If you have 250 or more btls in your cellar, why are u not on CT?

[Yao_C]

The tools we use shape us. I don’t want to use any more software than I absolutely need

So I use a Google spreadsheet. I can access my list from anywhere and make updates to it from anywhere. I’ve built the reporting that I need. It’s easy and fast for me to use. I understand everything I’ve built and can maintain it. I don’t need the vast majority of CT’s features.

I guess I’m option 3: antipathy

I’m grateful that I can read the notes that people publish though

[Joel_Singer]

I have a several thousand bottles split between my home cellar and a storage facility, which are located thousands of miles apart. I manage them with two spreadsheets. Over the past decade, my experience is that the spreadsheets are wrong less than 5% of the time. Most of these errors are insignificant (a bottle is in an adjacent column or row). A few months ago I signed up for Cellartracker, but when I saw what was involved in the conversion, I really couldn’t justify it. So let me turn the question around, if I have spreadsheets that are working for me, why do I need Cellartracker?

[Merrill_Lindquist]

I enjoy knowing where everything is, and the power of the TNs I can track over time, etc. All in, without CT, I wouldn’t enjoy the hobby as I do.

However, many folks I know enjoy the hobby just as much by experiencing the surprise of losing line of sight of certain wines, yet finding them later. They feed off and love the spontaneity of kind of knowing the wines are there, but not really knowing where they are. And, the organization and structure of using CT feels confining, suffocating and foreign to think of using it.

These people are known as Perceivers, or “P”, in the MBTI parlance. I LOVE my “P” friends. I’m going to a Champagne event today for my wife’s business partner, and he must own 400 bottles? He doesn’t know where anything is in his cellar, he enjoys opening whatever he grabs and he’s a gas to drink with but he’d never use CT. Another one of my “P” friends who is a joy.

I agree with everything you say about “many folks” - I am in that category. Entering and removing info is too much like work. I do like the surprises and I do have a general sense of what is in there and where.

However, Frank, I am a definite high “J” - hardly a bit of “P” in my MBTI profile.

[KyleC]

I’m at about 300ish bottles and I use CT, but the input process (even with barcode scanner/photo image recognition) is slow and not optimized for bulk options, and I’m considering dropping it. I still maintain a Google spreadsheet just because it’s so much faster.

[Eric_LeVine]

I’m at about 300ish bottles and I use CT, but the input process (even with barcode scanner/photo image recognition) is slow and not optimized for bulk options, and I’m considering dropping it. I still maintain a Google spreadsheet just because it’s so much faster.

Are you using the mobile app for input? Or the desktop site and the shopping cart as shown here (about halfway through): Interface Overview - CellarTracker Support

[Eric_LeVine]

I have a several thousand bottles split between my home cellar and a storage facility, which are located thousands of miles apart. I manage them with two spreadsheets. Over the past decade, my experience is that the spreadsheets are wrong less than 5% of the time. Most of these errors are insignificant (a bottle is in an adjacent column or row). A few months ago I signed up for Cellartracker, but when I saw what was involved in the conversion, I really couldn’t justify it. So let me turn the question around, if I have spreadsheets that are working for me, why do I need Cellartracker?

1. You won’t need to enter the details about the wines, since we have 3 million of them.
2. You benefit from the wisdom of the community: millions of images, tasting notes, drinking windows
3. We partner with 25 different professional wine publications, perhaps some of which you subscribe to. The content is automatically integrated for co-subscribers.
4. You already store in the cloud, a key benefit of CT.
5. You can get an automatic appraisal for insurance.
6. You can barcode bottles. You can do a million other things.

[Mark_Golodetz]

I was on Cellar Tracker for a year, and I think it is utterly brilliant. However, I transferred almost all my wine to a professional warehouse who keep inventory. It’s up to date and I do not have to plug in any numbers.

I love the warehouse, the owners are friends. They are efficient and helpful, kind and laugh at my jokes. BUT they have the worst inventory control system I have ever come across. Too many annoying characteristics to list. I long for the days of easy access CT, but unfortunately they are stuck with the system. I totally agree with OP, if you have a lot of wine, CT is an amazing tool.

[KyleC]

I’m at about 300ish bottles and I use CT, but the input process (even with barcode scanner/photo image recognition) is slow and not optimized for bulk options, and I’m considering dropping it. I still maintain a Google spreadsheet just because it’s so much faster.

Are you using the mobile app for input? Or the desktop site and the shopping cart as shown here (about halfway through): Interface Overview - CellarTracker Support

I primarily input on the mobile app, e.g. I’m receiving deliveries and inputting them at a remote storage site. I make some bulk updates on desktop via the site, e.g. I’m at home and prepping to move a bunch of stuff into storage, but that’s a minority. The ‘shopping cart’ functionality helps, but it’s desktop only.

Overall it seems like your domain model is well structured, but the UX of your app is suboptimal, especially for bulk operations. Even if you just made the hierarchy under wine definition or just the vintage or producer name clickable, that would go a long way towards improving the multi-input experience.

[Sc0tt_F_tzgerald]

I couldn’t manage without CT. As to those who don’t use any tracking tools, maybe they don’t want to know how much they’ve spent on wine.

[Lee_Short]

I don’t, for the reasons others have said. I’ve got a substantial number of bottles, and entering them all would be a nontrivial task. I’ve made an uneasy truce with the amount of paperwork I already have in my life, and adding in the everyday chore of entering new purchases and bottles consumed isn’t something I’m willing to sign up for.

Having the information at my fingertips would be nice, I admit. I’ve even signed up for CT with the intention of using it to track my inventory. Maybe I’ll do that some day, but the work of getting there has kept me from doing it so far.

[Mark_Y]

I’m at about 300ish bottles and I use CT, but the input process (even with barcode scanner/photo image recognition) is slow and not optimized for bulk options, and I’m considering dropping it. I still maintain a Google spreadsheet just because it’s so much faster.

Are you using the mobile app for input? Or the desktop site and the shopping cart as shown here (about halfway through): Interface Overview - CellarTracker Support

I primarily input on the mobile app, e.g. I’m receiving deliveries and inputting them at a remote storage site. I make some bulk updates on desktop via the site, e.g. I’m at home and prepping to move a bunch of stuff into storage, but that’s a minority. The ‘shopping cart’ functionality helps, but it’s desktop only.

Overall it seems like your domain model is well structured, but the UX of your app is suboptimal, especially for bulk operations. Even if you just made the hierarchy under wine definition or just the vintage or producer name clickable, that would go a long way towards improving the multi-input experience.

The mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, it is not meant for bulk manipulation and operation you are correct.

The desktop version is a monster… 99.9999% of the time when someone says “CT can’t”, on a desktop version, it’s user error / lack of know how.
the mobile app has a long way to go to catch up to desktop functionality, but like i said, i use it mainly to consume a bottle, check a note, and look at inventory here and there.

[Mark_Y]

I have a several thousand bottles split between my home cellar and a storage facility, which are located thousands of miles apart. I manage them with two spreadsheets. Over the past decade, my experience is that the spreadsheets are wrong less than 5% of the time. Most of these errors are insignificant (a bottle is in an adjacent column or row). A few months ago I signed up for Cellartracker, but when I saw what was involved in the conversion, I really couldn’t justify it. So let me turn the question around, if I have spreadsheets that are working for me, why do I need Cellartracker?

If you put the time into managing with CT, as you do with your excel spreadsheet, CT is wrong 0% of the time. And you don’t ever risk ‘losing’ your file b/c a harddrive went bust…

And if you have a list of wine on excel, the conversion process I THINK (never done it since i started organically), is to just email Eric’s team your excel… and they’ll import/convert for you.
i could be wrong tho.

Edit to add: based on excel, can you tell what your collection is by region? by varietal?
consumption by month? by quarter?
largest holding by producer? purchase trend over time?
I guess data geekiness is only interesting to a handful of people tho

[Eric_LeVine]

Are you using the mobile app for input? Or the desktop site and the shopping cart as shown here (about halfway through): Interface Overview - CellarTracker Support

I primarily input on the mobile app, e.g. I’m receiving deliveries and inputting them at a remote storage site. I make some bulk updates on desktop via the site, e.g. I’m at home and prepping to move a bunch of stuff into storage, but that’s a minority. The ‘shopping cart’ functionality helps, but it’s desktop only.

Overall it seems like your domain model is well structured, but the UX of your app is suboptimal, especially for bulk operations. Even if you just made the hierarchy under wine definition or just the vintage or producer name clickable, that would go a long way towards improving the multi-input experience.

The mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, it is not meant for bulk manipulation and operation you are correct.

The desktop version is a monster… 99.9999% of the time when someone says “CT can’t”, on a desktop version, it’s user error / lack of know how.
the mobile app has a long way to go to catch up to desktop functionality, but like i said, i use it mainly to consume a bottle, check a note, and look at inventory here and there.

The criticism here is totally fair. There are still way too many things one can only do in desktop, and the mobile app design predated bigger screens and needs to scale better across a wider range of form factors. We are just lining up a designer to kick off a mobile refresh. As Mark notes, right now the mobile app is better as a companion, but in a world of many mobile-first and mobile-only users we need to do way better.

[KyleC]

The mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, it is not meant for bulk manipulation and operation you are correct.

The desktop version is a monster… 99.9999% of the time when someone says “CT can’t”, on a desktop version, it’s user error / lack of know how.
the mobile app has a long way to go to catch up to desktop functionality, but like i said, i use it mainly to consume a bottle, check a note, and look at inventory here and there.

I get that, but for you too say “the mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, is not meant for…” is the wrong mentality entirely and a bit presumptuous. Sure most of this forum is full of older folks on desktop, but if you want to capture a younger audience who’s just starting out, and will grow with CT over time, you gotta be mobile first.

[KyleC]

The criticism here is totally fair. There are still way too many things one can only do in desktop, and the mobile app design predated bigger screens and needs to scale better across a wider range of form factors. We are just lining up a designer to kick off a mobile refresh. As Mark notes, right now the mobile app is better as a companion, but in a world of many mobile-first and mobile-only users we need to do way better.

Glad to hear it. Good luck, if you do a few user studies with a proper UX researcher, for a few hours, you should have more than enough feedback to do a proper redesign (and hopefully standardize interaction paradigms between desktop and mobile so there’s not a huge amount of dissonance when you go back and forth which is my experience thus far).

[Eric_LeVine]

The criticism here is totally fair. There are still way too many things one can only do in desktop, and the mobile app design predated bigger screens and needs to scale better across a wider range of form factors. We are just lining up a designer to kick off a mobile refresh. As Mark notes, right now the mobile app is better as a companion, but in a world of many mobile-first and mobile-only users we need to do way better.

Glad to hear it. Good luck, if you do a few user studies with a proper UX researcher, for a few hours, you should have more than enough feedback to do a proper redesign (and hopefully standardize interaction paradigms between desktop and mobile so there’s not a huge amount of dissonance when you go back and forth which is my experience thus far).

That is the plan.

[Joel_Singer]

If you put the time into managing with CT, as you do with your excel spreadsheet, CT is wrong 0% of the time. And you don’t ever risk ‘losing’ your file b/c a harddrive went bust…

And if you have a list of wine on excel, the conversion process I THINK (never done it since i started organically), is to just email Eric’s team your excel… and they’ll import/convert for you.
i could be wrong tho.

Edit to add: based on excel, can you tell what your collection is by region? by varietal?
consumption by month? by quarter?
largest holding by producer? purchase trend over time?
I guess data geekiness is only interesting to a handful of people tho >

Some good points here, though I don’t understand the first one about 0 errors. My errors are mostly data input. For example, I type the wine into the wrong cell or forget to move a bottle in the spreadsheet when I physically move it. How does Cellartracker avoid that? As for my hard drive going bust, I have multiple copies of the spreadsheet on the cloud.

When I signed up, I didn’t get the sense that I could just mail my spreadsheets for conversion. I had to match the columns to fields and probably elaborate some of my abbreviations and shorthand.

Eric, you also made some good points, particularly about information access. When I retire at the end of next year. I’ll look into moving over again.

[Mark_Y]

The mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, it is not meant for bulk manipulation and operation you are correct.

The desktop version is a monster… 99.9999% of the time when someone says “CT can’t”, on a desktop version, it’s user error / lack of know how.
the mobile app has a long way to go to catch up to desktop functionality, but like i said, i use it mainly to consume a bottle, check a note, and look at inventory here and there.

I get that, but for you too say “the mobile app is for pulling a bottle, checking a note, is not meant for…” is the wrong mentality entirely and a bit presumptuous. Sure most of this forum is full of older folks on desktop, but if you want to capture a younger audience who’s just starting out, and will grow with CT over time, you gotta be mobile first.

haha i’m not quite that old but yah i agree and just as Eric said, there’s plenty of mobile-first/only users, and future growth of CT is with mobile
I wasn’t saying that’s acceptable or good, or presuming anything… i was more saying that’s what it is mainly for RIGHT NOW, not the end state vision. I look forward to the day the mobile is even close to the desktop in functionality.
I don’t know if feature parity is possible, or even really necessary, but certainly lots of desired features to add which clearly Eric’s got the right mentality for and actioning towards.

[Victor_Hong]

If you have 250 or more btls in your cellar, why are u not on CT??? Or at least have a reliable spreadsheet of your own???

I organize a local monthly wine group dinner. And pretty much every month, the last few guys to post their wines for an event, are guys with cellars over 1000 btls but with no means to track what they own. And, these are really smart people. Most of them pretty technology savvy to boot. When asked in the past they expressed the perceived challenge of of; tally, organizing and loading their cellars on the front end. One guy expressed concern over needing to contribute the expected annual donation. He’s pretty tightfisted. These concerns are not without merit but after you’ve accumulated 250 btls +, keeping track of what you have so you can drink them within their window, becomes very difficult. Plus how do you avoid not completely forgetting to drink something before it starts to fall off? Especially once you have 500 plus blts? It becomes very difficult and time consuming to rummage though racks and boxes looking for something you think you still own but drank a couple years ago. Plus, you’re holding up my event thread .

Too busy with my Applebee’s night job to upload my Capital Grille Steakhouse wannabee cellar.

[Mark_Y]

If you put the time into managing with CT, as you do with your excel spreadsheet, CT is wrong 0% of the time. And you don’t ever risk ‘losing’ your file b/c a harddrive went bust…

And if you have a list of wine on excel, the conversion process I THINK (never done it since i started organically), is to just email Eric’s team your excel… and they’ll import/convert for you.
i could be wrong tho.

Edit to add: based on excel, can you tell what your collection is by region? by varietal?
consumption by month? by quarter?
largest holding by producer? purchase trend over time?
I guess data geekiness is only interesting to a handful of people tho >

Some good points here, though I don’t understand the first one about 0 errors. My errors are mostly data input. For example, I type the wine into the wrong cell or forget to move a bottle in the spreadsheet when I physically move it. How does Cellartracker avoid that? As for my hard drive going bust, I have multiple copies of the spreadsheet on the cloud.

When I signed up, I didn’t get the sense that I could just mail my spreadsheets for conversion. I had to match the columns to fields and probably elaborate some of my abbreviations and shorthand.

Eric, you also made some good points, particularly about information access. When I retire at the end of next year. I’ll look into moving over again.

Ah. if you mean you forget to remove a bottle after you consumed it, that’s user error in both cases and not avoidable… you are right.
Many other input errors are reduced/eliminated through standardization through the CX… give it a shot. And yah, email them the list, i’m guessing they can do the ‘bulk’ of the work… not to say it’s completely hands off, but it’s definitely not manual input each bottle.