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 across domains.