Vinfolio Blog

If you haven’t marked your wine for sale or accepted bids in the Vinfolio Marketplace, now is the time to start.  Beginning October 1, we’ve lowered seller fees and cut in-bound shipping costs to make it even more profitable to sell your wine, regardless of location*.

Sell your wine now and enjoy these limited-time benefits:

• FREE in-bound shipping for first-time Marketplace sellers on all bids accepted in October

• 15% fees for ALL Sellers, regardless of storage location until December 31, 2009 (reduced from 20% for off site locations).

• $6 minimum per bottle fee for ALL sellers until December 31, 2009 (reduced from $8)

• All sales still go towards the Marketplace cumulative volume discounts

• Shipping subsidies for bottles sold over $100 are still included

   
Get started

• Mark your wine for sale – learn how

• Set asking prices – learn how

• View open bids on your wines

For questions or to provide feedback, please contact service@vinfolio.com or visit the Vinfolio Forum.

*Please note that location refers to Vinfolio, private or home storage. All wine sold in the Marketplace must still be physically located in the U.S. (excludes MA).

Vinfolio's full-service storage service is currently supported solely by our 17,000 sq. ft. San Francisco facility (which is dedicated to customer storage).  But we're at the point where the San Francisco facility is nearing capacity so we're expanding our customer storage capacity by over 40% by beginning to store customer-owned wine in our Napa facility (located in American Canyon). 

As a reminder, we announced the opening of our 20,000 sq. ft. Napa warehouse in November 2008 (see press release).  Until now, the Napa location has housed our retail inventory and retail fulfillment operations.  As the leased space was sized initially to include room for growth, there is currently 7,000 sq. ft. of unused leased space ready to be occupied.  The Napa facility is occupied by other wine-related businesses and is currently climate-controlled to 58 degrees.  We are in the process of determining whether the landlord and other tenants are willing to lower the temperature a few degrees to 55 which is the temperature of our San Francisco warehouse.

From a customer point of view, there will be no other difference in services regardless of whether wine is stored in San Francisco or Napa.  Wine will continue to be able to be picked up or dropped off at either facility; delivery services have always been agnostic as to the source warehouse.

As we add new features and functionality to VinCellar, we’re constantly challenged with how to surface all of the critical data necessary to support these new features while maintaining a clean and usable interface. Our solution to this challenge was to create Display Options. Did you know that you can use context-specific display options to customize your views of My Cellar?

To see all display options and customize your view from the default, simply click on the My Cellar view which you’d like to customize and click the Display Options button. Options in each of the views are unique and appropriate to the context of the view itself.
 
After (de)selecting options, click Update Display to save your options for current and future logins. To revert back to the VinCellar default settings click Reset Options.
 
I encourage you to take a minute to review your options and make sure you’re not missing out on that piece of data you’ve always wished was available.

You may have noticed a “Watch” icon next to any wine listing in the Vinfolio wine store or Marketplace. This is part of our new Wine Watcher alert program which replaces Vinfolio wine alerts.

Wine Watcher alerts allow you to track individual wines or all wines in a group selected by search criteria such as your current bids, a saved search, or by keywords and see activity on the resulting wine(s) in the Vinfolio wine store and/or Marketplace. Create as many individual alerts as you like. They will be all combined into a daily or weekly digest and grouped by the alert name within the email. Wine Watcher alerts can be created from wine listing and wine detail pages or within My Account. Click here to learn how to set up an alert.

How to use the Wine Watcher alerts
Wine Watcher alerts offer a powerful tool to track a wine or group of wines. Depending if you are monitoring your bids, looking for new inventory or just watching transactional activity, Wine Watcher alerts can provide you with timely information (see below) to support your decision-making on wines you are following:

•    New Vinfolio Wine store inventory added (with the price)
•    New quantity that is marked for sale has been added to the Vinfolio Marketplace
•    A new low ask price has been set
•    A new high bid has been placed
•    A Marketplace transaction has been completed

Automated bid feedback provided by My Active Bids alert
The only alert created automatically upon placing one or more bids is one called “My active bids.”  This alert defaults to “Immediate” delivery (the only alert with “Immediate” option) based on a new low ask or high bid on a wine which you have already bid upon.  This “push” capability enables you to react quickly to competitive bidders or new asking prices set by sellers.

Managing your alerts
For alerts you create manually, you will receive a consolidated update of all the activity in your alerts on either a daily or weekly basis. To update alerts, simply go to My Account and select Wine Watcher. You may edit, delete or create a new Wine Watcher alert.

We’ve already written about the new Bid Fulfillment feature that we’ve deployed on the Vinfolio Marketplace.  It’s a great new feature that is a required parameter of a bid which specifies whether the Bid Quantity sought may be achieved through multiple purchases.  It essentially enables multiple sellers to accept part or all of a bid up to the maximum quantity specified. 

Different treatment of bottles failing inspection
When one or more bottles in a transaction fail our Inspection Guidelines, the transaction is processed differently based on what Bid Fulfillment choice was specified:

1. “Single purchase” - In the past, or if the “single purchase” option is selected today,  a single bottle  failing inspection would cause the entire transaction  to be cancelled (including acceptable bottles).  
2. “Multiple purchases” – Today, using the “multiple purchases” option, only the single bottle that fails would be affected.  This is a significant improvement to both bidder and seller, as they will only have individual bottle exceptions to the total transaction.  

All bidders’ credit cards must be successfully pre-authorized for $40 (not charged) prior to placing a bid in the Marketplace to verify the bidder’s identify and validate the card.  There may be times when a charge fails (e.g., based on purchase amount, bidder credit availability at the time, card issuer setting fraud alerts, etc.).  Typically, these are easy to resolve, but we felt it would be helpful to understand the process and the steps we take to quickly address these situations.

A bidder’s credit card is immediately charged when the seller completes the accept bid process. However, when the charge fails to authorize, a pop-up window is presented to the seller offering them the option to hold the bid for one business day while Vinfolio corrects the problem (this also prevents the seller from accepting an alternative bid for wine involved).

Should the seller agree, the following actions are triggered:

1. The bidder receives an email notifying them that their bid was “conditionally” accepted due to a problem when processing their credit card.
2. Vinfolio Customer Service proactively reaches out to the bidder to offer resolution assistance.
3. The seller receives an email confirming their agreement to reserve the bid until the buyer’s card can be successfully charged or other form of payment collected. (Note:  Even though the seller has agreed to give Vinfolio one business day to resolve the problem, the seller has the option to cancel the transaction at any time. If this happens, the buyer will receive an email notifying them of the cancelled transaction.)
4. Vinfolio successfully collects payment by:

 - Resubmitting the same card
 - Processing another credit card
 - Receiving a wire transfer for large purchases

A successful charge or other form of payment generates an email to the bidder summarizing the details of their purchase.  The seller receives an email confirming the sale.  If we are unable to resolve the problem, both the seller and the buyer are notified via email and the hold on the wine is released which enables the seller to accept another bid.  

Vinfolio is committed to ensuring both the seller and the buyer enjoy a positive experience and a successful outcome.