Republic National Distributing Co. is expanding its relationship with marketplace operator Flaviar Inc.
Flaviar says it facilitates a million orders annually through its network of retailers across the world. It signed a strategic agreement with Republic National in 2022.
Republic National, Flaviar plan to expand B2B ecommerce sales together
Republic National is a distributor of alcoholic beverages and related spirits. Flaviar owns spirits marketplaces Flaviar.com and Caskers.com. Under the arrangement, the two companies agreed to collaborate to expand B2B digital commerce in the wholesale beverage industry.
“Ecommerce penetration in beverage alcohol sales is still very low compared to other product categories, especially in the U.S., and we believe that the main reason is due to the lack of modern, consumer-friendly services in our space,” says Flaviar CEO Jugoslav Petkovic. “We’re firm in our commitment to support partners across all three tiers of the U.S. alcohol system, as well as internationally, to enable more of such services to launch and capitalize on this giant growth opportunity.”
The latest move in the collaboration is giving Republic National access to Flaviar’s latest acquisition: Wine-Searcher, a global database of alcoholic beverage product, price, and availability. Wine-Searcher’s database collects and indexes products, prices, locations, producers, and retailers into the drinks-related data available. The database has 18 million listings from more than 33,000 vendors across 126 countries.
Users search the Wine-Searcher database is 300 million times per year, and it has over five million monthly active users, Flaviar says.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. But Republic National, which reports about $12 billion in annual revenue, including about $1.3 million through ecommerce, will use Wine-Searcher for larger product inventory, marketing data and related services, the company says.
“Our collaboration with Flaviar aims to accelerate the pace of digital transformation within the industry,” says Republic National CEO Nicholas Mehall.
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