Over the history of online wine sales, retailers have been buffeted by the policy shifts of web giants that control much of traffic from US consumers. Amazon, Google and eBay in particular have all embraced alcohol sales at some point, only to back away and ban it from their websites. Since a ban on beer and spirits sales in 2012, eBay has quietly been selling wine from licensed retailers, but treating it as a non-specific category that didn’t require any specialized navigati

Without question smartphones have radically impacted how people access the internet. Despite the fact that these devices have been available for less than a decade, today, according to Nielsen, over 60% of Americans carry a smartphone. Consequently, mobile users have become increasingly important to retailers—including wine and spirits stores. To address the needs of mobile users there are two main projects that stores can look at taking on: building a mobile-optimized websit

Should unlicensed marketers profit from the sale of wine? Advertising online is an important part of any serious online retailer’s marketing mix. The options for a store start with the major search engines, but search marketing can be an expensive choice as the competition for keywords is intense. Increasingly niche websites are opening up where entrepreneurs have developed an audience and will happily help a store sell them wine. So far so good, and clearly marketers can hel

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 11% of all retail sales that are completed online and almost 50% of all retail sales begin online. We now live in that future predicted by Forrester, and the