Is Wine.Com irrelevant?
Is Wine.com necessary? I mean to ask, does the Internet really need Wine.com the wine store?
Apparently someone thinks so. It appears that Wine.com will receive another $12 Million in venture funding, a seventh visit to that trough that has been filled with upwards of $200 Million over the past 8 years or so. In addition, it appears Wine.com is getting yet another CEO. And in all this time, after all this money, after all the fine leaders of the concern, nary a dime of profit.
So I have to ask, what’s the point of Wine.com?
Better yet, considering THIS LIST, is there really a need for an unprofitable on-line wine shop called wine.com?
I wonder if it is the perceived value of the name "Wine.com" that leads to a sort of Manifest Destiny view of the company? One thing is for sure. No matter how many millions of dollars are sunk into the name, the name itself will never go away. It is prime "Real Etherstate". Maybe the problem is that it just hasn’t been zoned right all these years. Or, perhaps the Wine.com moniker simply hasn’t found the kind of developer that understands its potential.
Is the URL better suited for a publishing venture than a retail one? Or maybe it is best used to identify a promotional site?
I don’t know. What I do know is that Wine.com is irrelevant given the ease by which we can find just about whatever type of wine we want on the Internet using any number of other sites and search engines.
I like their wines, their prices, and their customer service.
But you’re right, they have an opportunity to dramatically increase revenues by becoming more than just a seller and being the ultimate wine portal and they haven’t taken advantage of that. Maybe they’ll spend some time on that one with their newly found $12M.
with Chris Kitze gone, Wine.com is going to need to find their soul – something that has been missing from that company since Peter Granoff left.
I really don’t know what to make of wine.com. There are a few very good wine info portals out there they would have to challenge. Plus, one needn’t go to wine.com to find their wine. Believe me, I love the domain and someone will probably pay well for it one day. Paul is right. They need to find their soul.
In the UK people make money from selling wine on the internet! However, I’d always thought it was the bizarre US laws which make it much easier for me to buy an assault rifle and a crack pipe in Michigan than it is to order wine out of state that held wine.com back, not just its poor range/pricing/navigation/information.
GollyG: Keep in mind that England is the size of New York state. So, for example, shipping is one day to every place.
Tom – Yeah, why does wine.com continue to exist?
Ironically, wine.com had a very progressive soul when it first started… back in the Virtual Vineyards days, when wines were actually hand-selected and presented with a proprietary stylistic chart showing relative levels of intensity, acidity, tannin, etc. Nowadays, the wines are treated like commodities, with the highest available rating(s) offered to aid consumers. I can’t believe this is a model that will continue to please customers who are actually looking to keep moving along the wine adventure route.
With Peter’s graph gone there is really nothing other than size that sets wine.com apart from the 12,000 or is it 120,000 other cyberstores that have popped up along the information superhighway. The cost of entry into eCommerce is nil, so they can’t protect their market share.
When Peter Granoff got all that initial funding to grow his Virtual Vineyards, his group is reputed to have paid $3 million to Dave Harmon who promptly went out and bought a Ferrari and stayed on with the company, often going to events in a logo man outfit. Today he has a pinot winery and is partners in the fulfillment company among other ventures. He’s been threatening to write a tell all book about the shenigans that sunk wine.com II.
Anyway, I was able to purchase the URL ~wine.coop~ for $165 from the registrar of this new upper level domain category. Any ideas on what I should do with it? Right now we are positioning it to be the anti wine.com, not in the sense of anti but as different from–it is slated to be a wine buying club which is one variation of cooperative associations.
–Another Tom
TOM,
In addition to the InternetWineGuide compendium (which shows only the tip of the iceberg) that you have the link to, isn’t there a site like Nextag and the other comparison sites used for shopping for electronics, say, that allows the consumer to compare prices for a given wine…?
TOM, too
Yes, a better link showing the range of US wine stores is http://www.wine-searcher.com/merchants/-/usa/-/1/1 Over 2,800 of them.
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