First Wine, now WhiskeySearcher
Looking for a special whisky or Cognac? A gift for a special birthday or a treat for you? Want to get it at the best price? At the risk of sounding clichéd, we've got an app for that. WhiskeySearcher is the new app from Wine-Searcher that concentrates on locating and pricing whiskey and other spirits.
"We decided to build a more focused version of Wine-Searcher just for spirits," says Wine-Searcher’s Director of Sales, Ross Brown. "We thought about what is most important in searching for a spirit. Near the top of the list is helping people to navigate through the rather bewildering breadth of whiskeys, as well as the gins, rums, vodkas and Cognacs that WhiskeySearcher can find."
The app gives the prices and location for more than a million spirits from retailers internationally "Also for those who don’t have a specific spirit in mind but want to browse or learn more about a style or a producer, whether the spirit is from, say, Scotland, America or Japan, WhiskeySearcher helps with this," Brown said.
The new app is a stepping stone for Wine-Searcher users to bridge the gap between wine and spirits.
"One of the things we know is that people already trust Wine-Searcher to pick out the best prices for them. This includes new products as well as more recognized whiskeys. We know that a lot of people who visit Wine-Searcher haven’t looked for spirits at all. Partly, this is because people come to Wine-Searcher looking for a particular wine. With a name like Wine-Searcher it is easy to not know that we list spirits as well as wines."
Wine-Searcher has an extensive list of spirits and some of our users do know this. Users have made around 5.5 million spirit searches in the past six months, more than half of them for whiskey.
“We want to make it easier. We did some tests and found that if we did a better job of showcasing whiskey and spirits themselves we could really help people find that special bottle at the right price," Brown said. "We asked ourselves what we could do to showcase whiskey and spirits so that people can find that elusive special bottle.
“We came up with two things: the first was to give whiskey –the 'headline act' for all spirits – its own app and bring across the best features of Wine-Searcher such as fast text search, label recognition, find nearby stores, and the ability to write your own reviews in My Ratings. The second was to take helpful information about the spirits and place this clearly on the home page of the app. The lower two sections of the home page now include scrollable profiles for different regions and and explanation of different whiskey styles, so that you can tell your Islay from your Yamazaki."
"As ever, we’d like to hear your feedback on what works, what doesn't, what's great and what might be missing."