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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Difficulty of Obtaining Wine Content

First off, let me introduce myself. My name is Amanda Maynard and I’m the newest member to the BevSites office in Cambridge, MA. My job includes a number of duties, but here are a few of the biggies: content collection, matching from our database to store inventory for websites on our system, managing new sites [...]

Wine Information: from Scarcity to Abundance

If you’ve spent time searching for labels and wine information you will recognize that access to this information is variable. Wineries and importers assume that you will come to their website where they may provide trade-oriented content resources. In many cases the information is missing, or more frustrating has been built into a flash presentation [...]

Wine.com recommendation engine case study

Marketing Sherpa has again brought their analytical rigor to a wine industry case study. This time the subject is the recommendations that are made on Wine.com’s product and search pages.
Summary: Ecommerce marketers need to optimize their product recommendations strategy. Simply offering suggestions isn’t enough to lift order value if those recommendations aren’t personalized and relevant [...]

Opportunities Online Persist despite Tougher Economic Climate

Story by Ian Griffith on 1/1/2009
Last year we conducted some comparative benchmarking of retailer websites on our ecommerce system for the month of November. We compared traffic and sales, pageviews and conversion rates to give stores feedback on how their websites were performing. When presenting an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of their online [...]

Benchmarks to Grow your Web Business

Story by Ian Griffith on 1/1/2008
With our exposure to wine stores of all shapes and sizes who are selling online, store owners often ask how their website is performing compared to other stores. While we typically have an intuitive sense of how a store is managing and the challenges they face, this year-end we worked [...]

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