WOW HD - Mashpedia Real-time Encyclopedia

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WOW HD

Type	Private
Industry	Retail Record store Ecommerce
Founded	London, England
Headquarters	Worldwide
Products	Recorded music, videos, DVDs, books, computer games, beauty
Website	http://www.wowhd.co.uk/

WOW HD is an online retailer, offering Games, CD, DVD, Books and Cosmetics. Similar to Amazon.com, it offers websites in and ships from multiple countries including: UK, USA, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan and Germany. Started in 2000 by MTOL HK Ltd. 'CD WOW!' was bought by Stomp HK Ltd in September 2007.

History [edit]

The retailer began operating in the UK in 2000, offering CDs and DVDs at lower prices than the high street. In 2004 the company were taken to court by the British Phonographic Industry, 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 High Court citing UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. This resulted in CD WOW! being ordered not sell titles that were not licensed for sale in Europe, and claiming it had to increase the price of all CDs ^[1], though this latter claim was later proven not to be true and dismissed as a publicity stunt. ^[2]

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 a 2004 agreement over the sale of imported CDs.^[3]

Since September 1, 2007 CD WOW! has been under new ownership and launched a complete new front end.^[4] 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'.

As of September 2008 CD Wow has launched the new front end into all the domains including a new domain in the Netherlands and is offering cosmetics and perfumes on all the sites via its Wowwoman.com domain.

In September 2010, Stomp AU and Stomp HK went into voluntary administration and sold the assets of the business including CD WOW to a new Australian company, Surrealus.^[5]

On 20 February 2012 Cd Wow! changed its name to Wow HD!

WoW CD was founded by Phil Robinson who founded Tring International a pioneer low price CD provider.