The Giants of Comparison Wine Shopping: Amazon and Google Shopping
It wasn’t so long ago that wine stores could afford to be complacent about their websites. Online traffic would likely find them from a product search on a search engine or wine directory site, competition wasn’t too bad and Google Product listings were free. It was tempting for retailers to treat online orders as less important than “real” customers [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Is Your Website Doing The Heavy Lifting For You?
Experienced tradesmen know the value of a good tool is its practical utility. Depending on the trade, a tool can save your back or deliver flush joints. In our work supporting retailer websites we often find ourselves repackaging the information on a website so it can be integrated with other tools and services. The following [...]
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 [...]