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The following are resources that we hope online wine retailers find helpful in running their business.

Winery Ecommerce Points to Trends for Retailer Websites

While ecommerce has become a prominent feature of retail wines sales for some years, the scale of retailer sales is probably much smaller than the impact of online sales for wineries, especially in California.  According to Whole World Wines 92% of wineries have a website, with 70% of those using a secure shopping cart to [...]

Design Choices that can Set Your Wine Store Apart

Recently a store owner told me “all other wine store websites look the same; we want our design to stand out as being different”.  To be honest this statement made me a little nervous.  Unless the store has a very clear idea of what “different” means, or has experience with a designer that knows how [...]

An Ounce of Compliance is worth a Pound of Data Breach Cleanup

For most wine stores their efforts to secure information against possible theft have been driven by banks and the card issuing companies.  The Payment Card Industry (PCI) launched its campaign to define security standards in 2006, and has been largely successful in promoting these standards to retailers and their vendors.  Now a new source of [...]

Searching for the Intended Result

By now most of us have had the experience of entering a search term into Google only to make a typo that Google has helpfully corrected, stating “Did you mean…?” Depending on the merits of your misspell you may find Google is confident you made a mistake and is showing you the corrected results. Other [...]

What Exactly are the Rules for Collecting Emails?

Retail stores have the often difficult task of trying to collect email addresses from their customers (or potential customers) so that the store can alert them of sales, tastings, and other special events but at what point does that hunger for emails cross a line?
I was recently in a situation where I started following an [...]

The Complications of Operating a Low Margin, High Volume Online Wine Store

It’s a simple concept:  pricing your items lower than your competitors’ provides a simple, reliable way to attract more people and is likely to bring in more sales.  But, in turn, by operating your business with rock-bottom prices (and, most likely, thin margins), you also create pressure upon yourself to do a high volume of [...]

Why Reinvent the Wheel? Sticking with an Industry Specific Solution for your Retailer Website

In recent discussions with a prominent retailer who was selecting an ecommerce solution for his store I was surprised to discover that the benefits of an industry specific solution for both his POS system and website were being overlooked.  Part of the reason for this was the involvement of a project manager from outside the [...]

The Grape Identity Crisis

In the past month, I’ve been doing some work with our master grape list. I knew it was a super huge task, but the more I learned and dove into it, the bigger the project revealed itself to be. One of the huge issues with keeping content about wines clean and streamlined is that there [...]

If You Build It, Will They Come?: Creating a Successful Retail Wine Site

Before I start this post, let me introduce myself.  My name is James Laurenti, and I’m the primary point person at BevSites for new stores going through the web development process.  I’m also one of the key people that support our sites once they’ve launched.  Prior to my work here, I’ve spent the greater portion [...]

Have you talked to your Wholesaler about Interstate Shipping?

Have you talked to your Wholesaler about Interstate Shipping? We have a unique view of the wine industry at Beverage Media in that we work with retailers, wholesalers, importers and wineries to support their businesses. Of these industry players the mostly maligned tends to be the wholesaler who is hidden from public view and appears [...]

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