The Imperative to Improve Retailer POS data
In this industry that trades in controlled beverages there are inefficiencies built into our business by regulators trying to contain the social cost of our products. Some of these regulations are being challenged in the courts and state legislatures, leading to political and legal battles that cause divisions by pitting one tier of the [...]
Key Transitions in the Growth of a Wine Store Website
Every year we review benchmark indicators for the retailer ecommerce websites we support. This is a valuable routine for us to catch outliers who are lagging, stores that should be doing better than their performance suggests. We need to find out whether the problem is technical or design related, or it might concern store personnel [...]
Catching the Buzz: Mining Digital Word of Mouth
A recent column explored the potential impact of social media on retail by describing campaigns designed to take advantage of customers’ activity on Facebook. The goal was to leverage social interactions to amplify a positive shopping experience across their network. With social commerce, most retailers see their goal as building engagement and providing customer service [...]
Chasing the Omni-Present Consumer
As we enter the holiday season retailers are struggling to keep up with the constantly evolving online consumer. The challenge used to be how a retailer could maintain a consistent experience in the store and on the web, with email marketing and print ads. Now those customers spend their time on even more channels like [...]
Social Commerce starts to get interesting
It has been 18 months since Facebook first allowed us to “Like” websites or products on other sites and broadcast that vote to our friends on our news feed. In that short period of time Facebook has built a series of features to support retailers who aim to leverage the power of that social network. [...]
How Market Conditions Affect Wine Sales Online
Helping customers and sourcing product is the daily work of running a store and you tend to take for granted the conditions of your local market. A foray into new markets recently reminded me that retailers in some states don’t enjoy the benefits of a printed beverage journal or its online equivalent to find distributor [...]
Google Shifts Retailers’ Attention to 12 digits
In the early 1980’s Walmart famously introduced barcode scanners in their stores to speed up the checkout process. Back then only 45% of their most successful products carried UPC codes. After successful tests with this new technology Walmart leveraged their market clout to require all their distributors and suppliers to supply UPC codes with their [...]
The Local and Mobile Future of eCommerce
As consumers have embraced the Internet and incorporated it into their lives a funny thing has happened: shopping at local stores is more likely to start online. Back in 2006 about 16% of in-store retail sales were started online and Forrester Research predicted that by 2012 that number would grow to 38%. Add to that [...]
How Savvy Retailers Craft Tales to Sell More Wine
I was ready to respond to the offer before I even finished reading the E-mail. I couldn’t even tell whether it was a red or white wine being offered, but I knew I wanted it. The retailer’s story of pizzas in France, mosquitoes and olive pits was enough to make me believe that if I [...]
Different Paths to the Top of Wine Ecommerce
At this time of year we typically run benchmark comparisons for our retailer websites to give stores feedback on how their site is performing. We take statistics for November and compare metrics including total visitors, pageviews, sales, transactions, conversions, and order size. Comparing results across all our stores we see the following categories of websites:
Newcomers: [...]
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