Amazon basically runs the world, so it’s no surprise that they’ve come to their senses and decided to sell wine. Their online wine marketplace opened last week and they currently only ship to twelve states: CA, CT, DC, FL, IA, ID, IL, NC, NE, NV, OR, WA, WY.
Rich Bergsund, chief executive of Wine.com said that right now, only about 2% of wine purchases are made online. That seems crazy when you think about how many other things people are buying on the internet every day. A lot of winemakers and industry groups are psyched about the news and think Amazon’s reputation and large scale marketing capabilities will get the word out about buying wine online.
Amazon isn’t going to have a huge warehouse filled with wine; it’s going to be the middle-man between wineries and consumers. The wines will be shipped directly from the wineries, so if you decide to buy a few different labels, you aren’t going to be able to save on shipping costs.
The executive vice president and founder of the wine division at Silicon Valley Bank thinks Amazon has a lot to learn. He said the company needs to offer a diverse but curated selection of wines and provide up-to-date, comprehensive tasting notes because shoppers don’t want to look through a million pages of wine listings.
Amazon’s wine marketplace is obviously still very new and will probably change as time goes on, but it does seem to have some pretty cool sorting capabilities – you can find wines by type, grape variety, specialty, tasting notes, professional rating, alcohol by volume, vintage, brand, average customer review, price, bottle volume and country of origin.
Yep, we’re pretty excited about this. Our Amazon shopping cart is going to be stocked with wine for the near future. If you buy wine from Amazon tell us how the shopping experience is.