Wine-Searcher Issues

So as a new member of Wine Berserkers I have a question for the forum.
I have been a member in good standing with Wine Searcher for several years and have found there are a lot of discrepancies in their postings.
For example I was looking to purchase a case of Italian wines last week.
The going price for the wine should be in the range of 85-95 dollars per bottle.
One nationwide retailer had it posted in 4 of their stores for $69.00 per bottle.
Yet when i clicked on it to buy it came up $94.00
I lodged a complaint with Wine Searcher and they came be some BS reasoning which made no sense.
Has anyone had similar issues?

Is the retailer Total Wine?

WS has actually been pretty responsive on the odd occasion when I have pointed out a retailer listing a wine it did not have or selling it for other than a listed price

Sometimes a merchant will deliver only part of an order, but make up the shortfall with an extra mark-up.

I’m hiding all the Total Wine stores for that reason

I could find the character limit for a post solely ranting about the short comings and generally crappiness of Wine-Searcher. It’s awful. Their sole goal is money. Anything that happens after that, they don’t care. Since that retail store (assuming Neal and I are both assuming correctly that it’s Total Wine) pays a truckload worth of cash to Wine-Searcher to list their inventory, TW has a huge length of rope to hang themselves before W-S will do something about it.

It could also be that 4 of their stores got some special deal, and I know you have to select the specific store some times to see those deals.

So this is the answer I got from WS…

I have been corresponding with Total wine & More, and the explanation that they have given us is that if you look on Wine-Searcher at one of their offers, and click the link through to the individual store on their website, the price will correlate.
But if you change the shipping location to ‘California’ for example then it will dynamically give you the price for a Total Wine & More store in California that can ship to you., this is where it could of gotten confusing, because of the tight shipping laws in the US, they have dynamically designed their website to give the prices for the store in the location that you request to ship to, and all prices are different in different states.

Makes sense. They got the deal in one state, and that state doesn’t allow shipping out of it, so no soup for you. Misleading, but not illegal.

Even collecting money they struggle with. I have to manually update my payment every year, rather than being opted-in for renewal.

yeah, the total results are not very helpful because they are site-specific. Even where there is a list of 15 Total stores with a wine at the same price, if your local store isn’t there you’re out of luck. Your local won’t get them for you and they won’t ship so far as I can tell.

Total is very useful to me for a very narrow range of purposes. I do not consider them a serious source

True, but you pay $60. A retailer like Total Wine to list all of their wine in all of their stores is paying 6 figures. Big 6 figures. That’s where the bulk of their money comes from. Funny enough, only like 3 or 4% of Wine-Searcher users actually pay.

Not a bad thing in these days of hacking.

Seems like some merchants have opted out.

Thanks Markus, that’s our view to. It is a deliberate decision by us not to auto-renew annual PRO subscriptions. Wine-Searcher PRO is quite private. We do not collect address info or hold personal data credit card data. And we think if you are paying $60 for a service, then we owe you the courtesy of asking if you wish to renew, and how you would like to pay for it.
Smaller amount monthly subscriptions are handled by Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. Those two businesses do automatically charge your card (taking a sizable commission) and hold your details.

For the most part, WS is a better than average search engine for wine that offsets costs through membership of retailers. If you search for stuff that the member retailers offer, you may not see independent retailers offering the wine for less. Conversely, it will list every retailer offering a wine not offered by member retailers.

The only complaint I would have is that so many links listed in WS go to the wine retailer and not the wine, causing you to search the retailer site for the item. It is too bad that it is too costly for WS to confirm member retailers and others listed actually have the wine.

6 figures! Sorry I have to jump in here to keep the record straight. It is nothing like that. Stores that are sponsors on Wine-Searcher pay-per-click for traffic; and there are no commissions involved on a sale - zero.

We’ve always been for independent retailers. It is why we pick up price lists from stores for free. Any store. Any size. Any country. We like a level playing field, so we pick up - again for free - the price lists from many larger retailers, including national chains. If you are PRO subscriber on Wine-Searcher you can access any and all stores that we list.

Thanks. We’re really trying to do this. But it is a tough ask. Thinking of letting PRO users report a ‘product pricing problem’ but need a way to stop one store using it to complain about another. Open to suggestions if you think it will work? As an FYI, we remove the price lists of between 2 and 10 stores EVERY day as part of our quality control systems.

Keep up the good work Ross.

Can stores opt to not have inventory listed? I suppose the answer is if they won’t send you their inventory you can’t list it.

Yes, and some do. We update price lists every day and there is always someone who does not want their prices to be shown.

I’ve learned the hard way around NYC that I always have to check the store’s own website, as W-S often lags. Things W-S shows are often long gone, and I’m talking about reputable retailers, not ones that do bait and switches.

Still, it’s an invaluable site.