A decision by the Supreme Court in “Byrd vs Tennessee” this past June has the potential to resurrect interstate shipping opportunities for wine stores across the country. The question is whether the support of the Court can be fully realized by stores wishing to ship a...

After the June announcement that Amazon is in the process of acquiring Whole Foods, with the exception of a provocatively-titled article by Brad Rosen, CEO of Drync, “Did Amazon Just Kill Liquor Retail As We Know It?”, there was not much speculation about how this acqu...

Publish in the June 2017 Beverage Media journal's "Talkin' Tech column

Many of the laws that govern the retail tier were designed in the wake of prohibition with the goal of maintaining temperance. Over the past 80 years our attitudes towards alcohol have changed in way...

Over 30 years ago, Tony Pitale with the help of his wife Anne founded Innovative Computer Solutions (ICS) with the goal of building a better Point-of-Sale (POS) software solution for the wine and spirits retail industry. This venture has given our industry Vision POS,...

While basic chatbots (computer programs designed to simulate conversation) have existed in some form for decades, it was perhaps in October 2011, when Apple incorporated Siri into their iPhone operating system (iOS 5), that they became mainstream.  In fact, less than 5...

At the end of each year we like to review the performance of the 200+ eCommerce websites on the BevSites platform and share some highlighted insights.  This has become increasingly challenging for the past 4 years as the average traffic, sales, and cancellation rates h...

Our review of NRF 2017 for the wine and spirits trade, including a list of our 5 favorite vendor interactions.

Wine stores selling online have had relatively open access to consumers in the major US wine markets, which has been a welcome addition to their local business. While some laws have been in place that should limit these shipments, there has been lax enforcement at stat...