I once found a vintage  Rosé being sold online by a private collector for less than $350 per bottle. Since this is a wine that normally sells for at least $100 more, I was skeptical. Sure enough, after I added the wine to my virtual shopping cart and entered in my payment information, I was hit with a number of unexpected fees. The seller not only charged the usual taxes, but added almost $100 worth of additional handling fees. He also charged twice as much for shipping as I expected—for a single bottle of wine, he wanted to charge me $90 to have it shipped overnight. At the end, the $350 bottle became a $530 bottle, so I decided not to invest. If you plan on selling your wine, you need to know how to include extra fees without making your buyer feel duped. Here’s how to calculate and include the tax and shipping costs for wine before you sell. Most wine collectors realize that they’ll have to pay extra for shipping fees and wine sales taxes. However, including this information early in the buying process can increase the likelihood that your buyer will bid on future bottles you sell.

If you cultivate a reputation as a seller who hides the true price of the bottle until the last moment of the sale, you’ll only hurt your future sales. Some sellers, like the one in the story above, will significantly lower the listed value of the wine in order to get buyers interested in it, then bring the price back up to full retail value using a series of handling fees and other miscellaneous charges. It’s better for your buyers and your reputation to list your wine at its accurate value from the beginning, and have a transparent system for calculating additional costs, like shipping and taxes. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to calculate tax and shipping costs for wine before your buyer bids on the bottle. vary depending on where you and your buyer live, and shipping costs also differ depending on how far your bottle needs to travel. This is why it’s essential to use a retailer who . Online retailers with warehouses located in wine-friendly states, like California, can ship to many states in the country, and only charge their buyers a relatively small fee for the service.

Here at Vinfolio, we even have an that you or your buyer can use before selling or bidding on any bottles. You can also use this calculator to keep other sellers honest. I recommend using this tool whenever you suspect that a shipping fee has been padded by the seller by comparing shipping costs to find the best sales price. For instance, shipping one bottle of to my home from Vinfolio’s warehouse costs anywhere from $20 for basic ground shipping to $40 for overnight shipping that arrives the next morning. This is much more reasonable than the $90 shipping fee on the privately-sold bottle of I was eyeing. Let’s say you pay shipping fees and taxes on your bottles, and you want to . Should you include the overhead, all-in cost of the wine when you list it online, or should you stick with the actual bottle value? Listing the full, all-in price of your wine will ensure that you know how much profit you’re making on each bottle when you resell. However, the risk is that you’ll artificially pad the value of that bottle, making it harder to sell it later, and driving up the price of that vintage on the market.

Listing just the value of your bottle, without shipping or taxes, gives you a more accurate sense of its worth. The biggest problem I’ve seen with all-in price listings is that they make the bottles appear more expensive than they actually are. The actual value of a bottle of is about $800. If you pay $60 in overseas shipping fees, plus state taxes, and additional storage costs, your $800 bottle could easily become a $900+ investment. However, if you list the price of your bottle online at $900, you pad the actual value of that bottle. red wine glass per dayAnother seller might see your $900 price and believe it is the true value of the wine, then charge additional shipping or tax fees on top of that listed price. what kind of wine is best with turkeyThis results in bottles that cost about $100 more than they normally would.best red wine glasses 2012

Use a combination of all-in value and real value when you list your bottles online in order to make an apples-to-apples comparison. You can use a private bottle tracking account, like or a spreadsheet, to make a note of the all-in price you paid for the bottle, taxes and shipping included. When you decide to sell your bottles later, simply look at this note to find out whether you’ll remain in the green when you sell the bottle. If your all-in investment costs are higher than the bottle’s real value, wait until the bottle increases in value before you resell.where to buy wine on sunday in pa If you’re listing the price of your bottle in a public forum, especially on websites used to , only list the cost of the wine without shipping or tax included. light red wine italianTo start, taxes and shipping costs vary, so they aren’t that useful for your fellow collectors to know. best wine and pizza

This also keeps wine prices honest. When in doubt, keep a detailed list of the fees you paid for your wine, and make it clear to your buyers and peers how you arrived at your bottle’s price. Whether you are starting your high-end wine collection or adding to an established portfolio, Vinfolio is your partner in buying, selling, and professional storage. Contact us today to get access to the world’s best wine.How an Internet sales tax affects wine The Senate is likely to pass a measure to have retailers collect sales tax for orders shipped out of state. The issue has been a hot-button issue since many big-box retailers perceive that online-only retailers have an unfair advantage and they have brought their largesses behind this tax equalization issue at the federal level. How would the Marketplace Fairness Act affect wine sales? The answer is: probably not much. Although wine e-commerce (hello, 1990s term!) has been growing, it is still hamstrung by regulations. Wineries can only ship to 36 states while retailers, who have much broader and more compelling offerings, can only legally ship to 12 states.

The other factor is shipping. If you buy a few bottles on the way home, you pay sales tax. But if you poke around online and throw some items in your virtual cart, you have to pay shipping even if you don’t have to pay sales tax currently. Let’s say the store charges $20 a case shipping, which is customary in the northeast for in-region shipments. If you’re buying $10/bottle wine, shipping is 16%, so it is almost prohibitive (unless the deal is extraordinary). If you order more than $300 worth of wine to have the shipping be less than the sales tax (assuming 7% sales tax). (Still, the online price may well be a lot cheaper than the in-store price, a phenomenon we have discussed before so it could be worth it.) If you’re ordering $300+ cases of wine, paying 7% sales tax is probably not a deal-breaker. Such a law would therefore stand to impact wines north of $25/bottle and stores in New Jersey. Why sotres in New Jersey? Because if you do an online search for a wine, one from the Garden State usually is one of the cheapest available.