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APIs driving ‘exponential’ growth in fine wine trading

11 March 2026 By Richard Woodard

With the use of APIs, merchants can instantly and seamlessly integrate with Bordeaux Index’s LiveTrade platform, dramatically expanding their market access and connecting with thousands of potential buyers and sellers all over the world. What’s more, it’s free to use and the company’s experts are on hand to help with implementation. Richard Woodard finds out more.

Bordeaux Index’s LiveTrade platform has some formidable numbers attached to it: about £40 million of stock, some 15,000 distinct products and more than 150,000 listings in total, with thousands of buyers and sellers from all over the world using it. Now just imagine if there were a way for wine merchants to instantly and seamlessly integrate their own listings with the platform… Step forward the LiveTrade API .

APIs – standing for application programming interfaces – automate key tasks in trading, including listings and inventory management, allowing users to list wines and execute trades pretty much in real time, with Bordeaux Index handling all buying, selling and logistics on the other side of the trade. The result is a dramatic expansion of market access and a streamlined trading process – all without any licence or transaction fees.

As Bordeaux Index chief technology officer James Carey explains, the LiveTrade API eliminates the barriers between merchants’ inventory listings and those on the LiveTrade platform. “What the API allows you to do is to link those two together, using your system to look at all your pricing information and stock side-by-side with our pricing information and our stock,” he says. “It means that you can trade without needing to navigate between the two.

“Once those LiveTrade products are synced into your system, they effectively become your products – you can sell those products as your own, with the big benefit of not having to hold the stock. You just buy from us at cost price and apply a margin to your customers.”

Integration

Many of Bordeaux Index’s customers have their systems integrated with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, meaning that they can sync products from LiveTrade, then choose which ones they want to list on their Shopify storefront, and at what margin.

The customer sees the products with the margin added, adds them to their basket and checks out, buying the wines from the merchant. Meanwhile, the order goes into the Bordeaux Index system, and the company ships the wine to the merchant within two days, ready to be sent on to the customer.

“It’s a completely seamless experience, and we’re a silent partner in the process,” says Carey. “The cost of holding stock these days is quite considerable, so this is very much a benefit to small or medium-sized merchants, and even the larger merchants too. There really is something for everyone in there.”

The impact of using the API to integrate listings can be dramatic, creating what Bordeaux Index describes as “exponential, measurable and repeatable growth”. According to the company, five out of six vendors have seen growth of more than 10 times in bid/offer activity within the first three months of integrating with LiveTrade’s API, generating more than 15 times more trading opportunities.

And it’s free. While rival systems may charge licence and transaction fees – often amounting to thousands of pounds – there are no such charges attached to the LiveTrade API. “If you’re a customer buying stock off our platform, you don’t pay anything other than the price of the stock,” explains Carey. “And if you’re selling wine, there is a margin which is clear and transparent. That’s very beneficial in the current market environment.”

Investment

How is Bordeaux Index able to offer this? First of all, because the company’s cost of implementation is relatively low: Bordeaux Index has invested in its own technology and has an entirely in-house team, eliminating the need to outsource to a third-party software provider – which is very expensive – and allowing the company to move quickly to develop and improve systems.

It also makes sound commercial sense for Bordeaux Index to make access to LiveTrade via the API extremely easy, as Carey explains. “We make money from volume of trade, so the benefit to us is getting as many people on the platform as possible,” he says. “So it’s very much in our interests to make the cost of entry as cheap as possible.”

Bordeaux Index also recognises that smaller merchants may not have access to tech capability, so the company has tried to make the API as easy and quick as possible to integrate, with help and support readily available. After initial contact, the company will set up an initial discovery conversation with the customer, in order to identify what technology they are using, and the level of technical capability they have access to, before tailoring a solution to that company’s individual needs.

Next comes the creation of a working implementation that will allow full API integration to be completed. The Bordeaux Index team will open up communications (via the likes of Slack or Teams), helping the customer with Chat GPT prompting to start building the implementation. This may involve Bordeaux Index sending sample code or prompts, then a two-way process of changes and refinements to make the implementation work.

Flexibility is key

“Typically, after a few days, you’ve got a working implementation,” says Carey. “Larger businesses will have their own tech teams – we would go through the same process with them, but it would usually be faster, and with fewer questions. If there is significant benefit to us, we will even build the whole thing for them.”

Flexibility is key here. In some cases, full technical implementation may not be the best solution, in which case an Excel workbook linked to the API might be a better idea, creating a real-time workbook of prices that the customer can execute on the network. “There are a variety of ways of using the API, some more integrated than others,” says Carey.

In technology, nothing stands still, and Bordeaux Index is constantly working to improve and refine the API. After the initial version was built, Carey estimates that the company had more than 200 changes based on customer feedback. Often these changes will be beneficial to other customers, and so will be integrated into the API.

“Importantly, these changes are additive, so if people want to use those additions they can do so without having to change their systems or start again,” says Carey. “Because we’ve got a dedicated team working on this, we’re always working on what’s coming next – and we never take our foot off the gas.”

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