CT/Vinfolio - Stupid Bids

WINE TALK
21

Dan, I did not have to do anything to “say no” to the bids, I just ignored them.

But anyone that would bid $50 for a 37.5 cl of d’yquem is stupid, and anyone that would sell at that price (minus the $10 vinfolio fee) is brain dead . . . the bids in this thread, without the $10 fee, are already up to $52. [bow.gif]

22

Even better, just ignore, like Parker does when people keep asking him if he still believes in tasting blind. deadhorse

23

[rofl.gif]

24

Paul, as someone else noted, every bottle has a price. Whether that price will be offered is yet to be seen, but I’m open to allowing for the opportunity.

With over 450k bottles in the pool of wine listed in the Marketplace, my cellar makes less than an inconsequential dent in that sum. Bottom line though, I’m not interested in taking the time to price out all of my wines, I’d prefer to see what action, if any, develops through the bidding process and either accept or ignore bids as they occur.

I’d venture that many people posting their wines for sale have done as I did and posted their entire cellar to see what kind of bids get thrown their way.

25

Yes, there have been some stupid bids. I had one for $5 when the minimum fee is $8. The good news is one can filter these bids out if you don’t want to get them or wish to set parameters indexed to a % of current retail, auction value, your cost, etc. One does that by setting up a custom bid alert. We haven’t really broadcast the details of how they operate as we made some decisions today about reworking how we handle them. You can explore them in VinCellar’s My Account page or clicking Create Bid Alert within a wine’s detail page.

I also think if one is willing to set asking prices, it will temper the “low ballers.” We’ve even discussed a new service offering where our buying team sets competitive market-based asking prices on your wine for a fee. Any interest in such a service?

26

Chris, I believe you are correct that a lot of people listed all their wines with really no intention of selling them unless they get an outrageous bid. I bid on a few wines until I realized this fact and I stopped bidding. I would be stupid to bid on wines that the seller really isn’t interested in selling unless he gets some crazy bid. I think the concept needs work. In the meantime I’ll stick to auctions where I know the wines are actually for sale.

Steve, is there a way of getting a list of wines that have asking prices? At least with those I figure the seller is showing some seriousness in selling the wines.

27

If there is an $8 minimum charge and the seller has to pay for shipping it would be almost pointless to sell wines under $25-30 which is unfortunate because I have bought many very good wines in this price range from winebid. For expensive wines I would prefer to buy from an auction house where I can inquire about the provenance and don’t have to worry about shipping.

28

I will pay American dollars.

29

This has been elusive. I know Vinfolio has tried a number of fixes. I will make sure they know it is still happening.

30

Yes, under “Narrow further” on the left side, next to last item is “low ask”. You can filter by low ask price. We’re also adding a category for “All low ask” which is not there yet.

31

Note that for a trade seller, the minimum falls to $6 but the reality is we’re not really targeting $20-$25 bottles. However, I suspect there will still be people willing to give up a third of the gross to sell wine that they no longer wish to drink.

32

No, no, PLEASE, when we have a glitch, I want you to hound. We will track this down. I am sitting at Vinfolio with their engineering team right now, and we just had a conversation about this. Anyway what we may do is make a special/debug page and have you try to register with that so they can track it down. A few other people have been hitting this too, but we are not getting a lot of reports.

33

Go for it–some extra troubleshooting has been added that will tell Vinfolio more if it fails again. Also can you email me eric@cellartracker.com and let me know what email address you are using to try and register.

34

This is almost as efficient as eRP support. Great work Eric!

35

[stirthepothal.gif]

36

So to shed a little more light.

  1. There was a registration bug that affected a few users (I heard from 4 our 5 out of 500 who registered in the first day or 2).
  2. Vinfolio posted a fix a few days later. We stopped hearing about problems.
  3. We just yesterday heard from 2 people who had repeated issues.
  4. The problem we discovered this AM was that for this initial failure, for some users it left some remnants in the system. These remnants blocked further registration attempts. So this was a carryover/cleanup issue and not really a mainstream bug.

It happens that P. Robert has a very fast trigger finger, so while we were in the middle of cleaning things up so he could try again he already registered with a different email address. Now we are running to a separate issue where trying to change the email address is failing.

I just got home after spending 2 days at Vinfolio. Great team, great engineers. I have no doubt that they will get this completely fixed and cleaned up very shortly. The Marketplace is 1-week old and is a surprisingly ambitious undertaking. My portions of work on the CellarTracker side are very small in relation to the overall set of tools. So there are some issues popping up here at the beginning, but Vinfolio is making very fast progress, both on bugs (we have some issues with ‘noisy’ notifications) as well as the next wave of simplifications and enhancements.

Meanwhile transactions are going through. Heck I just finished the sale of 2 bottles today, and I am getting more and more (some compelling) bids on wines in my cellar. And we haven’t even begun to turn up the dial yet to drive more traffic to this from the CellarTracker side (bidding support from CellarTracker for example).

37

Some people might want to get an idea of how much they could get, etc.

But more importantly I see it as part of what I’d call the “Facebook revolution” - if I want to buy a specific wine, beforehand I would have had to hint it down, check auctions, haggle the price, and maybe miss a deadline. Or just publish my interest and wait.

With new technologies like this I can do exactly the reverse, i.e. contact people who actually have the wine and see if they are ready to sell it for a price I’m happy with.

From the seller point of view it’s also a very “lazy” way to do business, I don’t have to make decisions about what I want to sell straight away and research price points. Maybe one day I receive an offer for a wine and I’ll think “well actually I don’t really plan to drink this and the price is right, so why not”.

It’s a very efficient way to use resources that are already there, it makes a lot of sense from a business point of view for both parties.

38

Guillaume,

You already have the winebid prices on cellartracker so not sure how much more you would learn. If seriously interested in finding out what you might get if you sell your cellar than send the list to an auction house. You will learn very little from this vinfolio thing as far as I can tell. Maybe a couple serious bids. Lots of low ball bids. And lots of ignore the whole thing from people like me since I won’t waste my time on wine that I don’t know know if it is or isn’t for sale.

I thought this was anonymous so I don’t see the relation to how FB operates. You aren’t dealing with a seller. You are dealing with a middle man, Vinfolio.

I agree it is a “lazy man’s” way of selling. I also think the serious buyers will not pay much attention.

39

My mention of FB was that it changed the way people publish info - with FB you simply put it out there and whoever wants to care, cares, and whoever doesn’t, ignores. Basically the same “lazy” principle.

BTW as a geek I consider “laziness” as a virtue, as described by Larry Wall when he explains why the 3 virtues of a good programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris