Wine.com, a popular wine retailer with a fantastic domain name, is releasing its API for third-party developers to create and enhance wine applications connecting to the site’s e-commerce and wine database platform.
Wine.com’s database has detailed information on over 40,000 wines, including labels, wine maker notes, professional ratings, customer reviews, geographical information, flavor profiles and more. The API will offer access to Wine.com’s “Wine Basics” content, which includes information about the world’s major wine growing regions and grape varietals.
The online wine industry is steadily growing with wine-related startups raising significant amounts of funding. Online wine store and community Vinfolio got a $4.5 million infusion recently and social wine review site and retailer Snooth raised $1 million earlier this year. And the newly re-launched Corkd has added a social stream and a new business model.
While many of these more established sites (and competitors) may not present opportunities for the integration of Wine.com’s API, the site may find interest from smaller blogs, or sites that want to create wine applications that connect with the wine retailer’s database and e-commerce platform.
Photo credit: Flickr/Warrenski
Nice blog. Informative & impressive content.
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After taking a quick glance, it looks pretty limited. Currently no access to product description, ratings, or “complete wine information.” Not sure what anybody could do with a big list of wines now that they couldn’t do before with scraping.
This is a great strategy for wine.com, the API opens up loads of great data to play with – looking forward to the first apps!
Agreed. I hope it opens up a number of great developers to develop iPhone apps against this API. Haven’t really found one I like for wine yet.
This still doesn’t get wines at Costco to my house any faster.
I hope they don’t ship from the Berkeley location. That massive warehouse is not suitable for storing wines. I’ve picked some up there and went inside and even on an 75 degree day it felt like a sauna.
Great to see this announced, its a big step forward for the industry. Happy to say that Snooth will be one of the companies using Wine.com’s API.
Philip – Snooth has been doing some great things – I’m looking forward to future offerings.
Love that the wine industry is moving towards collaboration. It’s a great benefit for the consumer.
Our site Women & Wine, http://womenwine.com launched our new social media platform where lovers of wine and food and travel can contribute/post/share stories, pics, photos, videos – add wine and food events.
We invite all wineries, bloggers, pros and novices to share their experiences, inspire and educate. Women & Wine creates content and offline events for A-list companies seeking to reach this niche audience and consults on social media strategy for this industry.
Ever the tireless marketeer!
How can you have a wine company that only works in one country? Don’t wine.com know that there is a world out there?
API!! This is a good news!
Like Dave I had a look at Wine.com API’s Product Object definition http://bit.ly/1VaRe3
Product info available seems indeed limited (targeting mostly varietals and less blended wines, as is common in the old world), but with a few interesting ideas : the geocordinates could serve as an approximation for a unique identifier for the wine collection (if they clearly choose vineyard or winery), and they mention (Endeca) near several unique product attribute (product type, …). I wonder if this is the search / database / semantic web company Endeca (http://www.ende...mers-retail.htm ), or another source they rely on, and why they did not use Wikipedia’s classification ?
Anyway, going “open source” this way puts them in a position to be the major provider of such data, effectively “industrializing” data distribution (both in format and process) … if they have chosen the right target users
Philip – In the API terms, it says that it cannot be used for commercial purposes. How do you plan to get around that? Or do you have a unique agreement with Wine.Com?
Wow. Sounds very cool to us. We will definitely be looking for ways to integrate this with our new wine social network:
http://www.catchwirewines.com
This is the kind of thing that could supplement our wine reviews and acclaimed winery profiles!!
Thanks for the great comments everyone, this is the Director of Business Dev at Wine.com.
I wanted to let everyone know we HAVE decided to let people use our API for commercial purposes as long as they follow the terms of use (including linking to relevant wine.com pages).
In addition, our plan page is a little unclear about the data available to developers.
The developer plan does grant the ability to retrieve all product level wine information except detailed rating information, wine-maker notes and geolocation data. This includes photos of labels, highest rating, short description, varietal and region/appelation data etc. We are sorry about the confusion and happy coding!
One more thing – we WANT our data in the hands of great developers, and we will grant full access to all the data in our API and a much larger number of hits/day to almost anyone who requests it as long as we can see what you are building!
Hi Cam – We’ve been thinking about our business plan related to wine sales on our new wine website, currently in beta. Followed you on Twitter, and will be sending an email to bizdev with the specifics. I’m concerned about some of the terms, but very interested. Hoping we can talk about it.
Michael
We’re excited to announce that our developers have already integrated the new Wine.com API (wine results, ratings, and reviews) into the free Hello Vino iPhone app – http://bit.ly/freewineapp – now, you can get professional reviews and ratings on wines to help with your purchase decision in the store or at the restaurant.
We’ll be integrating more of the Wine.com data into future releases of our app.
Thanks to Wine.com for making this excellent data available!
- The Hello Vino Team