Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is to start selling wine in the US, entering a business fraught with regulatory complexities and littered with the wreckage of previous failures.

Amazon is looking to recruit a senior wine buyer, whom it says will be responsible for "the acquisition of a massive new product selection" for its site. The wine sales will augment a rapidly expanding non-perishable groceries business that Amazon launched two years ago.

The supposed potential of online wine sales drew millions of dollars in investments during the internet boom but a series of start-ups struggled in the face of strict state-by-state restrictions on wine shipping.

Amazon itself invested $30m in 1999 in a 45 per cent share of Wineshopper.com, a start-up that expired the following year. Wine.com, now the largest US online wine seller, sells food gift baskets via Amazon's site, but not wine.

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