Winebid is showing the total price when you click to make the bid (taxes and VIG included). They even show the price pre tax on the homepage now.
K&L is rather easy at 10% plus tax.
Winesearcher shows average market price at the click of a button.
Provenance is listed directly on each listing.
Knowing this, I bid the max I am willing to pay for a lot and then let it ride.
Not trying to be negative, just trying to figure out what the benefit is of using this tool. Not looking at Winesearcher and saving 10 seconds of using a calculator?
That’s a fair question — and exactly the kind of feedback I’m looking for.
If CorkAlpha only saves ten seconds versus Wine-Searcher and a calculator, it isn’t valuable enough.
The intended benefit is not recalculating a single lot you have already found. It is scanning active lots across multiple auction houses, normalizing the all-in cost per bottle, comparing the exact vintage and format with recent realized auction results, applying condition and provenance penalties, and alerting you only when a lot meets your required margin — together with a maximum bid.
The current beta clearly does not demonstrate enough of that yet, which is useful feedback for me.
Your K&L/WineBid workflow is especially helpful context. Which part would be most valuable to you: cross-auction deal discovery and alerts, better realized-sale comparisons, or something else?
@ToddFrench
This response looked fishy to me, so i checked it for AI using Humanlingo and this was the result.
Is this allowed? The account is also only 1 day old
Fair point. I did use an AI assistant to help me write in English, which is not my first language. The product, claims, and questions are mine, but I should have said that openly. The account is new because I joined specifically to ask this community for feedback. I’m not trying to pass generated content off as independent experience. If AI-assisted wording is against the forum rules, I’m happy to edit or remove it and follow the moderators’ guidance. Thanks for flagging it.
That’s a very useful suggestion. Showing how often the exact wine, vintage, and bottle format appears at auction would make the liquidity assessment much more concrete. I’m thinking of displaying the number of verified appearances over the last 12 and 24 months, plus the typical time between sales. That would also help distinguish a genuine opportunity from a price based on one rare or outdated comparable. Would the exact wine and vintage be enough for you, or would matching the bottle format also be essential?
I am assuming that you will be including auction houses from Europe and Australia, etc. That means you.would probably also need to put in cost of shipping, tariffs and taxes for the US market if you’re buying from foreign auction house. You could do two different applications; one for buying domestically one if you’re bringing it in from other countries
I do like the idea, but it does need to be consumer useful to get any traction.
If I’m looking for something specific that’s rarely offered, I’m flexible on format, but there are definitely occasions when format is important, like if you’re searching for half bottles. (It’d also be useful to know what discounts or premiums the market shows for a specific format.)
Haven’t signed up for the beta, but the idea is nice and could be quite useful.
A browser extension that recognizes the auction website your on and provides insights for whatever lot you’re interested in would be a neat implementation…
Some key data/features that would be helpful to me personally:
All-in price (yes, very straightforward, but it can get more complicated with different premiums, taxes, potentially shipping costs and tariffs)
Market price (not from WS but rather historic auction pricing), ideally including a trend graph over the past 2-3 years
Suggested maximum bid with a probability score to win the lot and ability to set the desired probability
Rarity factor, e.g. how often does this wine come up at auction over the past 1-, 2-, 5- years
Support for major auction houses, including Europe, as well as smaller sites like WineBid, K&L, etc
Agreed. For a US buyer, an overseas hammer price is not meaningful without shipping, insurance, tariffs and taxes. The beta is intentionally US-auction-first; I should not imply international coverage until those costs can be modeled reliably. A domestic/international distinction—or excluding cross-border lots until the estimates are trustworthy—makes sense. Thanks, this is exactly the kind of boundary I need to define.
That distinction makes sense. Format should be a strict filter when it matters, but for a rare wine the user should also be able to see other formats. Showing the realized premium or discount for each format would be more useful than simply counting appearances. Half bottles are a good test case. Thank you.
Thanks—this is very helpful. The browser-extension idea is interesting because it would bring the analysis into the collector’s existing workflow rather than asking them to browse another database. Of your list, realized auction history with a trend view and the rarity factor are the clearest next steps. A win-probability score is more ambitious, and I would not show one until there is enough bidding data to support it. The beta currently shows source-linked examples and max-bid logic, not those additional features yet. Which auction site would you want supported first?
