Hi all, I’m back again. Thanks for your kind comments and patience with us. We have significantly upped our Microsoft Azure capacity and doing scale-up on Friday rather than Sunday. And we have some inkling that there might have been some fault on their side on Sunday night. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter to you all or your experience. We sincerely apologize if you lost out on a bottle (or won more than you expected), and also for the sellers, if you feel you lost some extra margin on your sales. We always have some staff watching every Sunday night and you can bet this Sunday our tech team will be monitoring very closely.
To Alan’s point, we’ve reviewed the bid increments and they are generally set at about 10%, although the $100 mark goes from $1 bid increments to $10 bid increments, which quickly sorts out the people who really want the wine vs folks who are having fun bidding in $1 increments.
To some of the comments above, I am happy to provide the hints that bidding earlier in the week and setting your max bids early helps in many ways- first bid often wins the item, having a max bid set early helps dissuade snipers, and it also helps prevent your “chasing” a bottle at the last moment.
Thanks for your understanding and support and feel free to contact me here at any time or directly at rmann@winebid.com Stay safe and healthy, and happy tasting and sharing.
Thanks Russ. It is so great to see a class act in this industry.
My bidding strategy is a little of both. If it is a more expensive bottle (say over $450) I will tend to bid early for the reasons Russ mentioned and Alan as due to the bid increments. If I open the bidding at $650 I believe it will take $25+ to place the winning bid. So if I occupy the opening bid and the next bid, I usually win. However on the smaller bottles where I can increase my bid at the last minute by a dollar or a few dollars I will snipe.
I lost out on my ability to bid on a handful of bottles last week but when it comes to auctions and wines I always sum it up to -if it was meant to be it was meant to be. It was meant to be…
I hope everyone had a great night tonight. From our end, with the adjustments we made, the site was positively screaming. A lot of the team was on hand to make sure everything was smooth. And we have a TON of wine coming up in the next few weeks- make sure to check in every week, and every day- we’re starting to release more and more new wines each day- you never know what might pop up. Happy tasting and sharing! -Russ
I wanted to point out that from Russ’s transparency and personal attention to the courtesy of the customer service staff, Winebid is a class-act company that I will continue to use enthusiastically!
Russ, am I reading that correctly that you are adding bottles during the week? It has become a Sunday night ritual in my house to peruse the new week’s offerings with a glass in hand, but really that’s the one time a week I look at new listings. How do you decide on what to list later and is this a new policy/practice?
Yes, thanks Russ, info is nice to see. I got sniped at the last second last night but also won a few auctions. All as it should be. Thank goodness for sniping, otherwise I’d buy wayyyy too much!
Hi JViz- for the most part, the vast majority of the new auction items will be loaded on Sunday night- we don’t want to disrupt your Sunday night ritual! In the past, we have occasionally added wine during the week when there was a huge overflow from the prior week that wasn’t ready for Sunday night. However, this year has been so crazy because of the pandemic, and we are getting a LOT of wine in, and often it comes in too late in the week to be ready for Sunday night. Our inspectors and photographers are really busy, and we don’t like to let wine sit out of auction for the extra week. Plus, we are adding a lot more high quality “buy now” wine- some consignors and many buyers are asking for that. When we do upload a big batch of new wine mid-week, we’ll definitely let you know about it, as we did this past week by email and app push notification. And, if you have your favorites set up, you will also get notified in your weekly favorites email.
Maybe you want to make WineBid an early Friday evening and Sunday night ritual? Your feedback is important and valued- let me know what you think!
Russ, It’s been my habit to look for wines I’m interested once. Almost always Sunday night, sometimes Monday. I’m sure that’s true of many regular customers. I’d suggest if you do a late add to get them in before some deadline, then send out some opt-in email reminder linking us to just the late adds. That should help both potential buyers and sellers of those wines.
Thanks for the feedback, Wes. That’s how we do it right now, although sounds like we should make it more prominent and clear when we do mid-week adds. More to come soon!
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Your feedback is important and valued- let me know what you think!