eBay Moves Into Wine Sales

June 3, 2016 – All you wine geeks out there now have another avenue to find and buy wine.  At the end of April, eBay launched its wine platform in partnership with Drync, a successful mobile app for wine recommendations that has expanded into wine sales with retail partners and wineries.

eBay is anxious to tap the on-line wine market projected to reach $1.4 billion by 2020.  The total U.S. wine market is estimated at $35 billion and growing.

There’s a base of 162 million customers in this country familiar with making purchases on eBay.  Similar to other products, these customers can now search for wine by price point, or auction, or “Buy It Now”.  They can also search by country and varietal.  Initially about 10,000 wines are available from 500 regions in 30 countries.  Inexpensive and popular brands are available as well as the rare and expensive.  Other options that may be available include free shipping and in-store pickup.  Retailers welcome the opportunity to reach new customers and hopefully expand orders by offering mixed cases, for example.

We decided to see for ourselves since we use eBay constantly. We searched for a particular varietal and clicked on “see all” but from there we weren’t sure where to go as clicking on the varietal took us nowhere.  It was easier to use the search bar at the top of the page but as we experimented entering names of various wines, some strange results came up.  We’ll have to spend more time playing around, as eBay is usually an easy place to spend money.  We did see some good “Buy It Now” deals.  Can see it now – yet another way to spend a lot of time on the Internet.