WineRx

Full review
Shopping on- line is one of my favorite ways to get merchandise and purchase services. However, as many know, there are some items that are less practical to purchase via the internet, either because of price, or shipping, or both. One product that I don’t shop for on- line very frequently is wine but one store I have used in the recent past for this purpose is WineRx.com, a web service for wine and spirits.

What Does This On- Line Store Offer:

This on- line store offers products for sale such as:

Wine
Spirits
Accessories

There are also services offered such as:

Articles
Drink Recipes
Vintage Chart

The above three services to not carry any charge. They are offered free to all by logging in and clicking the appropriate link.

Shipping/Payments:

WineRx.com offers three different shipping options: FedEx Ground, FedEx Home delivery, and possible store pick- up which adds nothing to the shipping cost (available only to customers in the area near this vendor, which is located in New Jersey). Visa, MasterCard, and American Express are the only three payment options available.

Final Thoughts:

WineRx.com is a web site brought to you by Bottle Hill Wines and Spirits- a company located in Madison, New Jersey. This on- line store was supposedly founded as the “cure” (hence the “Rx” in the title) for overpriced wine. It was intended as an on- line prescription to offer consumers some relief from high wine prices.

As most people already know, I don’t consume much wine and it is common for me to go several months between glasses. But now that the holiday season is upon us, I have not only had more opportunities to sample wine, I have also had more incentive to purchase wine for others, to give them as gifts. This has led me to pay closer attention to the wine in the stores and also to the on- line merchants who sell wine. In the past, I used wine.com and found it to be a very good, efficient way to search for wine and purchase wine. But I decided it was time to look for other wine vendors and my search led me to this web site.

WineRx.com makes the lofty claim that its prices are intended to provide “relief” to the consumer. Well, from shopping here and elsewhere, the verdict is in, and it doesn’t look that good. First, most every wine is marked with a regular and a sale price and on most (but not all) of the wines, there is a computed price for purchasing the product in bulk along with a percentage discount. This bulk purchase uses the sale price to make its computation and bases its percentage discount on the regular price quoted right above it. These “sale” prices are certainly better than the regular price. However, they are often a little higher than other on- line wine stores and also a little higher than the prices at local stores. If you shop around within the site, you can find some very good deals but the bargain priced wine may not be the brand name or style you were looking for.

Even though the prices are not the best, there is one redeeming quality with WineRx.com: The selection is huge- much larger than the selection offered by other wine sites, including wine.com. This makes WineRx.com a good choice for the discerning wine drinker who has a specific wine in mind that is difficult to find through other avenues. With such a massive selection, there is a good chance the wine you want will be offered in this on- line store. To give an example, there are more than 4,000 wines listed for the state of California- a figure several times greater than the number of California wines offered by other sites.

WineRx.com has a search function, like any other retail web site. The basic search function is somewhat inefficient, so there is a good chance consumers will end up using the advanced search feature. If browsing for wine by, say, region, it will take a long time to find what you want because there is no way to jump forward many pages at a time and the search function limits the results to no more than 250. Thus, it is best to already have an idea of what you want before you begin your search. This is where the advanced search can help. Using the advanced search, visitors to the site can search by brand, by style, by vintage year, by country, by color, etc. You can fill in as many or as few of the search criteria as you wish. This is an efficient way to locate the wine of your choosing.

As far as the other sections of the site, they are very lacking. The drink recipes section, for example, needs to be completed. I assume it must not be finished yet, because there is practically nothing there. Last time I checked, there were a total of only nine drink recipes. Unless WineRx.com plans to complete this section and make it respectable, the company should consider eliminating this from the site. The same is true with the spirits section. The only things offered are cognacs, cordials/liqueurs, specialties, spirit coolers, and tequila. But once again, there are almost no selections in each of these sections. The articles selection is also lacking.

Overall, WineRx.com is a slightly below average service that doesn’t always offer the best price; has several incomplete sections; and charges a hefty fee for shipping. It has a very large selection and can help consumers locate a rare type of wine, besides also offering a fair deal if purchasing in bulk. But the strikes against this on- line store are several, leading me to give an overall rating of only two stars. Not only are the prices not as good as claimed, the site is in need of several improvements before it can be taken seriously as a place to purchase wine.