The Wine Tools Needed To Suvive An Ugly Economy
It is a truism that in difficult economic times, like right now, when the entire economy appears to be on the descent, still, businesses need to work harder just to stay level. The problem with this truism is that it's a truism and every responsible businessperson knows it. That means if they want to stay ahead of the increasingly difficult game, they need to work DOUBLY hard.
For America's wine retailers, this obviously means adjusting inventory to suit the changing buying habits of their clients. It means trying to keep lower inventories. It means It means looking for higher margin products that remain attractive to their clients.
But what about for those retailers that work only online or have an online presence in addition to their brick and mortar presence? In order to sustain that business they need to use every tool at their disposal to identify the habits, desires and need of online wine buyers.
This is why I have become very interested in Snooth's recently announced "Snooth Analytics". To quote from their announcement:
"The Snooth Analytics package provides never-before-available data on
user behavior in an online wine environment. As part of the analytics
tool, retailers and wineries can view data on the number of wines
available, search results and detailed page view counts, clicks and
conversion data, as well as a breakdown of the completeness of their
wine listings on Snooth."
What retailers need to understand about this new Analytics Package that is part of the company's "Partners Hub" is that it is based on millions of consumer searches for wine at Snooth. In other words, the information on comparative pricing, key word searches, category price comparisons and conversion rates that retailers working on line must have at their disposal is based on a significant survey of online wine buyers.
Snoothis by far the largest (most visited) Interactive wine commerce website—look at this comparison of traffic growth for Snooth and their competitor Wine Searcher. Wine Searcher is not Interactive, but it still has more basic traffic than Snooth. It appears Snooth will, in 2009, become the THE most visited wine search site on the net. For now, it is the most visited site with interactive components.
Snooth is literally the most impressive and fastest growing interactive hub where consumer and the trade come together. But critical here is the valuable information that a retailer can obtain by working with Snooth, listing its wines on its site and closely monitoring the way Snooth's consumer users react to and interact with the retailer's product listings. If a retailer uses the new Snooth Analytics and Partner Hub fully, they can be in a position to be working doubly hard in what is becoming a terribly difficult economy.
There is going to be some serious shake out in the online wine world over the next year. There are going to be some survivors who go on to take significant market share they didn't possess at the beginning of 2008. And there are going to be online wine vendors that once seemed promising that no longer exist. I'm convinced that the survivors will be the ones that utilize the kind of tools that Snooth is providing.
No doubt that tools like Snooth (and my own, smaller, scrappy, competitor to it) will be key to on-line retailers surviving in this terrible climate.
But whether any of these tools can survive – clearly a better business model needs to be found.
Snooth has a great aesthetic, the design is reminiscent of twitter in some ways. Appearances aside, I agree that this will be a useful tool and people will need to work “doubly hard.” The bright side of times like these is the products of adversity–you truly discover new things about yourself in facing different challenges, and the lessons learned can prove invaluable to where one’s business would stand with smooth sailing.
Tom – thanks very much for this incredibly flattering piece. The analytics tools are a powerful feature and we’re very excited to see wineries and stores use them.
Philip
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As much as I appreciate and use snooth, I still find it hard to believe that CellarTracker doesn’t have more visitors. Or am I talking about apples and organges (if so tell me why)
Work smarter, not harder wine people!
Snooth will guide the way.