When you mark your wine for sale in the Marketplace, we recommend setting an asking price (which is optional). The benefits of setting an asking price include: 

1. Stimulates more bids (assuming it's reasonable) as it increases bidders' perceived chances of a success by reducing uncertainty
2. Signals that the seller is more likely to respond quickly to a bid, again improving bidders' odds of success
3. Ensures your wine shows up in searches when a buyer searches on price
4. Calls attention to your wine over those without asking prices when a buyer is browsing
   

Vinfolio offers several easy-to-use tools to help you research and determine a reasonable asking price:

1. Use the Community wines page of VinCellar to review the average value and community cost of your wine. These values will give a good starting point for the price range of your wine:

 

 

2. Visit WinePrices for recent auction results (if any) and current U.S. retail pricing history:

 

 

3. Click on the Marketplace tab in My Cellar and then on the specific wine name which will show you what others in the Marketplace are asking for your wine:

4. Don't forget to consider your Marketplace fees.

5. Remember, you may optionally set filters if you only want to receive notification on bids that meet your specified criteria.

Happy pricing!

Mark your wine for sale now so it’s listed as "marked for sale" in the Marketplace when bidding commences on July 7th. Vinfolio is offering 10 free storage units for every 10 cases of wine you mark for sale through June 30, 2009. To mark wine for sale, log in to VinCellar. If you don’t already have a Vinfolio account you may register for one here. Your single, free Vinfolio account grants you access to all Vinfolio sites including VinCellar and WinePrices.

 

There are a few, simple ways to mark your wine for sale. Find the one that works best for you and get started.  

Mark all your wine for sale by clicking on the Marketplace tab in VinCellar and selecting "Mark all wine for sale". This option marks all bottles of all eligible wine for sale with one simple click.

 

Mark an individual wine for sale by clicking the “Sell via Marketplace” link on the left action pop-out of any wine in the “My Cellar” Marketplace tab or from any wine detail page.

 

Mark multiple wines for sale at once by clicking the “Sell wine” link under Common Tasks on VinCellar home or the “Sell” button at the top right hand of any “My Cellar” page.

 

When marking individual or multiple wines for sale you will have the opportunity to select how many bottles you’d like to sell as well as set an optional asking price for those wines.  

Mark wine for sale during Import. Simply specify “Yes” in the optional “Marketplace for Sale” column in the VinCellar import template and your wine will be automatically marked for sale when it’s added during the import process.

That's it! Getting ready for bids is as easy as that.

Happy selling!

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been describing how to mark your wine for sale in the new Vinfolio Marketplace, launching July 7th. Many people have asked about the difference between the Marketplace and our Consignment Auctions.

Both offer fast and profitable ways to sell your wine, including low fees, anonymous selling, no buyer’s premium and fast payment. The key difference is whether you prefer hands-on control over selling prices and a highly flexible process (to sell or not, ship upfront or not, etc.) or wish the convenience of making all of your selling-related decisions at once (turning it over to Vinfolio to manage from there).  

We’ve provided an overview of some of the main benefits and requirements of each. You can also click here for a more detailed comparison of the Vinfolio Marketplace and Consignment Auctions.

The Vinfolio Marketplace

• Gives you complete control over the entire selling process from optionally setting an asking price to accepting a bid.

• Mark any wine for sale – as long as it meets our eligibility requirements.

• No obligation to sell until you get the price you want. 

• Wine is offered for bid in the Vinfolio Marketplace.

• Fees are 15% for wine stored in Vinfolio Storage and 20% for wine in other U.S. locations.

• Wine can be stored at Vinfolio to reduce Marketplace transaction fees from 20% to 15% (but will incur storage fees) or Seller can ship wine after the transaction. Shipping costs are the seller’s responsibility but reflect Vinfolio’s negotiated rates and qualify for subsidies on each bottle sold for $100 or more.

• All wines must pass Vinfolio’s inspection guidelines.

• Learn more about the Marketplace.

Consignment Auctions

• Wine is offered for sale at a fixed price in the Vinfolio wine store for either 90 or 180 days, enabling immediate purchase confirmation and faster fulfillment 

• Requires a minimum total retail value of $10,000.

• All wine must have a minimum $40 per bottle retail value and a minimum professional score of 89 points; otherwise, any wine is eligible for consideration if not past its latest recommended drink date.

• Wine is stored and insured at Vinfolio during consignment auction period at no charge.

• Fees are typically around 20% (plus inbound shipping costs).

• All wines must pass Vinfolio’s inspection guidelines.

• Learn more about the process.

Whichever method you choose, you can count on the full support of Vinfolio’s e-commerce engine and our superior customer service staff.

Click here for a more detailed comparison of the Vinfolio Marketplace and Consignment Auctions.

Since announcing the upcoming launch of the Vinfolio Marketplace, we’ve received a lot of questions about the types of wine that can be sold, if and how international users can participate, as well as questions about our guarantees on the wine.

Requirements

In short, there are three basic limitations on wine that can be sold through the Marketplace:

1. 1970 or later vintage
2. Less than or equal to 6-liter bottle size
3. Physically located within the United States (to ensure timely completion of the transaction)
   

For wines that cannot be sold through the Marketplace, we recommend selling your wine through Vinfolio’s buyout auctions. Be aware that after July 1st, we’ll require a minimum $10,000 retail value for buyout auctions. Click here to learn more about buyout auctions and how they differ from the Marketplace.

Option for International Customers

We also have an option for international customers. Wine stored at Vinfolio’s storage facility in the U.S. may be sold through the Marketplace. So if you have wine you want to sell, transfer it to Vinfolio’s storage facility and mark it for sale. You will also earn an extra 5% on sales because wine sold from  Vinfolio storage is only charged a 15% fee vs 20% for wine located elsewhere!

Guidelines and Terms

Every bottle sold via the Marketplace is inspected against all Inspection Guidelines. So before you sell a wine, check it first. Failure to satisfy any guideline causes the bottle to be rejected, the entire transaction to be cancelled and result in an $8 per bottle cancellation fee. Our guidelines were established to detect signs of bottles with an increased risk of being in unacceptable condition or possessing other attributes which negatively impact value or marketability to a buyer.

Buyers should be aware that all wine is sold "as is" and Vinfolio makes no guarantees on the suitability of a wine to drink. Though Vinfolio inspects each bottle, we can’t guarantee a bottle’s suitability for consumption and it’s the buyer’s decision to bid on a wine that may have passed its useful life (the bid price would presumably reflect that risk). It’s also not possible to determine certain flaws through inspection alone.

Rest assured, we’ll be encouraging bidders with complaints about wine condition to contact our Customer Service Department. Vinfolio will also be actively managing Marketplace activity on both the bidding and selling side to preserve its integrity. We want to create a place where buyers and sellers can participate with confidence.

If you haven’t started marking your wine for sale yet, what are you waiting for? Vinfolio is offering 10 free storage units for every 10 cases of wine you mark for sale through June 30, 2009. Get started.

So, you’re anxious to get started marking your wine for sale in the Marketplace but realize that updating your VinCellar account has taken a bit of a backseat to buying and drinking wine. Here’s a quick overview on how to consume and add wine to your account.

Consume wine

As with many web applications, there are multiple ways within VinCellar to accomplish the same task. You can consume wine in bulk from the “Consume wine” link under Common tasks on VinCellar home or by using the prominent “Consume” button on the My Cellar tab.

You can consume individual wine from the action popout link on all My Cellar tabs or from individual wine detail pages. Upon consuming, all wines are recorded on the My Cellar Consumed tab. To permanently delete a wine from VinCellar consume it with a reason of “Deleted”.

 

 

Add wine

Wines purchased from Vinfolio are automatically added to your VinCellar account. You can add wines from other sources using the “Add wine” link under Common tasks on VinCellar home or by using the “Add” button from the My Cellar tab. View Amy’s previous blog post for tips on searching and adding wines manually.

Alternatively, you can add multiple wines and tasting notes at once using the VinCellar Excel import template. Click the “Import wines and tasting notes” link when you’re signed-in to VinCellar home for a step-by-step overview of the process.

You’ve probably heard by now that the Vinfolio Marketplace launches in July, but that doesn’t mean you should wait to start putting your wine up for sale. In fact, if you mark wine for sale before June 15th, you can earn up to 100 free storage units in Vinfolio’s temperature controlled full-service storage facility.

Storing wine that you plan to sell in Vinfolio’s storage facility gives you the added advantage of lower transaction fees – 15% vs the normal 20%. Plus there is no need to worry about transferring bottles to Vinfolio after your wine is sold. It’s already here so you get paid even faster. More money and faster payment!

Here are a few tips we recommend before you get started:

• Make sure your VinCellar account is updated
• Determine which wines you want to sell and ensure they meet the Marketplace’s inspection guidelines
• Research your asking price using pricing date from Vinfolio’s wineprices.com
• When you’re ready to start marking your wine for sale, just log in to your VinCellar account and follow a few simple steps. Click here to learn more.

Follow the Vinfolio Blog for more helpful Marketplace tips on how to do everything from updating your VinCellar account to accepting bids for your wine.

But again, there’s no need to wait. Make sure your wine is already marked for sale by July so buyers can place bids the moment Marketplace is live.

Happy selling!

It’s been an exciting week at Vinfolio. If you haven’t heard yet, we’ve announced the Vinfolio Marketplace as an easy way for VinCellar users to sell their wine anonymously. Bidding starts when we launch in early July.

Now’s the time to go through your cellar and start marking your wine for sale. Selling is passive so once your wine’s been marked for sale, just sit back, pour yourself a glass of wine and let the bidding begin.

Improve your chances

• Set an optional asking price on your wine. Your asking price is public and informs bidders of the price you are willing to accept for your wine. This will help bidders set a reasonable bid. Enter an asking price when you mark wine for sale or from the Marketplace tab on the wine detail page.

• You can also set an optional minimum price. Your minimum price is private and represents the lowest price you would accept for this wine.  Your minimum price can be used to auto-accept bids on wine stored at Vinfolio (more about auto-accept in a future blog post).
• Upload a label image for your wine. Read Amy's blog post to learn how.  

What happens next?
We’re building robust tools to simplify the process of accepting bids and shipping your wine to us including:

• Custom bid alerts which notify you immediately (or less frequently, you choose) on bids which meet your specific criteria.
• Simple, guided bid acceptance process.
• Easy, visual steps for preparing wine for shipping.  We’ll tell you what to ship, when to ship and how to ship.

We'll be walking through the specifics over the next few weeks. Check back here frequently and you'll be ready to sell in July!

As summer approaches, there are a multitude of food and wine events that take place in the Bay Area. Isn’t it time you got out and enjoyed yourself? Below is a list of the calendar highlights (refer to today’s feature, “Summer food & wine festivals,” in the San Francisco Chronicle as well as Vinfolio’s “Wine Events” page for more details).

MAY

May 16, San Francisco

Uncorked  - Fourth annual food and wine festival in Ghirardelli Square. www.ghirardellisq.com

May 16, Monterey

Sustainable Foods Fair – Daylong fair at the Monterey Bay aquarium including the annual Cooking for Solutions event featuring celebrity chefs. www.cookingforsolutions.com

May 30-31, San Mateo

Maker Faire – The “world’s largest do-it-yourself festival” including demonstrations on an array of topics such as brewing beer and preserving foods. www.makerfaire.com

JUNE

June 4-7, Napa

Auction Napa Valley – The American Wine Classic – In 1981 the Napa Valley Vintners established what is now the premier charity wine auction. Includes tastings, dinners and lunches, as well the Barrel Auction at Robert Mondavi winery. http://www.napavintners.com/anv/anv_1_overview.aspx

June 6-7, Menlo Park

Sunset Magazine's Celebration Weekend – Demonstrations, panel discussions and workshops at the magazine headquarters. www.sunset.com/cw

June 13, Mountain View

Great American Food and Music Fest – Cooking demos as well as food and wine tastings at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. www.greatamericanfoodandmusicfest.com

June 16-18, Santa Barbara, CA

6th Annual California Wine Festival - With a venue in the heart of the historic Spanish center of downtown Santa Barbara, the California Wine Festival features top local wineries, restaurants, caterers and musical performers. www.californiawinefestival.com/

June 25-28, San Francisco

Pinot Days – More than 200 Pinot Noir vintners are featured in tastings and seminars at this four-day event at Fort Mason (Vinfolio is a sponsor). www.pinotdays.com

JULY

July 18-25, Napa Valley

Napa Valley Festival del Sole – Fourth annual festival includes concerts, art exhibitions, and food and wine tastings. www.fdsnapa.org

AUGUST

Aug. 6-9, San Francisco

SF Chefs. Food. Wine. – Tastings, panel discussions, and cooking demonstrations by local chefs and members of the food & wine industry in Union Square and nearby venues. www.sfchefsfoodwine.com

Aug. 23-24, San Francisco

Family Winemakers Tasting - Experience the largest tasting of California wines in the world that showcases the state's small, family-owned wineries. www.familywinemakers.org/tastings/tastings.cfm/

SEPTEMBER

Sept. 4-6, Sonoma County

Sonoma Wine Country Weekend – Wine seminars, cooking demonstrations, and vineyard tours. More than 150 wineries and 60 chefs will offer samples at the 30th annual Taste of Sonoma on Sept. 5 at the Gallo family's historic MacMurray Ranch in Healdsburg. www.sonomawinecountryweekend.com

 

Call me old fashioned, but Steve Gillmor's recent post on TechCrunchIT.com, "Rest in Peace, RSS", describing how Twitter has made RSS irrelevant in the Web 2.0 world we live in, made me yearn for simpler days when your AOL homepage had all the news you needed for the day.

 

Sure Twitter is cool. It's reshaped how people communicate, stay connected, and keep abreast of the latest news. But I think it may be just a tad premature to be announcing the death of RSS.

 

RSS came out of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group in 1995, and was first introduced by Netscape in 1999  (Wikipedia). In other words, RSS has been around a long time in internet years (kind of like dog years, but much shorter). Twitter first came on the scene in 2006. And though all the world's a-twitter with Twitter, let's see how it will fare over time.

 

In the meanwhile, here at Vinfolio we support both. You can subscribe to a wide range of RSS feeds, from the latest additions to our great wine selection in the wine store, to our CEO's award-winning blog, The Wine Collector. You can also tweet to your heart’s content from our cellar management tool, VinCellar. Tweet your latest tasting notes, your latest additions to your wine cellar, or a wine that's worth checking out.

 

I will say that Twitter has a great shot at becoming the successor to RSS. Armed with a Twitter aggregator, today's information junkie can have his wine and drink it, too. Twitter marries the social web with the media-driven web. In other words, you can keep track of your friends, your favorite wines, and politics all in one place. Sounds like RSS, but better.

 

I for one am going to be curious how all of this plays out. In the meantime, I'll be tweeting and RSS-ing at a wine bar near you.

Something's been bothering me for a while now. VinCellar's trust ratings don't add up and sometimes are just plain wrong. A couple of weeks ago I took a look at how we calculate our ratings and noticed that the calculations did not really capture the nuances of tasting notes and voting.

A simple summary of the old algorithm is that it only considered reviews with votes
when deriving a rating for an author. How is this flawed? I'll use an example to illustrate. A user with 20 reviews and one vote is judged solely on that vote. If the vote is positive he's at 100%, if it's negative he's at 0%. What about the other 19 notes? These should count for something.

How our new rating system works

In an attempt to protect authors who have numerous notes (and even those with a few) we've altered the rating system to allow unrated notes to contribute a score to the overall rating. I like to call this the "Innocent until proven guilty" trust rating system. Also all votes on a single review only contribute a score to that review. The algorithm is optimistic in that the score used for unrated notes is the same as if the note was positively rated. Here's a technical view of it:

  

So, using the same example our user with 20 reviews (1 rated, 19 unrated) would now have the following trust rating:

 

and using the example of a user with only two reviews, one unrated and one rated, his trust rating would be as follows:

Not too bad. Here's the key point of the algorithm, multiple votes on a single review now only affect that review's contribution to the author's overall trust rating and an author gets the benefit of the doubt on unrated reviews until someone votes on them.

What this means to you

• Trust ratings are fairer - In general, everyone's rating will be higher. All users, prolific or not, will get the same treatment so you can add your first notes without worrying about having a low rating.
• Write more tasting notes- The more reviews you write, the less likely your trust rating is dented by negative reviews.
• Vote more - Votes only count on their corresponding review. Give someone the thumbs up when you like what they have to say, you also won't damage their rating too much if you vote a review down.
• Understand the system -  We know that this algorithm could be more sophisticated and we're open to refinements.

We'd love to hear what you think; you can follow the discussion in the forums. Thanks for your time.