Thanks For Waving It In Our Faces

A couple of days ago the Japanese company Rakuten, who bought Buy.com last year, announced that they had made a special arrangement where customers from Japan can buy selected merchandise directly from Buy.com. One of the categories of merchandise they promoted heavily was wine (Buy.com had made an arrangement with Wine.com), so it wasn’t long before I hit the website to check it out.

I was excited about what I saw. Lots of good California wines available, and the prices were not marked up 100%+ as most overseas wines tend to be when they retail in Japan. In fact, although the prices were in yen they were pretty much what I’d expect to pay if I was living in California. So you can imagine that I was getting pretty excited about this new service.

Then I popped a bottle into my shopping cart and saw that it cost more than $20 to ship a bottle. The scale slid upwards from there – two bottles cost around $30, and a 12 bottle case cost more than $100 to ship to Japan.

What? Are you kidding me?

We usually buy our wine these days from Costco. They ship enough merchandise to Japan that it doesn’t cost them very much money at all to move high volumes of wine as well. We can buy many California wines for about 800 yen ($9) a bottle, no shipping. I guess when I heard about the new system at Rakuten I was hoping that they would have a similar shipping system in place. But I guess not.

It’s nice to have the option of buying good wines at good prices, but until they figure out a better shipping method I don’t think anybody in the Japanese market is going to pay $20 to receive an $8 bottle of Gnarly Head Zinfandel.

There are lots of other problems with California wines in the Japanese market, and this is just another one. I guess it means I’ve got to go back to America more often and stock up.


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