Preview Of Marketplace Enhancements Coming Soon Options

[Steve Bachmann]

The first two weeks of Marketplace operations have passed and during that period, users have provided some great feedback in this forum as well as via various online bulletin boards. A few days ago, we had a multi-hour planning meeting to discuss software enhancements to respond to the feedback. This post shares the key items in our "product road map" for the next 4-6 weeks.

1. "Bidder education" (Timing: Within next 1-2 weeks)

A number of bids have been placed which are unrealistically low. While we are not going to impose a required minimum bid, we want to ensure bidders are consciously entering a bid price that reflects objective market pricing data (which, by the way, sellers all see too). Step 1 of the bidding wizard will be revised to include certain market pricing data points (when available) such as:

• Last Marketplace sale price
• Current high bid price
• U.S. average retail price
• Average auction price (from WinePrices.com using major auction house results)

In addition, we will add some rule-based messages based on values of data entered at this step such as:

• For bid prices of $20 or less, display "Minimum seller's fee is $8/bottle ($6 for trade) plus possible shipping." The bidder can proceed but the Marketplace is not designed for buying/selling wine at low price points. The total seller fee could easily reach 50+% of the bid price which makes acceptance highly unlikely.
• When no quantity of a wine is marked for sale, display "No bottles currently for sale; you may enter bid as owners or others may accept." Owners can always see bids within VinCellar or CellarTracker for wine in their collections (whether it is marked for sale or not) and choose to accept a bid. They don't receive proactive bid notifications when the wine is not marked for sale.
• Bid quantity exceeds largest seller's quantity (temporary) - Display "No seller is able to supply your requested quantity. Please lower quantity. Coming soon: 'Open to buy' capability from multiple sellers." See next item on "Open to buy" which will obviate this rule when released.

2. "Open to buy" (Timing: Within next 1-2 weeks)

The initial design of Marketplace assumes that each bid would only ever be fulfilled by a single seller. Therefore, if the seller doesn't have the required quantity (in a single location) to supply the full quantity in the bid, the seller is not able to accept the bid (and also does not get notified of the bid). This approach also has consequences if even a single bottle fails to pass inspection as it leads to the entire transaction being cancelled rather than completing the sale of the accepted bottles.

It's clear that bidders don't understand the current approach and in fact, assume the opposite, or what we have internally termed "open to buy" where the bid quantity is really a maximum only and not also the minimum. For example, if the bidder wants to purchase 60 bottles of a given wine for a particular price, bidders currently seem to assume we are notifying any and all sellers (even those with 1-2 bottles) and permitting them to accept bids for lesser quantities. This "open to buy" method will become the default approach soon (with an option of invoking the single supplier method).

The advantages of "open to buy" are compelling including:

• Bids are processed as bidders intuitively expect.
• Sellers of any quantity are eligible to accept bids so more selling opportunities are presented. With each seller acceptance, the bidder's maximum bid quantity is just revised downward by the quantity accepted (until it reaches 0).
• Sellers can complete the sale of wine that passes inspection even when another bottle that is part of the accepted bid quantity is rejected. The bidder's maximum quantity is just increased by the number of rejected bottles.
• Vinfolio's aggregation of incoming supply in the bidder's name in our storage facility (including 6 months of free storage) enables the bidder to wait until the full quantity of his/her bid is completed (or expired/canceled) before transferring or shipping his/her purchase.

3. Auto-accept rule from Vinfolio storage (Timing: Mid-to-late August)

In general, bidders have expressed the desire for more responsiveness from sellers and advance knowledge of whether an asking price is "firm" (basically a "Buy it now" price). Moreover, with or without an asking price (soft or firm), we know many trade sellers (and others) wish to predetermine their bid acceptance decision criteria to "automate" the process (to reduce labor costs to administer their participation) and also to gain an edge in accepting bids versus competing sellers. We call this generic capability "Auto-accept."

The first (and easiest) step for us to take in enabling this capability is to implement it for wine being sold from Vinfolio storage. After that phase is implemented, we will expand the concept's application to include:

• Auto-accept rule for offsite wine
• Minimum quantity required for bid acceptance (needed for prior point)
• "Buy it now"/firm asking price

4. Wine Watcher™ alerts (Timing: Mid-to-late August)

Marketplace users have asked for more interaction capability which is dependent upon relevant information being pushed to them in a timely fashion. While we already have bid alerts to notify sellers when a new bid is made on wine that is marked for sale, we do not currently have a means of notifying bidders (or just "watchers") of various forms of activity relating to a specific wine. Therefore, we've decided to implement a capability we're naming Wine Watcher alerts.

Any Vinfolio user will be able to configure Wine Watcher alerts to monitor one or more of the following activities on a daily or immediate notification basis:

• New low asking price
• New bids
• Bid acceptances
• First appearance of a wine for sale in the Marketplace (>0 quantity)
• Increases in quantity of a wine for sale in the Marketplace
• Increases in quantity or any price change of wine in the Vinfolio wine store

A Wine Watcher "Active Bids" alert will be automatically created for bidders and be comprised of the list of wines with active bids. By default, the Active Bids alert will be configured to deliver an immediate notification whenever a new low asking price is entered by a seller or a new bid is placed by someone else on the same wine.

5. "Quantity caps" (Timing: Mid-to-late August)

To avoid having large quantities of individual items available that may distort the intended business positioning of the Marketplace and skew sorting/filtering by quantity, we will implement a maximum displayed quantity per item of 120 bottles for all users. There will also be an option via a preference setting to lower the displayed quantity further to 36 bottles which some users would like to ensure their anonymity (as ownership of a large quantity of an item might indirectly identify a source for scarce items). The owner will still see the actual owned quantity in their account but for public consumption and reporting, the displayed quantity will he capped at the maximum per item pertaining to owner's account (36 or 120).

6. Detailed retail market pricing pop-up (Timing: Mid-to-late August)

We currently provide various market pricing data to both buyers and sellers based on the belief that market price transparency encourages convergence between buyers on sellers on a "fair market value price" needed to complete a Marketplace transaction.

For example, on wine detail pages, one can currently find:

• Marketplace transaction history (very limited now but will grow over time)
• Major auction house results from WinePrices.com (both averages and details of individual lots sold)
• U.S. retail average pricing
• Active bid prices

While users can go to WinePrices.com (or other search engines like Winesearcher) to check on individual retail price listings, they are not seamlessly integrated into our site. This project will create a pop-up window to display retail price detail that can be used from a Marketplace search results page or a wine detail page to provide bidders and sellers with all of the relevant pricing data to support their decisionmaking.

7. Bidder-requested deferred inbound shipping (Timing: Fall 2009)

We already take steps to ensure sellers' wine is protected during its inbound shipment by increasing shipping speeds during periods of adverse weather. However, some buyers and sellers would prefer to eliminate all risk (including unforeseen events that could create delays). This project will enable bidders to specify that their bid should only be accepted by a seller whose wine will be sent either after a certain date or when the weather check which Vinfolio performs between the originating Zip code and our warehouse's Zip code satisfies the requested conditions. As this project could not be implemented in time for the summer months, we have deferred it until the Fall.

Other ideas

If you have other suggestions not addressed by the above plans, please add a comment to this post.

[Kristin Vinfolio]

1. "Bidder education" (Timing: Within next 1-2 weeks)

A number of bids have been placed which are unrealistically low. While we are not going to impose a required minimum bid, we want to ensure bidders are consciously entering a bid price that reflects objective market pricing data (which, by the way, sellers all see too). Step 1 of the bidding wizard will be revised to include certain market pricing data points (when available) such as:

• Last Marketplace sale price
• Current high bid price
• U.S. average retail price
• Average auction price (from WinePrices.com using major auction house results)

In addition, we will add some rule-based messages based on values of data entered at this step such as:

• For bid prices of $20 or less, display "Minimum seller's fee is $8/bottle ($6 for trade) plus possible shipping." The bidder can proceed but the Marketplace is not designed for buying/selling wine at low price points. The total seller fee could easily reach 50+% of the bid price which makes acceptance highly unlikely.
• When no quantity of a wine is marked for sale, display "No bottles currently for sale; you may enter bid as owners or others may accept." Owners can always see bids within VinCellar or CellarTracker for wine in their collections (whether it is marked for sale or not) and choose to accept a bid. They don't receive proactive bid notifications when the wine is not marked for sale.
• Bid quantity exceeds largest seller's quantity (temporary) - Display "No seller is able to supply your requested quantity. Please lower quantity. Coming soon: 'Open to buy' capability from multiple sellers." See next item on "Open to buy" which will obviate this rule when released.

The "Bidder education" enhancements are now live in Production and can be viewed on Step 1 of the Create bid process.