, can help you compare prices when shopping for wine. to find about shipping laws in your state. Try shopping online at the PLCB store. Related How-TosThings to Consider When Shopping for Wine OnlineFinding a Customer-Friendly Wine StoreWine Stores With Shtick Send Feedback on this How-To Guide » We do not pretend to be Web-technology experts, but we can claim some expertise in online wine shopping, and, for many stores, here are some of the major problems:This is the scourge of wine Web sites and the top problem we encounter. It’s amazing how many stores now list wines that possibly, maybe, perhaps might be at a warehouse somewhere or even could possibly be at a distributor — or maybe not. When we order online now, more often than not — more often than not! — we find out sometime after we order that at least some of the wines ordered are not available. We are not talking about futures — fine wines purchased now for delivery when they are released later — but about wines that appear, according to the site, to be in stock today.

We shop online for many products and we can’t think of another industry or commodity where this is a consistent problem.This is sometimes related to the phantom inventory issue because stores might be waiting to see if they can actually get a wine from the distributor, a warehouse, another store location or Mars. best dessert wine glassesBut the bottom line is that, too often, it takes a week or more for a wine to leave the store after it’s ordered. where to buy wine in laxMost wine bought in America is purchased for immediate consumption; what kind of wine goes best with saladeven getting people to take the leap to order online and wait a day or two is a stretch and if it’s going to take even longer — a week or more — forget it. top selling wine in usa

That will leave online shopping only to wine geeks and serious collectors, and there aren’t enough of them to support a whole online industry. Much of the attraction of the Web, after all, is its immediacy.best italian wine selectionSome sites that used to be pleasant now seem to be SHOUTING AT US FROM ALL DIRECTIONS. best wine expensiveThey have so much stuff on the home pages — videos, chats, Scotch, you name it — that we don’t know where to start. It’s like a wine store that was once nice to visit where the owner never could stop buying new bottles so now there are boxes everywhere — utter chaos — and no discernable system by which to locate anything.It appears to us that many wine stores now are buying off-the-rack Web sites designed by people who have never shopped at a wine store. Instead of giving us a feeling that we are browsing through a store, we have more of a sense that we’ve dialed into one of those endless voice mail prompts on the phone.

“If you want red wine, press 1. If you want 2005 red wine, press 2.” This is not fun. Other search screens are simply antiseptic. When we’re searching, we want to get to the “virtual shelf” as soon as possible. Web sites from another century. Some really fine stores out there haven’t spruced up their sites since dirt was invented. have fine selections of wine, but, heavens, those sites are a fright. is supposed to look olde-fashioned, but it just looks olde, crammed with words but not enough pictures and graphics; it’s a good example of a site that actually has a great deal of thoughtful information but doesn’t feel comfortable, and much of wine shopping is about feel. If a Web site looks dusty, shoppers might worry that the store is, too.A few years ago, some wine stores realized that if they sent customers an email blast saying something like “99-point Parker wine just arrived!” they could sell a lot of wine really fast. Now, some stores send us several emails every day — with an ever-increasing number of exclamation points!!!

— cluttering our inboxes and making us agitated. Here are some simple things we wish every wine Web site would have:Obviously, real-time inventory is best, but if there’s some reason that’s too expensive or complex, at least update the site every night. Don’t offer anything on the site that isn’t actually immediately available in your store or warehouse, or at least was available earlier that same day. Clear shipping policies, on the home page. What states can you ship to? Incredibly, some stores have this nowhere on their site. We only find out they can’t ship to us when they call or email after we’ve ordered — or when we contact them after the wine never arrives. Real reviews, from you. We like real people giving real reviews. We want your opinion because you’re on the hook for what you sell, just as we prefer to see handwritten signs in a wine shop instead of numbers and preprinted shelf-talkers from the distributor. We want to know what you think.

If you are using a winery’s description of its wine, say so. Too many wine Web sites pretend that this self-promotional chest-beating is their own opinion, which is lazy and misleading. Photos of the labels. We know this from our column: Shoppers really like to see the bottles. Pictures give a site the feeling of a wine store.If your site is real-time or at least updated every day, this shouldn’t be a problem. But we’re amazed how many sites show one vintage of a wine but actually have another, or don’t even say what vintage it has. This is not just wine-geek stuff; anyone who is buying, say, a Pinot Grigio needs to know how young it is.If you offer an e-newsletter, put a copy of that newsletter on your Web site. Have an active calendar of events, specials, news, interesting tidbits, staff bios. Web sites must seem lively. Who runs the site, and where. This seems simple enough, but too many sites don’t give a clue where they are based or where their store is actually located.

We like to know who’s getting our credit card number.We advise our readers that if they order online, they should have expedited delivery, even when weather is good and certainly when weather isn’t so good. Many stores, to our surprise, don’t even offer shipping options. We have to order and then call to ask for overnight delivery. (And, after we’ve ordered, make it easy to track our order on the site. “In progress” or “fulfilled” mean — what exactly?) Finally, we would urge even smaller stores that can’t deliver — either because of local laws or because they don’t have the resources — to create a vibrant, updated Web site. It’s interesting that one of the giants of online wine retailing, K&L Wine Merchants in California, says a large part of its online business is “will-call” — people who order online and then pick it up. These days, people do an awful lot of thinking, fantasizing and buying of wine during work hours. You want to make sure the site they’re looking at is yours.