Retailers - Your web sites - Do you lov'em or hat'em

I can fully appreciate that maintaining an up to date web site inventory is daunting especially if the data needs to be entered manually and there is no connection to the register. That said how high a priority is it to make sure the data is accurate?

I recently discovered shopping at a high end well known and respected retailer in the metro Boston area that customers would not see 3778 wines of the 5898 total wines listed simply by adding “red, white, or rose” to the search criteria (see below). A common search for me would be “wine, white, $20-$35”. I estimate that there are 403 wines I don’t see and therefore assume that this retailer doesn’t have.

It begs the question, what is the status of bringing the the receiving department into the 21st century?

Search on “product type - wine” returns 5898 entries.

Search on “product type - wine” & “color - red” returns 1198 entries.

Search on “product type - wine” & "color - rose " returns 35 entries.

Search on “product type - wine” & “color - white” returns 887 entries.

Could it be that there are other categories such as sparkling and fortified?

There is another field “Still/Sparkling” and yet another “Dessert/Fortified” but I would be surprised if all 3778 fit either of these categories.

The issue became apparent to me when I did a search on the key word “Chidaine”. The site lists nine, all “whites” to my reconning , seven of which were in the $20-$35 range. When I searched “whites” & “$20-$35” only one was displayed. I just did a search on “whites” & “still” & “$20-$35” and get the same results.

I am pretty sure the problem is that fields, which are necessary for advanced searches, are not being populated.

Something else that just caught my attention is that it might just be impossible to find the phantom wines unless you know the name of the wine itself because if the search is too broad and the database returns more than 250 you get this message.

  • 5898 results found.
    First 250 results are shown; please refine your search using our Advanced Search for additional results.

Which didn’t get me out of the “A’s”

“country - france” & “price - $20-$35” still only found one Chidaine.

I have lots of problems searching numbers and such. Example: Vineyard 7&8