How wineries can transform wine sales with Social Buying
In an age when we effortlessly split restaurant bills and taxi fares, why can’t consumers do the same when buying wine? This has always puzzled me because drinking wine with family, friends and colleagues is the ultimate social experience.
While payment technologies have evolved impressively - enabling purchases anytime, anywhere, on any device - they remain focused on the individual. One tap, and it’s bought, delivered, done. Yet, these advancements overlook something fundamental: the joy of shopping together. The social aspect of buying with friends is what often makes the experience memorable, rewarding, and fun.
A few years ago, as I started getting serious about wine, I wanted to split the cost of a purchase with friends directly at checkout. (Do I really want to pay $500 upfront and then ask my friends to manually transfer their share to my bank? No.) Surprisingly, no winery or wine merchant offered that option online. So, I launched Cobuyr, a group payments, data and analytics platform company designed to make buying wine a shared social experience.
If you’re in the wine business, you might be wondering: Why should I care? Here’s why.
What if you could generate incremental revenue in a market growing just a few percentage points a year? Lower your customer acquisition costs? Reactivate club members to purchase more often? Create an experience so unique it drives word-of-mouth buzz?
The answer lies in enabling group wine buying.
How it works.
Cobuyr integrates seamlessly into your e-commerce platform via standard APIs. This allows customers to purchase wine together - friends, family, colleagues, or club members - directly on your site.
The customer journey is simple: a new or existing customer visits your website, selects wine, and initiates a Group Buy checkout. They then invite co-buyers to join, assigning how much each person pays and what they receive. With just an email, the Cobuyr system prompts everyone to pay. The wine is then shipped or picked up by group members.
For wineries, Cobuyr creates a new kind of engagement: a social buying experience that turns customers into evangelists. This network effect leads to higher conversion rates and higher average order values while building deeper customer relationships.
But technology is just the beginning.
The true value lies in the data. Modern wineries are using tools like Cobuyr to not only boost revenue but also to understand their customers better and foster loyalty. With budgets tighter than ever, the priority is making existing tools work harder - while also investing in innovations that unlock new growth.
Cobuyr’s advanced analytics reveal the social buying networks of your customers - showing not only who is purchasing together, but also who should be buying which bottles or cases of wine, and with whom. These insights help you understand both individual and group behaviors, enabling you to supercharge your marketing strategies.
Adding group buying to your checkout isn’t just a technical upgrade - it’s a strategic one that will drive your digital transformation. It opens up untapped sales potential.
Even as wine sales have declined over the past five years, wineries have built solid customer databases through tasting rooms, online sales, clubs, and events. But many still treat their customers as isolated individuals, missing the bigger picture: each customer is part of a wider social network that can be activated to buy more wine and to promote your wine as brand ambassadors.
Likewise, wine clubs, the hero of the past for wineries, are often managed as one-to-one relationships, rather than communities. The opportunity isn’t just to sell more - it’s to build social connections.
The good news? Wineries are sitting on a goldmine of customer data, collected through a variety of marketing efforts, that’s just waiting to be monetized.
Group wine buying transforms transactional shoppers into active and loyal customers. It brings people together. It builds and fosters a community. And it unlocks a new era for wineries: Welcome to Social Wine Buying.