Looking to List Your Wines Online? WineRAC is Ready and Waiting.
Written By: Matthew Apsokardu on Thu, Sep 18th 2008
Ecommerce is a global behemoth. Websites like EBay and Amazon are so broad in their scope that the only limit is imagination. Some industries have taken to online shopping with fierce enthusiasm - electronics, cars, books, and music just to name a few. Other industries are more deeply entrenched in the tradition of face-to-face interaction, and have hesitated in adapting to new trends.
Wine represents the old guard, and few companies have been able to bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar wine stores and the ethereal online plane. With that stumbling block in mind, ClassicWines.com has developed a search engine known as WineRAC - designed specifically to aid wineries and retailers through the headaches and uncertainties of getting online.
"WineRAC stands for wine retrieval and active classification, and is a very powerful search engine and aggregation tool" says Mark Spangler, VP of ClassicWines.com. Spangler worked in tandem with programmers, wine industry professionals, and social media experts to devise a sophisticated yet consumer friendly method of retrieving wines from wineries and retailers, and optimizing that information for the web.
In WineRAC, every wine is allocated a unique page and is placed inside one of the largest wine indexes on the Internet (230,000+ wines and growing swiftly). Consumers who visit ClassicWines.com can search through that database, much like they would through Google or Yahoo, and find wines specific to region, varietal, price, or a myriad of other parameters.
In conjunction with listing bottles, WineRAC also aggregates retailers who choose to work with ClassicWines.com in order to create a price listing and link to that retailer right below their product. Should a given retailer have a lower price than 3-4 competitors listed, that retailer will ultimately be rewarded with the sales conversion.
"Of the many innovative features WineRAC has, the price comparison system really stands out," says Mark Shay, CEO of ClassicWines.com. "We live in a free market economy, and I love that we can offer consumers an on-the-spot comparison of prices from the many retailers in our database. There's nothing quite like it out there."
WineRAC relies on 'feeds' for a large portion of its information. Feeds siphon data into WineRAC and allow for constant updating and adjusting of bottles. This method prevents information from becoming stale. "Although we can lift data directly from a page (known as page scraping), we prefer to use feeds. This keeps the data fresh and relevant for consumers," says Shay. "By cooperating directly with wineries and retailers in building feeds, we have effectively brought brick-and-mortar stores under the roof of online commerce in a way that makes everyone feel comfortable and taken care of."
Through the creation process, Mark Spangler realized that smaller operations may still be hesitant to get involved simply from a financial perspective. In a tightening economy, marketing budgets could be dwindling (or winking out of existence all-together).
Knowing that, Spangler decided to institute a free product listing policy. "We want to give small wineries just as much of a chance to be seen as the big boys. We'll list products for free and help wineries through the feed process because we know, once they are online, they'll love it and want to increase their exposure even more!"
