Majestic Sees the Light (Well ... Almost)!
It has taken Majestic Wines fifteen years to realise that people do not necessarily want to buy 12 bottles of wine at a time. The fact that it has taken this long to change their policy speaks volumes about the attitude of the wine industry to new ideas and to innovation generally. But the comic part of the company’s bold and groundbreaking decision to allow customers to buy (wait for it) six bottles at a time is that it doesn’t extend to their online offering. Online you will still have to buy 12! This makes no sense to us, because the economics of e-commerce should mean that it is cheaper to distribute wine via the internet than via bricks and mortar premises, and that if there was going to be a place to start chipping away at the minimum order quantity you would have thought it would have been the online side first.
Anyway, we will continue to pursue a different path. We are now offering almost 250 single bottles for sale in addition to the over 2,500 we now offer in boxes of 3. We are delighted when customers buy a bottle or two just to try out, or because that is all they want. Amazon don’t tell you have to buy 12 books at a time – imagine if they did! – so why should a wine company?
Wine sales are currently falling in the UK and retailers need to do a lot more to get people enthused about wine. Putting silly restrictions on the quantities people can buy is not going to get our wine market back on its feet.
