Recently I’ve become a fan of Lot18, a flash sale site for wine lovers, which works much like Gilt Groupe for wine. Like Gilt, they offer quality products at a discount to standard retail, and their site features rich descriptions and photos. They’ve also taken advantage of some best practices in flash sales, including: Daily emails to introduce the latest offering and drive traffic Limited quantities Time-limited sales Countdown “expiration” timer after you’ve added something to your cart The last item is key, as I believe it’s one of the things that makes Gilt so successful: urgency. Items are reserved for a limited time (10 minutes) when you add them…