Not really. A useful service has been turned to 
I have always bought direct from the wine shop. Why add a middleman? Just another opportunity for finger pointing if something goes wrong. Like air travel or hotel rooms through a third party booker. There would have to be a discount involved to entice me into taking the additional risk.
From this consumerās perspective, the site is worse but still useful.
- The ābest for youā farce is easily ignored.
- Canāt save settings without a Pro account, but still able to toggle auction, by request, etc.
- A few more clicks are needed to change geographic search limits, and it has to be done anew with each visit to the site, but it can be done.
None of the above is moving me to reactivate my Pro account.
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100% - Marketplaces Eat Markets - hereās my scathing review of models like this - Marketplaces Eat Markets - by Paul Mabray
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Thanks Todd - we learned a lot from the successes and failures of Pix.wine which the first viable competitor to WineSearcher. In fact, we went to buy WineSearcher before starting Pix and again while we were building the company, and competed against them as we tried to sell the remains of company to one of the big wholesalers (who instead partnered with Flaviar to buy it instead).
My context of the biz
https://www.meininger.de/en/wine/interviews/pix-what-went-wrong-what-went-right-paul-mabray-interview
The Chronicle writeup - Client Challenge
Esther Mobleyās terrible and intentionally intellectually dishonest article catalyzed by the anti-tech, natural wine zealot Aaron Ayscough (who hasnāt sold a wine in his life) misrepresentations that we were building a flavor search engine -
That said, a search engine for wine should be able to search on anything about the wine - starting with the wine/brand but also should be able to key off wine maker, grape, region, vineyard, pairing, occasion, dogās name from the vineyard manager, and yes, flavor profile, etc to help someone find what they want. Like Google. But itās really, really, really hard to do.
That said, I havenāt given up the quest and Iām very happy what weāre currently building (and have been for just over a year) with over 450 brands as customers. Lots more talking about it after June but weāre already way bigger than WineSearcher and our focus has been the backend of the site. But when we refresh the consumer side, Iām going to share with the group here to get real feedback. I just know that, based on the last go, launching it as beta to the hardcore oenophiles is not the right move. It needs to be nearly perfect.
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I believe he was being sarcastic 
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How do you judge it to be viable? Traffic? Clicks?
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Wine Commercial Search Engine presenting Retailer offers of wine.
They had more retailers globally than we did, but we had more retailers and offers in the US than they did.