A Coming of Age for Online Wine Sales
The online selling of products appears to be entering a new period of maturity where it can no longer fly under the radar. Two recent events have highlighted that eCommerce has become a significant part of consumer activity in the US. The first is that Amazon has agreed to collect sales tax for a number [...]
Google Drops Alcohol from Product Listings
Last month, without much notice, Google dropped all wine, beer and liquor from their product listing service. This move was in connection with a change to their free Google Product Search service which is becoming a paid advertising service called Google Shopping. Google Products represented between 10-15% of eCommerce revenue irrespective of the size of [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Let’s Talk Twitter
It’s digital age word of mouth uncorked
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the stony soil of Châteauneuf-du-Pape,without Internet access,chances are you have been hearing more and more often about the website called Twitter.com. Twitter talk seems to have undergone a huge uptick in recent months, thanks in part to Oprah and other media [...]
Five Stages of Growth for an Online Wine Store
Given concerns this year about economic uncertainty, the holiday season for retailers is being watched very closely. In general off-premise wine sales have not suffered the hardships that restaurants are currently enduring, but poor performance in late November and December can completely undermine what may have been a moderately successful year. As stores seek to [...]