Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Non-amazing Amazon

Amazon.com is starting a service that will allow small wineries to reach more customers. If I understand the terms of the program, it really stinks for the wineries and I hope they will stay away from Amazon in droves:

Amazon will list the wines for sale, but the wineries must handle the shipping and legal compliance (not a slight matter, as the wine laws differ in every state). The wineries have to pay Amazon $40/month AND 15% of their sales. It is difficult to imagine a worse deal than that, for the wineries. If Amazon handled shipping and compliance, that would be different.

In contrast, wine.com opened an online wine marketplace; shoppers can pay $49/year for unlimited wine shipping; I'm not sure of the terms for the wineries, although they have to ship their wines to wine.com distribution centers.

The article about this is here.

Here is Amazon's new building in Seattle WA:


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