Online retailer Amazon has announced it will be closing it’s Amazon Wine section at the end of 2017 – but it will still be possible to buy wine on the rest of the site.
Amazon Wine has been running for about five years, allowing wineries and suppliers to sell wines through Amazon.com.
But, in an email to Amazon Wine sellers, which has been widely reported by media outlets, the company stated that ‘as Amazon continues to offer customers additional retail options for buying wine, we will no longer offer a marketplace for wine at this time, and Amazon Wine will close on December 31st, 2017′.
According to TechCrunch, the statement added, ‘Wine will continue to be offered through Amazon Fresh, Prime Now and Whole Foods Markets.’
A spokesperson for Amazon could not be immediately reached for further comment.
Earlier this year, Amazon bough organic food retailer Whole Foods, which also sells wine.
Amazon Fresh and Prime Now are both grocery delivery services from Amazon, which include wine and beer. The market for on-demand food and drink delivery has become increasingly competitive in the past couple of years, with Deliveroo and Uber also expanding to wine, beer and spirits.
Earlier this year, an Oregon wine estate developed a wine ‘from conception to release’ with Amazon Wine – although Amazon cautioned that it had not been directly involved with developing the brand. Its job was to provide wines with a platform to sell from, it said.
Online marketplace eBay launched into wine retail in 2016 in 45 US states, and earlier this year that it would add another 1,000 wines to its lists in the UK via a deal with WineDirect.
