Yesterday, the Vinfolio Marketplace debuted and today we're scaling up its market impact by announcing a very significant relationship with VinCellar's leading competitor in the online cellar management software space, CellarTracker (see Vinfolio announces partnership with CellarTracker!).
What it means
- CellarTracker users will be able to sell wine in the Vinfolio Marketplace using CellarTracker as their "front-end" to Vinfolio's "back-end".
- Together, Vinfolio and CellarTracker have over 135,000 users managing 12+ million bottles of more than 400,000 unique items worth an estimated $2+ billion in retail value.
- Buyers of fine wine will soon have access to the world's largest wine "store" (by an order of magnitude).
- CellarTracker will be able to deliver even more value to its loyal user community.
- To avoid any possible misunderstandings, we're not merging the companies and we'll continue to compete for new users to adopt our respective cellar management platforms.
The background story
CellarTracker's Eric LeVine and I first met in late 2006. While our companies have been competitors for years, I've always believed in the principle of "co-opetition" in which one may compete in some areas but cooperate in others. Vinfolio's development of the Marketplace enabled us to define an attractive win-win collaboration because any marketplace's success is defined by the ability to create a critical mass of buyers and sellers. While Vinfolio had its own sizeable constituency, the opportunity to team with CellarTracker and its community of users offered what I considered to be a preemptive market move. So I asked myself, "Why not go for it?" and broached the partnering idea with Eric in November 2008.
After working out an agreement in December, Eric and Vinfolio's team have been working closely together since January to ensure a seamless integration between CellarTracker and Vinfolio's Marketplace to support a simultaneous launch of bidding in early July. CellarTracker users will soon be able to start marking wine for sale from their CellarTracker accounts to offer in the Vinfolio Marketplace.
Bottom line: While we will continue to drive the development of VinCellar's own user community, we're very pleased to be working with CellarTracker to create value for our respective users and the broader wine community. We remain open to other such partnerships in the future but "execution, execution, execution" is our priority for now.
