Wine.com serves choices and helps customers remember what they bought

2006 sales at Wine.com improved on the prior year by 5% because customers appreciate technology that includes personalized purchase histories, printable “cellar” notes and a wine rating system, says Rich Bergsund, CEO.

Web-only retailer Wine.com believes that because there is so much information to consider when it comes to buying wine that the Internet is the perfect medium. To back up its contention, the company has created or expanded several data resources that customers have embraced.

“Our growth comes from having information about our wines that enables people to find new wines and try new things,” Bergsund says of Wine.com, No. 182 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. In addition to wine ratings from magazines such as the “Wine Spectator” and “The Wine Advocate,” customers can tap the recently added Ratings Pedigree feature. They gain access to more information, such as winemaker notes and customer reviews, and can sort wines by a variety of means, including type, winery and price. That data, in turn, can be sorted by popularity based on a 30-day window of Wine.com’s top sellers, Bergsund says.

Cellar Notes is another new feature that enables registered customers to print ratings, price and winemaker notes of any favored wines. The goal is to give the customer a resource for future reference, rather than relying on memory.

Customer orders also are shipped with tags that hang around a bottle’s neck, and stickers that include the wine’s name, vintage, date purchased and its rating. That also helps customers with future selections, Bergsund says.

Bergsund joined Wine.com last summer to lead a turnaround following the 2005 departure of the previous management team.

Plans for 2007 include extending the shopping resources already in place to raise wine buyers’ confidence. “We have a very young customer base and they are willing to experiment,” Bergsund says. More than half of Wine.com’s sales are imported wines, compared to the wine-drinking population at large, 75% of whom buy domestic wines.