Keeping busy

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth, Partnerships

Mark talked about this before, but our Merchant Select tool is becoming more and more of a key feature. We ramped it up again last last week: now you can select merchants specifically, you can refine by country, you can also look up a winery and see what they are selling direct to the consumer.

As we begin to really ramp up the number of merchants we are displaying on the site, and begin to add more and more international ones this feature is going to be a cornerstone of the site’s search. Its very powerful, and key to getting more relevant results.

Have a play and tell us what you think.

PS. To find and use this thing, click on the ‘Add a merchant’ link on the top of any search results page

Be our guest

posted by philip in Snooth

Snooth’s blog is a strange beast. A blog, or web log, is generally written by one person, or if not, at least with one voice. Ours, like the rest of our site, is trying to do something different. Unexpected? Confusing?

Interestingly, we’re starting to hear some people get confused on our site. But they aren’t confused by using the site, they are just confused over what the site is ’supposed’ to do. Is it a wine search engine? A price comparison tool? A cellar management system? A social network? And so on.

By the way, I don’t know either. We’re a wine site, thats for sure, but what we build and what direction the site takes is really based on how we see people use it. Some people come and browse prices and leave, others categorize their wines and leave, some come for the recommendations, others do all these things as well as participate in the forums, add friends, give recommendations and so on.

We wait for feedback, but we also track how the site is used. If something turns out to be popular we’ll pour more effort into improving it. If people start using something in a way unintended by us, we’ll re-engineer it so it supports you better.

We’re a site about wine. A social shopping site. The rest is really up to you, to steer us down this path.

But, back to the blog. Its a multi-threaded blog. Most of the employees write on it, we have a few ex-employees still contribute (farewell Annie) and an excellent roster of guest bloggers who really add depth and a variety of opinions and experiences to the blog. Just to give you an idea of the diverse backgrounds, here are some of our current regulars:

• Dan Petroski - Assistant Winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley.
• Scott Rosenbaum - director of operations for the International Wine Center and wine buyer for the retailer DrinkUpNY.
• Todd Kennedy - self-taught foodie/chef who writes the blog Gute Essen about the meals he cooks for himself and his friends.
• Kirstin Jackson Ellis - wine bar manager and wine and food consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes about wine and food pairing at Vin de La Table, her luxurious and lighthearted blog.
• Robert Scibelli - lecturer and administrator at New York’s premier wine school, International Wine Center.
• Giampiero Nadali is a marketing and interactive communications expert and author of the Italian wine blog, Aristide, where he writes about wine with an outsider and consumer-devoted approach.

Having said that, there’s room for a few more. So I’d like to ask if any of you ladies and gentlemen that come to our site and read this blog would like to have a hand in this? So many of you are either wine lovers, collectors, wine makers, professionals or passionate amateurs in this industry that I’m sure you’d have great stories to tell.

Drop us a line if you are interested.

Wine 2.0

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine Industry

Wine 2.0 is the name given to the application of web 2.0 technologies (whatever they actually are) to the wine world. Snooth uses a lot of modern coding practices (ajax, tagging, user generated data and so on), so we’re certainly a Wine 2.0 company.

The Wine 2.0 trade organization is having their next event on April 24th in San Francisco at Crushpad’s facilities. I was asked to be on the group’s advisory board to represent Snooth. I think we’re the youngest company on the list!

Consumer’s are invited (i think), so if you are in the area and want to say hello, please stop by.

Amazon on Wine

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Last week Amazon announced their entry into the wine retail market. As usual, Amazon is being tight lipped about what exactly their plans are, and the story has been widely mis-reported. Decanter, for example stated that it was via a partnership with Wine.com - unfortunately, that was in 2005 and only lasted a year.

I was called up by several reporters and spoke to a good number of people about this and what was most clear is no one actually knows the real story.

What is clear is that Amazon is a giant, sophisticated company, and to have them turn their attention to our little ‘ol industry is a good thing. Its good for consumers of course - more competition improves selection and drives prices down. Its also good for Snooth. Sure, it may be more competition and if the giant rolls the wrong way they might crush us, but an industry without competition is not likely to be a profitable industry to be in. And having a large company decide to enter a once small market validates the fact that there’s potential here.

At the moment I don’t have more to add that that. What I said above is based on fact, the rest is conjecture. And without knowing Amazon’s plans its hard to say much useful about it.

Amazon Fresh delivers fresh goods in the Seattle region. If the wine business merely complements that, they are just another regional store. If they decide to ship nationwide then they have to acquire licenses on a state by state basis, and that can take 6 months+. They could skip that and just focus on their zShops model and aggregate data, much like Snooth does. But this doesn’t work either, as its illegal to charge someone’s card for a wine purchase if you are not the license holder, and their current zShops model would need to be reworked to comply with the law here.

This will be Amazon’s third foray into wine (after the wine.com partnership in 2005 and an investment into a wine.com predecessor in 1999) and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out this time. If its successful, they could be as beneficial to the industry as Costco has been.

Some of us are talking about what it means here.

Good with pork wine

posted by philip in Snooth

I’m still not sure what the story was behind some of the traffic spikes we saw over the last week, but a good deal of the hits came from Google. Interestingly enough, around the same time, they began displaying internal site links for us with the regular Google result text snippet:

They obviously calculate which ‘pages’ should be included programatically, as some of ours are pretty funny: “good with pork wine”, of course, being the winner here.

Google’s really become the company where any exposure by them is good exposure, so of course we’re happy with the endorsement (only a fraction of the larger sites get these internal site links at all). Its just a shame we’re stuck with being the pork wine site experts…

Snooth Launches Talk

posted by philip in Snooth, Press

New York, NY - March 5, 2008

Snooth makes wine shopping more social with launch of Snooth Talk

Snooth, the worlds most comprehensive wine review site, today announced the launch of Snooth Talk, the industry’s first fully featured, seamlessly integrated wine forum. Snooth users can visit Talk to ask questions, give advice, debate wines and interact with their fellow wine lovers at a much deeper, more involved level than before.

Launched in June 2007, Snooth is a highly interactive, social database of the world’s wine, offering both casual and expert wine drinkers the ability to search, obtain personalized recommendations, browse ratings and reviews, as well as seamlessly buy hundreds of thousands of wines from a network of over 1,000 merchants. Users have the ability to search by their own personal preferences (bold, peppery, fruity, etc), by a specific meal-pairing, price, or by region or producer. Snooth’s recommendation engine also provides customized selections based on stated preferences and user feedback. The more information a user gives on wines they enjoy, the more personalized and detailed the recommendations become.

“Snooth is a valuable tool for the average wine drinker to research, track and buy wines online,” said site founder Philip James. “With the launch of Snooth Talk, users really have the opportunity to get much more deeply and personally involved with a product they enjoy so much.”

Snooth is continually developing its feature set and adding new merchants. The site recently surpassed 2 million reviews and is now used by people in over 190 countries.

About Snooth:

Snooth is a revolutionary web-based social shopping experience that is simplifying how people select, interact with and purchase their favorite wines.

Snooth is the world’s most comprehensive wine database, featuring over 2 million reviews for over 300,000 wines. It offers both casual and aspiring wine drinkers personalized wine recommendations, ratings & reviews, as well as a wine information search tool that seamlessly connects users to the websites of over 1,000 merchants and wineries and critics including wine.com, Sam’s Wines and Spirits, K&L Wine Merchants, Beverage Media and Inertia Beverage Group.

Snooth launched in June 2007.

Please visit www.snooth.com for more information.

Contact

media@snooth.com
(646) 723-4328