Profitable Content

Posted on | October 1, 2004  
Writen by | Ian Griffith

While most stores realize the need to establish a presence online, many struggle with how to make the investment profitable. Some stores will start online with a simple homepage, while others will build a few pages showing products and prices. It can be useful to tell people where you are online and what you sell, but the only stores capable of creating a revenue stream from their website are those who commit to e-commerce.

Selling wine online is a booming business but it is rarely as simple as listing your products and prices like a shopping list in the Food and Wine section of the newspaper. Shoppers online are looking for information about their purchases. With wine and spirits this means being able to see a picture of the product and read a description. The best kind of description will always be one written by a staff member who composes insightful reviews with a flourish. In the absence of a staff writer you need to find relevant content on as many of your products as possible. Searching for this content is time consuming and requires enough product knowledge to put it beyond the reach of a neophyte.

When we designed the BevNetwork e-commerce system we recognized that collecting content for more than a thousand products was not necessarily an effective use of a store's time. In response we built a content system to enhance our customers' websites. When your site automatically contains a baseline level of content you can choose to enhance the information for key products, but it is not a fulltime job.

Recently, wholesalers have begun subscribing to our content system in recognition of several benefits. Not only are we able to provide a cost effective source of content for their own website or marketing program, but their product information is automatically distributed to the websites of their customers who subscribe to our e-commerce system. If their products are better supported than a competitor's then this competitive advantage will lead to additional sales.

While we build and support websites for retailers and wholesalers, we have come to recognize that our Internet business depends on content. When a new BevNetwork website goes live it is automatically supported with labels, bottle shots, reviews, ratings, tasting notes, winemaker notes and producer information for a majority of its products. We work with wineries, importers and distributors to ensure our content is accurate and up-todate.

A sizeable portion of the content we supply is available on the Internet from winery websites, however, we won't lift a label or review from another retailer. You could do this work yourself, but it represents a significant investment of energy when you could be focused on other priorities.

The other major advantage subscribers to the BevNetwork system receive is access to Virtual Inventory from the wholesalers in their market. Adding tens of thousands of products, which are supported with labels and reviews make the path to profitability much easier. If the goal is to make money from your venture online, then you need to sell product, and to sell product you need content.

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