

Some of the major problems with ZIP's lack of control:

• There is no way to indicate that you want an unreleased movie to become "ASAP" when it is released (it just goes into "Standard" mode. So if you want that great new blockbuster as soon as possible, you have to keep checking your ZipList the few days before it is released to see when it moves from the "Pending" section of your ZipList to the main section, and when it does, ASAP it. To add insult to injury, if you choose the extra charge "Gotta Have It" option, you CAN get this added for delivery immediately on release. It would be nice if their was some way to indicate that pending releases should ASAP automatically when available (and if you have no open ASAP slots it would be a top priority "Standard".
• Even using ASAPs, you are going to spill over into Standard titles when the ASAP titles aren't available to ship. This becomes more likely if you have low-availability ASAPs, or if you have more than one return on a given day.
• When they do fill ASAPs, you have to keep going back to the website to mark something else as ASAP

My own suggestion would be to add some options to the current priority popup (for Standard items) to allow it to move things around in your queue. Instead of just "ASAP/Standard/Park", you could also choose to send a movie to the Top/Middle/Bottom of the Standard grouping, or Up or Down one slot. This would be the simplest addition in terms of user interface (although their might need to be a bit of back-room work to handle changed Priority order). The revised popup might look like this: ASAP Standard Park Top Up Middle Down Bottom

Undocumented Unparking

Also, be careful if you are right around the 20 Standard title mark in your ZIPlist. If you fall below that, the system will start to "Unpark" titles without warning. This was how things were documented in the past:

"By setting the priority to "Park" you can add titles you want to remember on your ZipList, but don't want us to send just now. Here's how it works: When you browse Zip.ca's library, you can add as many items as you wish to your ZipList. Provided you have 20 or more items in your ZipList, you can Park some of them for now. We don't send you Parked titles until you "unPark" them, by changing the priority to either Standard or ASAP. However, if your ZipList does drop to fewer than 20 titles, we'll will unPark the oldest Parked title on your list, and send you an e-mail letting you know we've done so. If you prefer to unPark a different title or add something different to your Standard list altogether, just visit your ZipList and make the change. "

The current FAQ only says "Selections set to PARK are those that you are interested in viewing but do not want sent now.  These selections will not be sent to you unless you "un-PARK" them". However, as of April 2005, ZIP seems to be following the original automatic "Unpark when below 20" logic, except it does NOT send you any warning email. I can understand the unparking rationale, since if you only have a few titles in can be hard for them to send you discs, but it shouldn't be automatic until they provide a way to order your ZipList, and even then the warning email should be sent.

As of April 15, 2004 ZIP changed their Queue (or "ZipList") logic. You can now designate up to 2 titles with a high priority (called "ASAP"). All the rest of your titles are given a generic "Standard" priority, with little control over ordering within this category. If you have more than 20 titles in your queue you can also assign titles a "Park" priority. "Parked" titles will not ship automatically, and give you a way to store titles you don't want currently, but might be interested in someday. As ZIP says, this does provide a simpler interface, but there are some drawbacks as well.

My first question on seeing the changes was "what ships from the Standard group if neither of the two ASAP titles is available?" Let's say there are 5 of my "Standard" titles available - how does ZIP choose which one of the five to ship to me? It looks like the queue keeps track of the date/time you add an item, and within each of the three groupings (ASAP/Standard/Park) uses this as the sorting order for display purposes. Presumably this order is honored for shipping purposes (the Help indicates that one of the criteria is "which titles have been on your list longest").

The problem is that the user has little control over this sort order once a title is in the queue. What does happen is that when you change an item's priority, it moves to the bottom of the new group. So if you change a title at the top of your Standard group to "ASAP", update, and then change it back to Standard, it will now be at the bottom of the Standard list. In theory you could arrange your queue to your taste by doing a lot of switches like this in the correct order, but it would be a lot of work.

This problem will be much less serious if ZIP is able to ship ASAP titles at a high frequency, which will depend on your choice of titles and how their inventory controls are, just as with any other company. But once past the two ASAP titles, the customer now has much less control over what they get.

The next question is "Does switching priority like this reset any date/time info for the entry as well as the sort order?" Suppose Amy has had the movie "Manhattan" in her Standard section for 17 days, while Brian has the same movie as an ASAP listing for 13 days. If the movie became available on a day when ZIP needed to send them both a disc, I'm guessing the allocation rules would favour Brian because he had it as an ASAP choice, even though Amy has been waiting for it longer (there might be more complex logic, of course). But let's say that the day before this Amy changes her "Manhatten" listing from Standard to ASAP as well. Since they both have the same priority, does the system send it to Amy because she has had it in the queue for 17 days, or to Brian because Amy has only had it as an ASAP title for 1 day. Also, if Brian changes his listing to Standard 2 days before, then back to ASAP 1 day before, does the priority logic still count the 13 days in the queue, or only the 1 day since it was most recently changed to ASAP. Enquiring minds want to know...

As of April 29, ZIP added much better Availability info to the queue - there is now an indicator for titles they still have On Order, and for titles in inventory a variable length green bar indicates whether the title is in stock (full green) or a relative level of availability (presumably based on some sort of ratio of pending requests to number of copies). I'm wondering whether the availability indicator is tailored to that member's position in the waiting list for that title, or just shows the same indicator for any given title to all members. The first would be most useful, but probably is too much work to calculate in real time.

Multi-disc sets are another question. I gather that after some initial problems they set things up so a later member (say disc 3) of a set would never ship while an earlier member (disc 2) was in the queue, even if the later disc was displaying higher in the queue listing. I don't know if the same rule applies with the new queue management system, or if, say, an ASAP disc 3 might ship out if disc 2 was in the queue but as a Standard priority.

Also, you'd probably want to be careful in deleting titles from your queue and putting them back again. For instance, imagine both Alice and Bob have the movie "Local Hero" as an ASAP selection in their queues, and both are eligible to have a movie shipped on a certain day when only one copy is available. If Alice's entry has been in the queue for 7 days, and Bob's for 13 days, I'd guess that the computer would take the fact that Bob had been waiting longer and send him the movie. However, if the day before Bob had deleted his "Local Hero" queue entry and immediately added it back again, it will now be showing as a wait of only 1 day, and Alice will likely get the copy instead.