Online Wine Broker

The last current way of buying wine is through the online wine brokers. The broker allows you to sell directly to others in an auction format. A lot of the people selling are small retailers who use the online brokers as another sales channel. The best known auction sites in this category are Wine Commune (www.winecommune.com) and Cellar Exchange (www.cellarexchange.com).

The big daddy of auction sites eBay (www.ebay.com) also now has a growing community of wine buyers and sellers which follow their normal business model.

These sites are the cheapest – they charge no buyers’ commission, low sellers’ commissions and are partly financed by their advertising revenue. As the shipping laws are altering, the brokers are gaining in popularity. Sellers often put the onus for the legality of the transaction on to the buyer by executing the sale in their home state and giving the buyer the responsibility for the shipping. It used to be that these auction sites had little IGW. However this is changing, and you can now find all levels of wine on the sites. This can be the cheapest way to find good, out of stock, wine, if you are prepared to look hard, and to wait until the good deal presents itself. However, you have to be careful, there are few guarantees about who you are buying from.