It’s amazing how many companies try to design and innovate their web presence with a website that is more cumbersome and less functional than the previous version.
Clicking around the current bin sale, appears you can no longer sort by producer, price etc, it’s fixed at producer. It also fixes you into 15 results per page, you could previously select up to 100. The website weirdly groups wine in the search result by producer. The large graphics and grouping make it hard on the eyes. You can’t click on the name of the wine to drill into it, you have to click on the picture which take you to a page that has all wines for that type of wine, not the particular wine/vintage. You also can’t tell how many bottles of wine are in stock in the search results, you have to drill into the selection.
Love benchmark, been buying wines from them over the past decade but this new website is a big stinker. The old one was perfectly fine to use.
Also they’ve tightened their policy of requiring you to ship within 30 days during shipping season. I understand from their point of view. For me it’s less convenient.
I’ve definitely purchased less from them the past few months.
By and large , I agree with you. It’s like these companies make changes for change sake.
I do wonder sometimes if there was a tutorial and/or the main designer explained their changes and the reason for doing so if our feelings would be more positive on the changes .
Agreed. The site changed a while ago, and I am not a huge fan. However, I’ve had great luck buying from Benchmark, so even a bad website isn’t going to stop me.
Yes, they had a bunch of those. I think the “best” deal I saw was for -$38.
And I agree about the new website. Why not give me a choice of how I want to display it. And they use those large photos, but almost all their photos are worthless generic photos. In some cases, genuinely annoying. For example, I see Giacosa and a red label for $125 and I’m all excited, until I realized it is not a photo of that bottle. What’s the point of the photo then?
I used to browse regularly; would sort by vintage and go through the entire inventory from the oldest up to the 90s. Can’t do that anymore so K&L gets my business instead these days
The website has caused me to stop looking there. It’s not worth the hassle…whoever “Ok’d” the change should be taking a hard look at sales before and after. While I want to shop there…it’s just so complicated in this new format that I’m no longer motivated to look. There was a wine that was there before the change, not there after the change, then it showed back up again when I was looking in another area. it’s a mess and I think they’d do a lot better to go back to the old format. That was easy to navigate, fun to browse through, and I understood it. This new format is just cumbersome and a pain in the @$$.
Tentatively…my plan is to wait and purchase from them again when they have a website that’s easier to navigate. It’s no longer a website that I go to browse when I’m bored or thinking I might be wanting to make a purchase.
agree - the whole interface needs to be rethought - you can’t click on the wine name to go to that wine, you click on the (overly large) picture icon and go to a page with all the vintages, then you have to click again to find the wine you wanted in the first place.
Hate having to display wines 15 at a time, give me the all option every day - and shrink that icon, so I can see more of the list on one screen. I may need readers now, but I’m not blind.
Was also looking at a few wines in the sale, and then just gave up.
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