Opening up an online movie rental firm is a lucrative business idea today because most of the families now a day’s prefer to watch movies in home rather than in cinema halls. Watching movies in theaters has its own disadvantages like standing in lines, increase in the price of the tickets, traveling etc. These factors motivate an individual to search for alternatives and with the availability of home theaters the experience can be nearly as good as cinema halls. There are many ways to start an online business that deals with renting movies; it can be, sending DVDs to customers via postal service, some customers might ask for live streaming etc. You may find some companies offering both solutions to its members.
Create a Website
The first and foremost thing for any business is online presence. Build a website and you may tie up with an existing online firm to attract customers. If you don’t want to hire any designer to build a website you can go to amazon.com and can create a site that matches your rental business. However, while designing a website make sure it allows your customers to search for movies without any hassle, like Cinema Paradiso. They have their movies listed in a very user friendly way, like TV series, World Cinema, New releases etc.
Competitor analysis
This is another very important step before starting any business. Analyze and make a list of your online business competitors. Monitor them as and when required to excel in the competition.
Scale of business
Determine the scale of your online DVD rental venture. If you cannot afford to accumulate enough funds for your business then you might have to operate in a small scale. Choose the area of your service, it can be just your city or you may go for a broad area. If you are looking to offer mainstream cinemas then you might need to invest more in buying DVDs. If you are targeting a particular niche like “horror movie lovers” then you don’t have make huge investment.
Who can be your customers?
Carefully judge your target market. The biggest difficulty for any new online DVD hire firm is that the market is ruled by many major players like Netflix, Blockbuster video and some others. Besides offering a huge collection of movies to their customers they also have proper logistic support to deliver movies anywhere any time in a country. You must select an audience group and encourage them to use your company and influence them that your service is not inferior to the market leaders. Identify your customers based on age group, gender, location etc and try to provide tailor made services according to that.
Service offerings
You have come up with innovative and attractive services like free trial periods. You can even customize your membership plans. Cinema Paradiso offers six type of membership plans to those who are willing to be a member. Do a brief analysis about any other services offered by your competitor and adopt accordingly.
Select your Distributors
The easiest way to increase your stock is to find a distributor and buy DVDs at a bulk. In this way you can save a little bit money. If possible make an agreement with the wholesaler to deliver latest movies the moment it arrives and before giving it to someone else. Pay few extra cash if required.
Last but not the least
Start advertising about new releases in your website. Open up prior booking and declare to give some gifts for the first 10 bookings and so on.
Online DVD rental business is a tough market but if planned properly there is a huge area for making profits.