For about the fifth time, nearly every wine search I had painstakingly set up was triggered by some snafu at Wine-Searchers. Yes, it may have been some stupid merchant (Winegusto anyone?), but this is such a regular problem that I can only blame Wine-Searchers for not getting their act together and addressing it at the program level (some sort of failsafe or something).
I still find it useful, but this is just too common a pain in the arse. What are the alternatives?
curious what you mean by “every wine search I had painstakingly set up was triggered by some snafu at Wine-Searchers”
in any event, you can try google shopping. but it’s not very good. Wine-Searcher – unfortunately – is probably the best. but i think it’s a testament to how small this market is that no one has attempted to make a W-S killer, as easy as that would be since W-S – in an absolute sense – is a fairly lame product.
Wine Searcher is still the best. I look to Wein.CC and Vinfolio sometimes, but they seem to have the same info. It depends on the merchant to keep the info current - right?
Yes. Wine-searcher isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the few no-brainers, like CellarTracker, than almost everyone can agree upon in the world of wine products and services. You’ll probably save the $30 annual fee (just went up to $40 I read somewhere?) the first time you buy something.
I’m curious about the problem the original poster complains of – I can’t tell from the post what it is that’s happening to him. Are you running into the “New Jersey Bait and Switch” scam, where they list wines at low prices that they don’t have, to get you to order and then contact you afterwards to see if you’re interested in other lesser wines at higher prices? I ran into that once or twice a few years ago, but I fortunately haven’t encountered it since then.
I think the issue is that the price email alerts are only good for one shot. Once triggered they all have to be setup again, painfully, manually. So in the case of an errant price list from VinoGusto or any other merchant, all of the alerts fire and are apparently lost. Sounds frustrating. Have people been in touch with Wine-Searcher to see if they can restore it or perhaps add a feature to make it easier for a user to reset old searches?
I think Eric is on the right track here. It would be difficult to pre-screen all incoming data for validity, but seemingly much easier to allow for searches that mistakenly fire to be re-armed. Now, the annoyance of getting all of your trigger e-mails in a bunch is another issue, but one you would be happier with if you could reset the triggers more easily (I think).
I guess I’m in a minority around here. I spend plenty of money on wine (not the minority point). I have used Wine Searcher (free version) to make a purchase maybe four times since it debuted. A majority of my shopping is split between direct-from-winery purchases and business with my local merchant, who does a great job of throwing offers that interest me my way and contacting importers and distributors when I have a request for something he doesn’t know about.
There are many things that I would buy if I could get the best price in the country on them, but for most of them, I find a suitable alternative in my local market at a similar price point and give the business to my local wine people. W-S Pro is not a slam dunk for me. I’d rather have another bottle of $40 wine. Am I a dinosaur? Luddite?
Just that they allow you to set up searches (wine, vintage, price) and they email you when it hits. Very useful, but suicide inducing when you have 250 of them triggered by some screw-up.
Correct. Not this time, but I have contacted them many times before. It is such a recurring problem that they need to find a fix, but so far have not bothered. Also, they used to have a “contact” button, but they apparently got tired of hearing from their customers and removed it. Very frustrating, Eric!
Vinquire.com is another price search engine for wines. Not sure if they have a saved search feature.
WS-Pro is great if you’re after specific wines, hard to find wines or live in a market where you simply can’t get some things. However, they’ve really not changed the service in years. Honestly, competing with them wouldn’t be conceptually hard, but getting people to switch might well be. People are used to them and for the most part they fall into the good enough bucket. I’d bet few people setup saved searches to the extent Drew does, so they just ignore that issue.
Exactly right. A good number of my email alerts got triggered today with VinoGusto being the only search results, and every time it would show that they had the wine for $10 (don’t I wish). W-S has apparently deleted them from their list of merchants, but for some reason they’re still showing up in search results. I tried to put them on my list of excluded merchants, but can’t do so since they’ve been deleted. I sent W-S an email earlier letting them know this, but haven’t heard back yet.
Another safeguard: when dropping in a new merchant see the count of alerts that will be triggered. If the number is unusual then stop and check manually…
Just to follow up on this, I received a reply to my email referenced above:
"Hi Frank,
Thanks for your email. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. I have received a lot of emails about it and we will have the problem resolved when the site updates in just a few hours time.
A lot of people have been in touch. Fortunately we were able to resolve the issue and restore everyone’s email alerts without waiting for the next scheduled site update.
To everyone who contacted us, thank you for you comments and sorry for putting you through this. We work very hard at what we do and it’s always interesting to read your responses. We do listen, and we do respond, because even if we are the best there is always room to improve.
If only winesearcher would spend 1/10 of the amount of time as you eric at making their product better it might actually be worth the $40 they charge for it. It should do a whole hellava lot more than it does and do what it already does better. The stupid price alerts bug is just plain dumb.
I actively block venders that I have issues with, taking the time to do so makes the experience even better. I love Wine-Searcher, I use it everyday… multiple times.
I am very pleased to report that all of my searchers were restored as of this morning without having to add them all in myself. Thank you W-S for fixing this problem!
Winesearcher provides a generally good service for a reasonable price. No system is going to be perfect or anticipate all possible bugs on the internet. If WS has restored the email alert settings that were falsely actuated by VinoGusto (iirc) within a day or so, what more can you ask for? If you can’t name someone who does a better job at the service they provide, it’s silly to rant about them.
I have no affiliation or financial interest in Winesearcher.