Wine.com’s customer base was too good to pass up, says eVineyard

Brett Lauter, vice president and chief marketing office at eVineyard.com, says that the financial problems at Wine.com gave eVineyard.com an opportunity to acquire a strong wine-buying customer base at a very low cost. Some analysts today are saying that surviving dot-com retailers should just let competitors go out of business, rather than buy a dying business because online customers will naturally flow to the remaining online retailers. “Wine.com spent more than $200 million in investment capital building their brand and growing their business and we spent in the seven-figure range to get those people who were their customers,” he says, Lauter declines to give a specific dollar amount. Wine.com has a customer base of 400,000 that eVineyard will market to. eVineyard acquired Wine.com on Friday (see: eVineyard acquires the ailing Wine.com).