I currently have a big stack of anime blurays that I purchased over a year ago and which I still haven't gotten through, due to the number. These were all purchased in the last days of Right Stuf Anime, which has since been absorbed by Crunchyroll. I thought I would write an article in honor of the venerable anime store.
I personally started using RightStuf pretty late in its history, probably around 2018 or so. The reasons that I used it are going to be the same as they would be for most people:
After about half a year of trying them out, I literally used Right Stuf for all of my anime, manga and light novel purchases.
But now they are no more. They were acquired by Sony, and immediately merged with Crunchyroll to become the Crunchyroll Store. I suppose that the selection isn't too bad on the new site. You have more or less all the flavors of the week, and you might have a shot of getting something released 2018-2023 it didn't sell out (but these are so spotty that I'm worried that they are just selling through Right Stuf's archives without any intention of restocking.) But CDs are gone, board games are gone, books on the Japanese language are gone, the random non-anime DVDs that Right Stuf had are gone, so it's now really just a recent anime shop. I've never ordered anything from the new storefront, since I don't care to give mony to Sony or Crunchyroll when I can avoid it, but there are tons of reports online from people whose items have been severely damaged by half-assed packaging, as well as packages not being properly delivered at all. Exclusives which are exclusive not because it's a cult classic that only Crunchyroll bothered to sell, but because they spent a lot of money on exclusivity contracts to prevent other sellers from selling it.
Apparently some of the RightStuf staff did make another store called BuyAnime, but there's an issue with how it presents itself. Here's what RightStuf looked like just before it got yanked:
And here's what BuyAnime looks like:
Notice a difference? There's much more of a push towards ero stuff, and that's without enabling the adult content options (which are prominently advertised in several locations.) In fact, the first time I looked at this site I wasn't even aware that it was a general purpose anime and manga site, not just a hentai site. Their selection is worse than RightStuf's, which is understandable since they are building from scratch, but you can at least buy stuff like Spice and Wolf novels or the Gundam: The Origin manga. But I have severe doubts about the direction of the site. Just to view the blu-ray or manga catalog (NOT the adult catalog) you still have to confirm that your age is 18 or older, on a page that bills BuyAnime as "The Best Shop for Erotic Anime Online." As I understand it, at the outset they were just a hentai site and only expanded out from that due to demand, but that's still where the focus is. I get that this is the easiest niche to attack, since porn sells and normies who want the more mainstream stuff that RightStuf sold will go to Crunchyroll or even more likely Amazon. But at the very least I don't think that BuyAnime is going to be able to scrub off their reputation, meaning that even if they become a reliable store to order from, they will be a store that you can't really talk about using without looking like a huge perv.
But getting back to RightStuf, you can still get a sense of what the site was in a few different ways. There's lots of good stuff archived on the Internet Archive (which hopefully will continue to exist far into the future.) They seem to have flat out forgotten that their tumblr page existed in 2017, meaning that at the moment of this writing that site is still in existence, and a nice little time capsule both for RightStuf's site design sensibilities, as well for the types of sales that were common there. Their youtube page is also still up.