A new collector's tool - spiritradar.com
A rather new kid on the block, spiritradar.com went online September 11, 2021. Originally they set out to be an information source for rum collectors online. This is how they describe the starting point:
“We are rum lovers who regularly test and share our tasting experiences with each other. Together, we decided that thanks to our combined professional backgrounds, it would make a lot of sense to create an application that would make it easier for us to orient ourselves in the global market. By compiling all the price data, and incorporating our own collections, we would be able to quickly find the best deals for buying new bottles at the best possible price.”
When they launched they already had close to 9000 different rum bottlings in their database.
They expanded into whisky and launched the whisky category on February 2, 2022.
So what is it?
Spiritradar.com is a site that monitors e-commerce sites and online auctions. It gathers and displays historical pricing data on all bottlings. You can register your own private collection, and track its value history. All bottlings are registered with detailed facts and bottle image. You can decide to watch a bottling to receive notifications on availability and to follow value history.
An example collection, with value history going back to 2015.
The site also provides shopping tips based on your collection and your watched bottles, and they list (most? or at least a lot of) whisky and rum related events worldwide.
The facts and numbers
Even if they have only been active for less than a year, the amount of data found in their database is already quite impressive. Here are some facts and numbers as of July 2022:
11.294 rum bottlings → 21 new last month
47.441 whisky bottlings → 2182 new last month
110 millions historical price records for the registered bottlings
1439 e-commerce sites monitored for offers
3406 brands
9 auction sites
Is it user friendly?
This is perhaps where spiritradar.com shines the strongest. It is super easy to use, and the functionality is well thought out. The user interface is intuitive, clean and the response times are fast. Thumbs up from me on this account.
Detailed facts on a bottling.
Pricing
Spiritradar.com is a subscription service. Pricing starts at € 12.99 / month for Basic membership, through € 19.99 / month for Advanced up to Premium at € 59.99 / month.
You really do get almost all the functionality with Basic, so this should be sufficient for most of you. With Advanced and Premium you also get these two added services (with the amount of items monitored being the difference between the two):
Offer monitoring - you get e-mail notifications every time they find a bottle is available either in store or in auction
Shopping tips
Anything missing
Well, nothing much, really. This service already seems quite complete in terms of functionality. One thing that springs to mind is even more content. Not that what they have is not good, but they could always add more bottlings - and the continuously do. I especially would like to see even more bottlings from Nordic distilleries added. Nordic whisky is very close to my heart after all. Adding more auction sites, especially whisky auctions would also be nice.
Perhaps an entry level subscription level at an even lower price, but limited functionality. For example let users start registering their collection and get a taste for spiritradar.com.
Conclusion
If you are active in the market buying whisky or rum, of the sort that is perhaps not readily available at every corner shop, then this might very well turn out to be a very useful tool for you.
I imagine it would be very helpful for those of you that also sell bottles, as you can easily track changes in valuation and availability.
Distributors and e-commerce sites will also find plenty of useful information here.
I’m very impressed, and will follow spiritradar.com going forward. Looking for those Nordic bottlings!
Sláinte!
-Thomas
