By the time you read this, the window for making large-scale changes to your digital presence or online marketing strategy will be nearly closed. That said, for businesses keen on making adjustments to impact their online sales this holiday season, there are a number of product marketing services (often referred to as “product feeds”) that can be implemented quickly to create immediate impacts on website sales. Wine-Searcher as a Starting Point Most stores selling wine onlin

We are pleased to announce a promotion to all our stores pairing Wine Alert with Google Shopping. We normally charge $75 and $50/month for these services, respectively, but we are happy to offer you both services for $50/month (plus a one-time start-up fee for Google Shopping). This is a good way to drive quality traffic to your site and is something that we recommend for all stores on our platform. Wine Alert is a service by eRobertParker.com that matches your products wit

In his classic text on the history of California wine, Leon Adams described the cycles of boom and bust that characterized the early days of that state’s budding wine industry. Sometimes it feels like he might as well have been discussing the options for selling wine online for retail stores. Recent changes in the available marketing options for wine stores have some wondering if recent years were part a boom cycle that is coming to an end. Last summer Google pulled the plug

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 who walked in the store. But times have changed, competition has become more intense online, and every new customer comes with

Around this time every year we review the results of our benchmarking report which shows how retailer websites on the Bevsites eCommerce platforms have fared over the past year. Looking to share useful insights we characterize the differences at stores that grew significantly or sustained sizeable sales with their online business. Previous articles have described the archetypes of The Coaster and The Priest, and descriptions of the paths different stores have taken to the top

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 of the largest states. The other is that Google is converting their comparison shopping engine from a free to a paid model. From the beginning Amazon argued that without a phy

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 a store’s website. This policy change has left retailers scrambling to make up for lost online sales and could raise the co

As of this morning Google has removed all wine, beer and spirits from Google Products in preparation for the transition to Google Shopping on July 1st. The policy reason has to do with a definition of alcohol as being "non-family safe": http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188484#US. However this policy for Google Shopping is contradicted by Google's advertising policy for Adwords. Adwords has historically distinguished between wine and beer adver

Google has been in the process of making multiple changes to how they process feeds for Google Products during the last two weeks. In this time, many of you have noticed a steady drop in traffic from Google Products and we've noticed it as well. We are in the process of making changes to the feeds that we send Google on a daily basis to combat this drop in traffic. We are learning more each week and adjusting the feeds as necessary. Much like when Google's organic search ge

As you know, we set up product feeds for Google so that all of your wines are search-able on Google Products. This week, we started getting more rejected items than the norm and I was quite curious why that was. After taking a look, it seems as though Google has decided to reject all items that have swear words in the title. Yep. No more Big Ass Winery or Bitch Bubbly on Google. These items won't be making the cut. Right now, you can still do a search for items like that an