What Jordan said.
You’re making-up a completely different situation than what occurred here.
Also, it doesn’t seem like an efficient or sustainable business strategy to actively cherry-pick auctions to cancel and refund on a regular basis in order to capture a sliver of margin.
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Yeah, this is 100% not happening and with respect to what did happen, it’s almost certainly a screwup and not a scheme to net WineBid a few more bucks.
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I certainly know of retailers that have done just that with futures contracts. It wasn’t too often, but definitively has happened.
Sure, fraud happens (and I’m not at all saying WineBid is engaging in fraud here!). It’s just not a sustainable, active business model, even in crypto. I’m guessing it’s easier to pull that kind of active “management” (fraud) of the process off in futures - there’s no promised delivery date, and the retailer gets the full difference in price + the carry on $$ over 1-2 years - refund costs, while in an auction, the house is only getting 18% of the difference in price (and also takes the risk that the second auction won’t sell) - refund and relisting costs.
I may have a new business model here… 
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May I interest you in some light evening reading? 7k posts worth.
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Correct Joshua. Proven to be an unsustainable business model
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Alan
I think that may have been an option at some point but it looked as if the process was going to drag on for quite a while and Wine Bid did not have a specific game plan or time line to communicate to Tom. Don’t recall if Tom pressed for immediate action and that was what triggered the refund. Sometimes we get what we ask for, but don’t get what we need
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Ha!
Yeah, I’m just surprised that they weren’t on top of this better. I can understand a mistake that cascades, and ends up with wines shipped to the wrong recipients, stuff happens. I can understand it taking some time to resolve. What I don’t understand is when they get the wines back, how they weren’t the shipped to the correct buyers. It’s not like there’s confusion over which bottles belong to whom - every bottle is labeled with a unique tag allowing it to be easily matched to an auction, and the winner of that auction.
To be clear, I’m a happy winebid buyer and seller, have never had a serious issue, have had a small number of minor hiccups resolved quickly and positively. Plus I have the luxury of picking up and dropping off at their facility, so no risk of shipping errors. There are some newer people whose names I don’t recognize, maybe there is just some building of experience going on.
I keep wondering if this was because Tom agreed to be refunded before the bottles were located and reacquired. If he told WineBid he’d rather just get his money than wait for the wine, then maybe they could have offered them as a courtesy but I wouldn’t expect it. If he said he was out and didn’t care then its obvious. If WB told him they didn’t expect to get the wine back and said he should just take the refund, that’s a different story.
On the moving of the wines around, most of the wines we’ve all received from WineBid have likely been shipped some distance already. If they are collectible then there is a good chance they are not even coming from the first buyer. Not to mention how they got to the owner before that. I don’t see why we would expect WB to say this one extra shipment on the listing. We are all taking that provenance risk with every wine we buy. This is also likely just one return out of many that happen over the course of a year.
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I didn’t ask for a refund though I had to bug them a couple times for a status update. The delay was on account of the wine being sent to someone’s off-site storage and thankfully not guzzled by the recipient. I finally got them 2 weeks ago. I suppose I could have sought a refund but it would not have been possible to find most of these again at the same prices, so I was willing to wait, but I definitely wouldn’t expect to have received them if I’d been refunded.
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Brief summary from my POV:
-Winebid ships a dozen cases of wine to wrong recipients.
OP is not happy.
-Winebid poorly communicates status/resolution for 3 weeks while hoping missing cases are recovered.
OP is pissed.
-4 weeks after mixup, Winebid has reunited a few errant cases some customers, but not OP.
OP doesn’t want to wait to see if his wine turns up. Wants a refund, hopes Winebid handles it the “right way,” (presumably by refunding his $).
-Immediately, it seems, Winebid refunds wine cost and shipping costs, but not storage.
OP not ecstatic, but presumably happy that Winebid has done the “right thing” by refunding him.
-Winebid also refunds storage fees.
OP is happy?
*Fast forward 6 weeks.
-Winebid recovers OP’s former wine.
-Winebid auctions off the OP’s former wine.
OP isn’t happy WineBid didn’t offer the wine exclusively to him.
Would OP have been happy if offered the opportunity to repurchase his case of former wine at the reimbursed rate?
Would OP have wanted a discount on the recovered wine due to the now suspect provenance?
How would OP respond next year when drinking a bottle of lifeless Chave?
I think the OP did the right thing by communicating clearly to WineBid what he wanted (a refund 6 weeks ago), and Winebid did the right thing by refunding him. At that point the relationship between OP and his former wine is over & I don’t think it’s realistic to expect differently.
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Delete…I see it was already addressed now 
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Yes, I really doubt this extra shipment is the one that broke the camel’s back, especially since it happened well into fall shipping season. If we’re talking about a case of DRC shipped during July that would be one thing but I highly doubt the wines are in any worse shape due to the snafu than they otherwise would be.
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Man that is some serious work! Cheers!
Well that is one place I never bought from on their “deals” Once at an offline a few people were bragging at these great prices and talked to a shop owner friend, and he was questioning how those prices could be. Something didn’t seem right to me or him.
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Since there is some speculation of facts over the last few days of posts, here are JUST THE FACTS from me, the originator of the post:
- WineBid shipped several cases to the wrong recipients in October, I received 2 cases in this shipment, with 1 case correct and 1 case not correct
- I immediately contacted WineBid.com to alert them of the error and sent on the wines I received that were not mine to the correct recipient with the label WineBid sent me
- I was then told they are looking into my missing case and would get back to me, I left them alone for about 2 weeks
- After about 5 or so weeks of checking back in weekly or every other week, they said they did not have my wines back yet and could not locate them.
**** The customer service people I spoke to encouraged me to start a refund request.*** - I said multiple times that I would wait if you think you can get them back and asked them what means they have taken to find them. I got No Answers or Details on those questions so I assumed the worst that they were doing nothing (even if they may have and could not say for privacy reasons)
- So after about 5 weeks of this dragging on I asked for a refund and was given one and refund of the shipping
- I also had stored the lost wines for about 14 months and asked for a refund of those - I was begrudgingly given that refund a few weeks later (Dec 9)
- Then the same week as my refund was made for the storage of the wines, all 12 bottles magically appeared on their auction site, most at higher minimum bid prices
- I asked and was denied the right to buy those wines back, which legally they are allowed to do. They refunded me and I totally get that.
Case Closed
BUT, like many have said, it’s in their right to legally be that way, just like anyone has the right to be a jerk, you just will have to face the consequences of doing so.
As for the provenance of the wines, we’ll never know. I was not too worried, but it is something I had in the back of my mind as solace for not getting them because who knows, the person that got my wines could have left it next to a heater in their mud room, or in a sunny place by a window, in a garage in a warmer region or who knows waiting to deal with it.
In the beginning, this was just a PSA to see if anyone else was affected to see if we could work together to figure out the issue if it was a larger issue affecting more people. I was trying to get my wine back knowing how these large companies have little cares for the people that buy from them that are not very high volume or high dollar spenders. So, in the end it was a smaller issue and this did not work to get my wine back, but it did prove my point about winebid being how they are so at least you have seen the real face of the company for who they are. Now you know the kind of company you are really dealing with and evaluate for yourself is the risk of provenance, the high fees, shorter season holds/storage fees, and the bad customer service really worth your allocation of spend? Maybe for that uber rare wine you have always been on the lookout for, or a birth year wine, but other than I can’t think of anything.
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This is the only part of the response that bugs me, everything else seems reasonable. If this happened to me, particularly if they were imported wines to me, I would not be happy.
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Tom
Your main point is well taken. They cared too little to set up a process for you to have the option of repurchase if the wines eventually showed up. Also, at the 5 week point the encouraged the refund and didn’t seem diligent about keeping you in the loop. Depending on how much you wanted the wines, holding out longer would have been the better strategy as the refund was the official cutting of the cord for them. I don’t believe they were salivating at the opportunity to relist the wine for huge profit gain. But it was bad faith by them to not automatically refund the storage costs.
Sellers can always come up with reason to back their actions. There is another thread with a broken bottle incident that was not covered by the seller. And another thread about insurance add on charges.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It helps us all make better decisions on which sellers are good and not so good to deal with.
It also is one of the more volatile topics on the board as the opinion factory is skewed on both ends of the spectrum.
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