The US Wine Industry and the Internet: An Analysis of Success factors for Online Business models

This paper explores the use of e-commerce in the distribution channel of the wine industry with an emphasis on the North American market. After achieving early attention from e-commerce pioneers, a number of initiatives to sell wine online have failed dramatically – their business models were not commercially viable – and significant investments have been lost in the process. In this paper, we comment on some of these initiatives and propose a set of general principles to guide online business entry and evolution. The exposition and discussion of our principles provides general lessons regarding the success potentials of the various business models