Five tips for gaining an edge when buying wine from retailers:
- Identify your preferred wine retailers – Who offers what you like to buy? Are prices consistently fair or do you feel the need to check them on Winesearcher.com every time? See prior post on Criteria for selecting a good wine retailer.
- Concentrate your purchases – There are two primary reasons to do this. Whether formally or informally, most retailers will offer higher spending customers access to hard-to-find or highly allocated wines before others as a reward for their past purchases. Second, if you’re shipping wine, it’s far more efficient to do so in case quantities which are easier to hit if you buy from fewer sources.
- Retailer’s email offers – If you want a wine listed in an offer, act quickly. In all likelihood, thousands of others got the same email at the same time. Better wines tend to be sought after and available in limited quantities.
- Discover new inventory before email offers are sent – The secret is using RSS (really simply syndication) technology, something which Vinfolio offers but few others do. RSS “feeds” provide real-time notification of inventory additions grouped into either predefined wine categories or matched to totally personalized criteria tailored to your particular wine interests. You decide which feeds to subscribe to (or create) and can unsubscribe any time. You also can combine feeds from multiple sources into your "reader" which provides further convenience in grouping related content from different sources. Learn more by visiting our RSS page.
- Use Vinfolio’s “quote requests” – If we don’t have a wine in inventory, find the wine in the “Other results” tab within our wine store and click on the “Get quote” button. Our buying team will seek out the wine and provide a price quote if found or we’ll monitor availability and notify you automatically if we come across it in the future. There’s no obligation to proceed if a quote is provided. Requests for 6+ bottles or valued at $250 or more are give priority.
This post was inspired by a post on Vinography titled “Is that e-mail wine offer a good deal?”
