Tom Merle, a member of The Open Wine Consortium (OWC), has posted details on Amazon's planned national rollout of wine sales online (and as a comment to my original post earlier today, which focused on wine delivery as part of Amazon Fresh home grocery delivery).
Here the important points I took away from Tom's post:
- September rollout
- Winery sets online price, Amazon pays 50% of that to winery.
- Three-tier fulfillment, a la New Vine Logistics (NVL), not distribution line Wine.com.
- Free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime (maybe). If so, it points to an internal solution for fulfillment, as opposed to outsourcing to someone like NVL.
The Amazon wine buyers may become as powerful as those at Costco, America's largest wine retailer. Not clear how Amazon will deal with smaller producers with limited supplies of a given vintage. Or how smaller producers will deal with Amazon (since a small winery really needs to sell direct as much as possible).
Lots to think about.
What I'm wondering is if the amazon affiliate program will apply to the wine sales? So if we, as bloggers, post reviews of a wine, and an affilliate link to the wine, is that a way for us to make some more money off this whole blogging thing?
Posted by: nick | July 27, 2008 at 02:50 PM
Are wine retailers worried about Amazon's foray into wine? Personally, I am not, but I would love to hear the opinions of others.
From my point of view, our value proposition is so vastly different from that of Amazon that I do not view them as competition at all.
Top Secret regards,
Agent Red
Posted by: Agent Red | July 29, 2008 at 12:02 PM