Virgin Wines relaunches, adds 'wine auctions'

Virgin Wines has relaunched its website, giving it a new look, and has added a new auction feature, so customers can bid against each other for cases of wine.

The colour scheme and layout is a big improvement on the old site, with better navigational features - the sidebar on the left makes it easier to search the new site by price, type of wine, country of origin, and so on.

New homepage:

Old homepage:

As well as the new search facility, Virgin Wines has made it easier to find a wine to your taste by adding 'tasting tags'. Users can tag each wine with descriptive words, allowing you to search for all wines tagged as 'fruity' or 'spicy'. Tags improve findability and can be great for SEO, so this sort of functionality is a great addition.

Virgin Wines has also added an innovative new auction service to its website, allowing customers to bid against each other on cases of wine. As an introductory offer, Virgin will be auctioning a case of £3,000 Chateau Latour 2000 today, with a starting price of 99p.

The site will have about 8-10 cases on auction at any one time, with the length of auctions varying from a few hours to a few days. In addition, Virgin Wines will offer 'Name Your Price' and '60 Cases in 60 Seconds' auctions.

Founded in 2000, Virgin Wines claims to be Europe's largest independent wine retailer, with more than 400,000 customers.

Keep an eye out for our forthcoming interview with Virgin Wines' CEO where we will find out more about the key reasons for this redesign.

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