Related posts:

1. Lies, lies and Snooth: I investigate
2. Snooth Review – a specialist wine shopping comparison engine
3. snooth wine web design

Wine-Searcher is a large search engine of wine stores, winery, and wine auction, price lists and catalogues. According to wine-searcher it has almost 4 million products listed from about 18,000 wine shops.

But it’s claim to fame is really the ability to compare wine prices

Martin Brown created wine-searcher in 1999 after building one of the big wine sites in the UK www.bbr.com.

It provides two services to wine drinkers. The first one is free, consumers can search for wines but only see limited results. The paid or “Pro” version costs the wine drinker US$29.95 and the drinker can see all the results.

In the free version consumers only see sponsoring retailers – if they stock the wine. If they don’t then other non sponsoring retailers are shown. According to wine-searcher 97% of the searches are free searches so becoming a sponsoring retailer may be a good idea.

As well as always being listed on the free results page, merchants also have display ads. It costs US$2000 to $3500 per annum or you could test a month for $210 (as at July ’10, see rates for the latest).

Here’s a quick review of what a consumer sees (you may want to watch this Wine-Searcher Review at YouTube in a bigger format) :

### Sidenote – Disclaimer ###
This software was created by a New Zealander called Martin Brown (the disclaimer being that I’m a NZer). However despite NZ being the size of Oregon I don’t actually know Martin (more’s the pity as he seems like a smart fella). However my readers are mainly American so my perspective is from a US retailer’s point of view not as a “Kiwi”. We Kiwis are everywhere I tell ya, from Google (Craig Nevill-Manning, invented Froogle now Google Product Search) to the California ABC (Matthew Botting, the general legal counsel)!
######################

Wine-searcher takes a different approach from snooth

While snooth gets a commission for featured listings, wine-searcher gets a periodic fee from sponsoring merchants and “Pro” version consumer buyers.

Snooth is more oriented around wine consumers and the wine industry contributing ratings and reviews, whereas wine-searcher is more about straight out price comparison. Both have significant free offerings for the drinker and the retailer.

Google Trends provides an estimate of the relative sizes of websites. This shows that wine-searcher maybe the biggest – but only just – it seems like they are all about the same size (see pic below, ignore the number of daily visitors as this is generally regarded as a good relative comparison only).

Wine-searcher vs snooth etc on Google Trends

How to start

You simply fill out this form and they’ll start the process from there.

From experience wine-searcher will often seed their database with your wines to help you get started (probably by a process called web scraping).

But if they don’t, the standard ways of uploading products apply as per below.

Ways to list your wines

By File

The file can be from many formats including: Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and Text (CSV, Tab separated, etc.) files. You just need to be clear about your fields e.g. name, price.

Wine searcher seems much more relaxed about how you describe your wines – they require the name and the price but that’s it. Though they do encourage you to put in a lot more information.

By Feed

The data feed can also be either a XML file or a delimited text file. So they’re more relaxed about this as well compared to snooth and google.

I’m guessing they have a manual process the first time in the background, that maps the way the merchant defines a field to the way wine-searcher does.

A feed or text file that had the following fields would probably work well:

• name including varietal (up to 160 characters)
• price exc sales tax
• vintage
• bottle size
• case or single bottle quoted price
• a product page URL

Ways to stand out

Wine-searcher, like google and snooth, suggests you add more information to your listing as these tend to get more referrals than less informative listings.

So I’d also include as many of the following in their own fields as you can:

• Region
• Varietal
• Color
• Release Status
• UPC
• Organic
• Kosher
• Non-Alcoholic
• Biodynamic
• All-Natural
• Vegan
• Certified Sustainable
• Closure Type
• Sugar
• Alcohol
• pH
• Acidity
• Winery Notes
• Vineyard Notes
• Vintage Notes
• Tasting Notes
• Serving Suggestions
• Aging Details
• Review 1
• Review 2
• Review 3

Remind me why I’m doing this again?

Conversion rate. For every referral from a shopping comparison site you can usually expect 7-8% to turn into sales. That is much higher than most other traffic sources and given the amount of traffic it is certainly worthwhile.

Have you had any experiences with Wine-Searcher?

Related posts:

1. Snooth Review – a specialist wine shopping comparison engine
2. Why are Comparison Shopping Engines so Important?
3. What is most important to wine consumers? Is it selection or price or both?

Usually people type a search phrase into the search or shopping engine. The technology may be fascinating (to me) but the input (keyboard) and output (computer screen) are very standard.

Until I came across Google Goggles

Say your customer is at your competitor’s wine store browsing the aisles. They see a wine they like so they use their mobile phone to take a picture of the label and send it to Google Goggles.

Google then compares the picture to all the pictures on it’s database through something called ”visual search technology”. It determines that it is a wine label for Duckhorn Napa Merlot 2005 and sends a query to Google Product Search. The customer gets shopping comparison results from online websites sent to their phone while standing in the retail store aisle.

And this is where it gets really interesting

The mobile phone also tells Google Goggles that you are at a particular physical location using it’s GPS system. So Google also looks for local businesses selling the same wine. It may then tell your competitor’s customer that you are actually selling that same wine a little more cheaply, have more in stock, or perhaps that you have different vintages.

It could also be used this way

The customer may be walking down the street and wants to see what wines your stores offers.

So they take a point their camera at the store frontage and Google Goggles uses GPS and internal compass to provide information.

Google compares the location to it’s list of photos and locations at Google Maps (Google Places), works out that it is your wine store and provides the customer details on your shop, local reviews, phone number, opening hours, and any coupons. It would also look at Google Products (Local Merchant Center) and add in your wines with any reviews of those wines from all sorts of sources.

Did I say “could”? Try it is happening right now with the Google Android and is coming soon to the iPhone.

Here’s what Google says on youtube:

So next time you see someone using their phone at your store, they may not just be sending an SMS…

A help or hindrance, what do you think?

Related posts:

1. Google Base Feeds and Wine
2. Google 2010: end of empire, hail the new order

In previous posts in Wine Comparison Shopping Engines I outlined why you should use these sites and how to do it with the “elephant in the room” (Google).

In this post I talk about how to do this with another very interesting shopping comparison site that specializes in wine – snooth.com.

Snooth was launched in June 2007, and has a huge wine database and online community, with over 1 million wines and prices from 11,000 merchants and wineries worldwide. Snooth says the site currently handles over 5 million searches per month and has over 400,000 registered users.

It’s certainly got some big names behind it and has established a lot of creditability in the wine and tech world.

To put them in perspective here’s what Google Trends says (US only):

So they are about as big as wine.com (best to look at this data on a relative basis – not absolute numbers of visitors).

So it’s big. Perhaps not a Google elephant, maybe more of a lion

It is also free

You can list your products for free. It’s only when you choose to get greater exposure through “featured” listings that you start to pay any fees. We’ll covers the free stuff first.

How to start

Go to the trade sign up page hub.snooth.com.

You’ll first need to be “verified”, don’t worry this ain’t intrusive! Within about 48 hours they’ll send you an email saying you’re verified and you can start to edit your store details and upload your products.

So login to your site, go to Your Account and then clicking on your retail store. How to do this is pretty obvious with the exception of Featured Merchant Setup and Billing which I’ll come back to.

Upload products

Snooth automatically creates some products after verification – probably by using “web scraper” software to copy and paste data from your product web pages into snooth. The good news is you can be up and going very soon. The bad news is you need to make sure you agree with all the data! Sometimes we er…. forget to keep our data perfectly accurate.

As is usual with shopping comparison sites the easier way to do this is to use an Excel or Open Office spreadsheet. Go to snooth templates to download a sample file. Or just download a file from your “All Products” page, which is what I did. The fields are copied below. The ones with * seem to be automatically filled in(?).

Snooth Wine ID*
Name*
Vintage
Winery
Region*
Type
Color
Release Status
UPC
Organic
Kosher
Non-Alcoholic
Biodynamic
All-Natural
Vegan
Certified Sustainable
Varietal
MSRP
MSRP Currency
Container Notes
Amount Produced
Closure Type
Sugar
Alcohol
pH
Acidity
Your Price*
Your Sale Price
Product URL
Bottle Size*
Winery Notes
Vineyard Notes
Vintage Notes
Tasting Notes
Serving Suggestions
Aging Details
Review 1
Review 2
Review 3

Don’t worry if it looks daunting – there are many ways to do this quickly other than doing it one product at a time. Also don’t worry if you don’t fill in most of the fields (though there are advantages in doing this).

Upload Products by Spreadsheet or XML file

One way to quickly add products is to see if your eCommerce software downloads an excel “csv” file of your wine products. If so then upload it (go to Your Products > Add Products > With a CSV file). If, or when, it works then ensure that the snooth fields match your equivalent fields (something called mapping) in snooth’s easy to use interface, and you should be all go.

The second way is to use that xml feed that I’ve talked about in my previous post for google. The feed is similar though without the “g:”.

    
        5112453345
        Alderbrook Reserve Zinfandel Dry Creek Valley
        2002
http://your-site.com/this-wine.html
32.99
        1
        750
        http://your-site.com/this-wine.jpg
        Alderbrook Winery
Red
        Table Wine
        USA
        Upper Dry Creek
        Zinfandel; Carignane
15.1%
        15.1%
        Rich, dark rose color. The nose is bursting with brambly blackberry fruit. Anise, blueberry and black cherry notes flow through on the palate. Enjoy now or hold for the future, this is a wine with aging potential.
        
            
                92 Points
                Wine Enthusiast
            
            
                90 Points
                Jay Miller, The Wine Advocate
                February 2009
                This wine exhibits...
            
        
    

Your eCommerce software probably has a way to do this. According to snooth as long as it can identify SKU, price, URL and wine name then it should work. Fingers crossed, it didn’t work for me.

*** Sidebar on Magento and RSS ***

The eCommerce software I know best is Magento and it requires some programming to customize a feed. So what I would do is use SingleFeeds extension to manage all my feeds from the one source. You need an account with SingleFeeds which costs but you don’t really want to start custom coding (techies should see MagentoConnect for more). The good news is that Magento has an easy way to create a Google Feed which requires no programming. (I’m mucking around with WordPress so I’ll see if I have more luck with that one.)

*************************************

If or when it works then you just ensure that the snooth fields match your equivalent fields.

Snooth consolidates similar products

When you upload products Snooth tries to work out if it has these already listed in its product database. If so, then it simply adds a pre-existing product ID to your listing so consumers can compare the same product from different retail stores. If not, it adds them to your account for you to edit (if you wish). Now that is pretty cool technology!

Paid to be Featured

All Comparison Shopping Sites have hundreds of listings. It’s why consumers visit them so they can compare at least prices if not other features. One way to get to the top of these listings is to pay the site in way or another. For some sites you increase your bid price for a click, on others you pay a flat fee, with Snooth you become a featured merchant and pay a commission on sale.

Featured Merchant

Featured merchants are the ones that appear at the top of the listings and get a yellow star with “Featured” beside it (see pic below for a Mondavi wine, not the yellow star at the top but beside the store listings).

That this is an advantage won’t surprise you if you’ve read my previous post on Google Products. Many consumers don’t go much further than the top 4-6 listings (that are “above the fold”). So it is certainly worthwhile.

The downside is you have to pay a small percentage (10% I think) of the purchase price. Snooth tracks this by asking (insisting) you install a small piece of code called tracking code in your website shopping cart. You’ll probably need to get your eCommerce provider to do this if you aren’t comfortable with html.

This code tracks whether a customer came from Snooth (by using “cookies”, see wikipedia), then tracks whether they actually purchase something by seeing if an order is completed (it looks for a success page such as one headed “Thank You” or “Order Completed”). If it’s successful then snooth charges your credit card that percentage fee or “commission”.

If you go to your company setup in Your Account, you’ll see a section called “Featured Merchant Setup”. This is where you put in your details. Here’s a snooth video that explains the process:

Become a Featured Merchant on Snooth

One thing to Note

Most comparison shopping engines encourage you to provide more information in your listing by giving you a higher ranking for a richer description – especially reviews. So if you can do this once and do it well then you’ll be rewarded many a time with more prominent better rankings in shopping sites.

Have you used Snooth and do you have any tips?

Related posts:

1. Wine-Searcher, a Price Comparison Shopping Site Review
2. Why are Comparison Shopping Engines so Important?
3. Snooth, Darwin and the Internet Jungle

If you’ve been reading my previous posts you’ll be saying, “Okay, okay I get it, it’s important, how do I do this?”. And I’m glad you asked.

This part of the internet ecosystem has it’s own peculiarities and optimization techniques

Your first port of call is the Google Merchant Center. If you haven’t already then I suggest you sign your shop up to a gmail account and use this as your login for other Google services (Adwords, Webmaster tools, Checkout). As well as the Merchant Center.

It’s an easy process with lots of help available from Google and others in YouTube. The only issue I can see is perhaps verification that you own the site through Google Webmaster tools, but give it a go it’s really not that hard. It’s also free!

Here’s a good video from Google themselves:

You’ll be asked to submit your products

The easiest way to do this is by downloading the sample excel file and filling this in for your products. You then upload it and in about 24-72 hours you’re selling in the Google shopping results at no charge. Here’s Google again:

However it’s a manual process that can better be done with an automated feed – which is what this post is about.

But first a quick outline of something pretty cool that does incur a fee

Once your products are successfully submitted, you can also choose to enable your AdWords with Product Extensions. This allows you to highlight your products directly in your search ads.

Note only Adwords and Checkout incur fees, not the Merchant Center and submitting products.

This is the official word, “when your AdWords text ad appears, and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of your products in a plusbox under your ad.”

This is very effective and something all merchants should do – but don’t.

You can also choose to sign up to Google Checkout while you’re at it. This gives your AdWords Google Checkout badges which gives your ads more presence on the search results page. Note Google will charge you about 2.9% on every sale through Google Checkout (just like a credit card company or PayPal).

Right let’s talk about doing this automatically through something called a feed.

A feed?! That’s something I have at the Diner down the road

Yes it is. It’s also a file that usually has an .xml ending and is also called an RSS feed.

A Google feed with one product may look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/
Find, buy, ship or pick up wine and wine gifts easily at the Your Wine Store. Find the right wine or wine gift from our large selection of wines and spirits.
en_us
40
Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:31:20 MSD

http://www.yourdomain.com/napa/merlot/andreas-vineyard-napa-merlot.html

This Napa Valley Merlot is made in an intense fruit forward style and reveals a combination of black berry fruit aromas of plum, cherry, blueberry with a complex long after taste

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/andreas-wine-image.gif

new
9.99
Andreas Vineyard
Food, Beverages & Tobacco > Beverages > Wine
SKU10001
1504 Some Street, Beverly Hills, CA, 90210, USA
Cash
Discover
Visa
true
1
3.3 pounds
2005
n

Translated it simply says there is a wine shop in CA 90210, selling a napa merlot for 9.99, go to this website address to purchase, here's a pic, lots of payment methods, there are 13 in stock.

Google wants the feed to look a bit different, it requires a title, link, and description.

As an example of a more ordinary feed that Wine.com gives to it’s affiliates check this out (with the boring parts of the code deleted):

		20595
		Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1994
		http://www.wine.com/V6/Robert-Mondavi-Reserve-C...
	

This code says there is a product, with an ID, that has a name, that can be found at this url. All in a way that is easy for shopping comparison engines to understand.

Often ecommerce software will do this automatically, or by allowing you to easily set it up. Sometimes you have do this yourself and/or perhaps get a service company to do the rest for you eg. wine.com uses godatafeed http://www.godatafeed.com , or another good one is Single Feed http://www.singlefeed.com/.

Once you’ve taken care of Google we’ll look at the other sites. But that’s another post.

Any questions or comments?

EDIT Google changes feeds, please see their announcement here (Dec 17, 2010): New Shopping APIs and Deprecation of the Base API “We are pleased to announce our newest addition to the shopping family — simple yet powerful programmatic interfaces that enable retailers to upload their content to and query data from Google. The new Shopping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have two main components: Content and Search. As part of this launch, we’re are also sunsetting the Base API and replacing it with these new Shopping APIs…”

Related posts:

1. Google Goggles – that customer may not just be sending an SMS