Orders pour into online wine sites
These are heady days for online wine merchants, according to wine comparison site Winezap.com. Traffic to those sites is up 35% from last year, the typical site is generating 46% more orders and the average order size is up 11% to $335, Winezap.com says.
The rapid growth stems in part from the loosening of restrictions on interstate shipping of wine in recent years, says Michael Stajer, CEO and founder of WineCommune LLC, the parent company of Winezap.com.
“Purchasing wine online is a fairly new concept for Americans,” Stajer says. “It wasn’t really until 2005 that many of the restrictions on wine selling were lifted, allowing customers to finally purchase a bottle from somewhere other than the shop down the street.”
Also helping to boost online wine sales is the coming of age of a new generation with a taste for wine. That so-called Millennial Generation of those born since 1980 is the fastest-growing segment among wine consumers, according to a 2006 study by the Wine Market Council. That study showed 40% of Millennials said they were drinking more wine, compared with 20% among the next older Generation X and 13% among the post-World War II generation of Baby Boomers.
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