The depths of my neurosis: I no longer buy much wine at all, but still use it pretty much every day “just to check.” So yeah I still subscribe.
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Sad to hear the price is going up. Mine expires in Feb and it looks like I paid $73.99 last Feb, so it may have gone up twice in the last year.
I am on it daily as well and it is a very useful tool. But it has a monopoly, so I don’t imagine they are going to leave any money on the table.
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This. It’s not a 100% accurate function.
I run into a lot of issues with stores listing stuff that they either don’t have or they don’t sell online (even though they list it online) They sell it in-store only, yet they won’t actually tell you if they have it in stock when you call (which is super fishy. This happens all the time with spirits).
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I wonder how many subscribers they have. Probably most of us here, but I wonder how many others out there beyond enthusiasts of our level buy it.
and here’s the reason to keep subscribing. $85 can be saved in one purchase . . .
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I’m not sure how in-date/out-of-date this information is, but once upon a time, only 3 or 4% of the usage was by Pro users. I can’t imagine it has jumped by much more than that though.
Very telling piece of info.
Also one of the reasons we pay to be seen by free users.
ask wine-searcher for a breakdown of inbound traffic starting from them vs google (or other SEs). as a paying customer, you deserve this. i’d be extremely curious to see the results.
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I’m glad you said it
Underrated comment 
You can also individually exclude merchants who “pass” your filter settings but whose results you decide you don’t want to see for whatever reason so you are not totally at the mercy of the accuracy of their filters.
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What is interesting is that “free” users don’t purchase at any where near the rate that paid subscribers do, but because we price to auction and not retail, our prices are default lower, so we can generally get some conversions on those. We are about to do a lot of deep diving with W-S, so I should have some data to report that could make this an interesting conversation.
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What traffic data is currently shared with pro merchants?
Not much, basic stuff like clicks and things like that.
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Hi Chris, thanks for your kind words.
That ‘glitch’ is a feature! When the search engine cannot find what you are looking for in the US (or any other location that you have narrowed your search down to) but can find the wine for sale further afield, then the search will auto-expand to include other locations rather than give you a nil result. That’s why you see prices from other countries. It is an automatic expansion of your search when no shop has the wine for sale that you are looking for in your selected location.
It’s easy to turn this off. Go to ‘Search Settings’ in the account menu under your name, and the 3rd item from the top will be ‘Expand searches’. Toggle it to off.
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Hi Joseph,
By way of explanation, the PRO of 2023 is not the same as the PRO of 10 years ago. The workload to pick up 16+ million products and prices and publish a refresh every night is quite a task.
Wine-Searcher tries to hold any price increase to once a year. During Covid, we held the price flat. Outside of the US there’s a growing trend to add a digital services tax (the so-called ‘Netflix tax’) to online subscriptions. This tax is 20% in the UK and France, and 25% in Denmark and Norway!
Tip, signing up on the wine-searcher.com website for 1-year is up to 25% cheaper than monthly in an app store. If anyone is renewing an annual subscription while traveling outside of the US be sure to tell us that you have a US address and we’ll not charge the local digital services tax.
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Hi Ybarselah, Stores can see daily inbound click traffic counts in their personalized Store Manager. Adding UTM tracking lets stores see which individual products attract the most clicks. Of course, search traffic is determined by the wine being searched for - it needs to be in stock, it needs to be desirable, and if the price is right and the store is trusted, then the buyers will find it! And it can all change overnight as new prices (low or high) affect the market.
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I’m not sure all the ways this plays out, but just experimenting now, any time I follow the link from Cellartracker to WSPro, it gives me international results. Even though I click on setting and it shows my default settings are USA only, and even though it’s a wine that is available from a lot of sources in the USA.
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thanks - so to be clear, you differentiate these inbound clicks as originating on w-s vs. originating on a search engine and then clicking through to w-s?
Hi Chris, following a link from Cellartracker is a different thing altogether.
Cellartracker sends a directive to Wine-Searcher to follow whatever location a CT customer has set and this will override your WS settings. If you look in your CT settings you should see “Where To Buy Location” preferences that you can change to limit international searches.
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