New advanced search feature on wine.com is pretty snazzy

Wine.com today alerted me to a new Advanced Wine Search feature on their website that easily narrows the search path toward a wine or wines that fit the parameters you select, all in real time. I don’t consider myself so geeky that I know what’s behind this new functionality, but I’ll climb the Tree of Educated Guesses and assume they’re using Ajax technology to power it.

There currently appear to be only 2,302 wines you can buy via wine.com’s new Advanced Wine Search; you can see this number on the bottom left of the first Search page (just click the link above). I am going to step out on one of the Tree’s lower limbs here and assume that this number represents only a fraction of the wines in wine.com’s inventory. Nevertheless, you can instantly see this inventory number recalculate on the fly depending on the boxes you check.

For example, just by clicking the Rhone Reds checkbox, the inventory will change from 2,302 to 79 to indicate that there are 79 Rhone Reds available. Additionally clicking the Chateauneuf-du-Pape checkbox yields 19 wines available from France’s Chateauneuf-du-Pape appellation. Yep, it’s pretty easy to figure out.

In the results window, you can sort by price, rating, etc., as always, plus you can still set a price range to further hone your search.

I’m going to step a little farther out on that long limb and assume that wine.com must still add inventory to its Advanced Wine Search database. But because this tool is so intuitive - and therefore quick and easy to use - I would love to see this kind of technology applied to every online store I buy products from.

I’m also betting that this kind of usability is so appealing to its web-savvy customers that wine.com will win over a substantial market share of those wine buyers who have been frustrated with their online wine-buying experiences elsewhere.

~winehiker

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under grape squeezins, technical stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.