The Auswine Forum

They probably just have too many people on at one time..and because the site is written like junk it has an issue...

GraemeG wrote:I could never work out why they bought Langtons in the first place
cheers,
GG

Its the perfect business model.
Charge 16.5% to the buyer
Charge 16.5% to the seller
All on stock you never purchased or actually own.

Then charge delivery fees and insurance on top of all of that.

Then, introduce an online store to sell current vintage wines your parent company has already but cant move.

Low cost business due to not having bricks & mortar retail frontage (apart from warehouses)

Add onto all of that 'en premiere' and personal brokers.....
Really they have to be generating bucket loads of cash....yes i agree only if they are actually clearing the offerings.

The only thing i cant work out is why cheap out on your ... website, which is your only point of public contact!

Rossco wrote:
The only thing i cant work out is why cheap out on your ... website, which is your only point of public contact!

... because someone somewhere is claiming they are 'saving the company money'.

It happens, and the bluff can often continue on for years.

I actually think it is an improvement on the old one. It is still pretty bad and full of bugs but the search function is better and the old one was awful. The problem is it is still using the same old platform as the last version when they really just need to spend the cash and redo it from scratch. I'm guessing the developers they have working in house don't have the experience and they don't want to outsource it.

I hate the search function
I want to search each auction individually
otherwise its all just one big auction with different closing times
they are doing this deliberately, so you cant tell what auction your in
you will end up buying in what you think is the 5 buck reserve when in reality you are paying more than Uncle Dans bargain bin
well I wont and most others here wont but its not us they are trying to mislead
and they will rope in the suckers, that I assure you of

You can select the individual auctions..Under auctions on the right of "All Auctions" are the individual ones to select..

The one good thing is the regions are under each country so that's a plus...but the way they've menu'd it out is terrible..

Bobthebuilder wrote:

jh_16 wrote:I took a screenshot of myself winning a lot when the auction had closed and then somehow I was miraculously outbid.... We will see how my complaint goes

About a year ago I had the same thing happen right as the auction was closing
but different from your case, next thing I know I have them sending me an invoice for the underbidder price I put in
every other winning bid gets charged straight to my CC they have, this one they are too scared to do, want me to push the button.
its been sitting there for over a year, I refuse to pay because I know they know they were trying to pull a shifty
funnily enough I have been tempted to push the button because I would actually like those bottles, but its a matter of principle so I'm holding my ground on this (besides the fact I'm sure the bottles don't even exist anymore and if I pushed the button id end up going months on end calling them while they tell me they are trying to find the wine and its my fault for letting it drag on so long!)

got a response.....no sorry....no offer to buy at the price I thought I had won it at....just the standard

"HI Joel,
Thanks for sending that through.
I will admit that is very strange, the website doesn't really work very well with mobile phones which may also be why it wasn't coming up at the time.
I think the website on mobile phones (especially Iphones for eg) is delayed.
I will log this with our IT department and see if its something that can be worked on"

got a response.....no sorry....no offer to buy at the price I thought I had won it at....just the standard

"HI Joel,
Thanks for sending that through.
I will admit that is very strange, the website doesn't really work very well with mobile phones which may also be why it wasn't coming up at the time.
I think the website on mobile phones (especially Iphones for eg) is delayed.
I will log this with our IT department and see if its something that can be worked on"

So they haven't even bothered to optimise their website for mobile devices yet? In this day and age, that's terrible!

It took Eric a long time to do it on Cellartracker (iro mobile version). Such things do cost money and the different browsers also add to the testing effort of websites. IT does have a lot of pitfalls, but relevant experience and getting the basics right goes an awfully long way to getting a good IT delivery.

trufflequeen wrote:So they haven't even bothered to optimise their website for mobile devices yet? In this day and age, that's terrible!

The real issue here is the platform they implemented a couple of years ago is very... heavy / clunky / slow. It would work ok for smaller volumes of lots but it essentially collapses under the weight of the number of lots being run at Langtons. I do say platform because I doubt it was written from scratch, larger organisations tend to buy off the shelf products then customise them.

They have since tinkered around the margins a few times to somewhat improve the experience, however short of dumping the platform all together, it will be almost impossible for them to fix, or change it to be a responsive website that plays nice with mobile devices, etc.

In my (professional) opinion, the blame falls squarely on whoever procured the platform, and the developers hands are tied. If they ran a proof of concept, the testers were either railroaded or they never loaded the test system up with a real world volume of auction lots.

So in short, its likely not that they haven't bothered, but rather that its almost impossible without throwing the platform away.

Ian S wrote:It took Eric a long time to do it on Cellartracker (iro mobile version). Such things do cost money and the different browsers also add to the testing effort of websites.

This is true - if you start with a complex web interface (rather than simply a web site) which was not written with mobile in mind, it takes a lot of effort to bring it in line with modern responsive standards / optimise for mobile as well as for desktop.

To be fair, its much easier now than the dark old days of trying to optimise for early internet explorer versions as well as everyone else.

At least I found the pdf of the auctions! Hooray.

I browse the pdf, then key into the search for whatever I'm interested in.
It's all rather old-school, but it works, quickly.
Nothing else does!
cheers,
Graeme

Nothing beats ctrl+f