Wine World is an online liquor shop (backed by Rocklands) that has a huge selection and quite low prices. Guaranteed low, actually. The only downside is that you can’t be like, “”I have 20 people over now, bring me some booze””. But in our experience, we got delivery the next day.
Note: If you’re under 21, you can’t drink and we in no way encourage you to. It’s not that cool and most people would trade being young for the privilege.
The Drinks
There’s a huge selection here, which includes most types of beer, wine and liquor available in Sri Lanka. You can get everything from a bottle of Lion beer (Rs. 170) to the Louis XIII cognac Rihanna talks about (Rs. 646,012).
It’s called Wine World but what might really draw people here is the liquor. The prices seem cheap (about Rs. 7,000 for Johnnie Walker Black, Rs. 1,200 for Halmilla Old Arrack) and there’s a ‘Low Price Guarantee’ badge on the site. Presumably, you can complain if you find anything cheaper.
The range of wines is also good — everything from reds and whites and rosé, sparkling and champagne. We ordered a Prosecco (the poor man’s champagne) to try out the service. It cost Rs. 1,872. How was the drink? It was good, thank you for asking. This is a weird review in that our opinion on the actual item doesn’t actually matter much. What really matters is how the website works, which we’ll get to.
The Site Experience
The website, designed by We Are Designers, is quite user-friendly in general. It’s not super mobile-friendly, but neither is it mobile-hostile.
The basic finding/ordering/checking-out process is quite good. Search doesn’t work well (a search for tequila returns nothing, a search for gin returns only two items) but the goods are well-categorized and easy to find through the menus.
Checking Out
Registration is relatively painless and once you enter an address, you can choose to have it remembered. The only thing we found confusing was the delivery charges. For example, if you order one beer delivery (to Colombo), it costs Rs. 150. If you order 20, it’s Rs. 3,000. We ran a few queries and we couldn’t quite figure out how they were calculating, but basically the more you ordered, the more delivery cost you will have to pay. Not sure if this makes sense.
As a big plus, they deliver anywhere in Sri Lanka.
Once we ordered, we got an email and that was all cool. The next day someone called, confirmed the address and a guy delivered one bottle of Prosecco and one Lion Beer in a plastic Wine World bag. And that was it. Pretty smooth.
Conclusion
If you’re capable of planning a day ahead, Wine World is probably the cheapest and easiest way to refill your liquor cabinet. They have a wide selection of wine, beer and liquor and guaranteed low prices. Overall, it’s a pretty good online shopping experience. Cheers.
