I came across this site via Wine-Searcher while price-comparing a bottle today. There are only two prior threads with “CellarBid” in the title, and these provide little to no insight, experience, or commentary.
The site boasts:
- No buyer commissions
- 5% seller commissions
- No listing fees
Has anyone ever used this auction site? Any familiarity at all? The 0% buyer fee is intriguing, but I cannot find any evidence at all that anyone has actually used them to purchase or sell wine. It is suspicious at the outset for that reason.
There are not many bottles available for bidding, which adds to the suspicion regarding legitimacy. There are only 122 active listings, 74 of which are auctions and the remainder are wines for outright sale. But, when you choose an auction and click on the seller profile, many have 20, 30, 40 reviews from prior customers.
From the “About Us” section, I find:
I have been a wine enthusiast for many years. I have visited over 120 different wineries, and have had the pleasure of drinking some of the finest wines in the world. I have been buying wines at auctions for years, and have found that most of the wine auction sites are more about the site than about the visitors. I wanted to develop a website where buyers could meet sellers and choose to exchange their wines at a price that they both found agreeable. A website where the seller did not have to part with their wine before they had a buyer, and where the buyer did not have to pay a large auction fee to acquire the wine. Enter … Cellar Bid.
The great part about buying wine at auction is that you can find wines that may no longer be available in your marketplace. In addition, you may find a wine that is a real value. I know that one of my greatest pleasures in wine buying is when I get an excellent wine at a price well below what I thought it would be, or when I find a wine that is undiscovered and therefore priced well below other wines of the same quality … a real value!!! Those types of buys happen all the time at an auction site. Therefore, visit often … and watch for the opportunities. They will be there often … you just have to be there at the same time.
It is important to note that CellarBid.com welcomes Wine Brokers to sell their wines at our site. Since wine brokers use several outlets to sell their wines, it is possible that the wine may no longer be available. Therefore, it is necessary to confirm availability after the completion of the auction. CellarBid requires that the wines be listed with an opening bid price that the Broker finds acceptable as a fair selling price. That assures a bidder that the wine will be delivered if available, regardless of the selling price.
Cheers!
Michael Weiner
Cellar Bid
The WhoIs lookup shows the site is owned by Michael Weiner in Chicago, and he registered the site in 2010.
Here’s an interview from a month ago with some website I have not heard of: http://www.sellwineguide.com/single-post/2016/08/28/Cellarbidcom-a-peer-to-peer-solution-to-selling-your-wine-online
Shady? Interesting? I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion.