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 have hardly increased or decreased. Yet while the standby metrics suggest little shifted, we can point to a number of major changes in selling wine online between 2013 and 2016 (such as in interstate shipping re

In the build-up to the holiday season last year there was a lot of excitement about social commerce and how Facebook’s enormous user base was going to become a new force in the season’s retail business. Once the dust settled however, it turned out that social media didn’t have quite the direct impact some had expected. According to Forrester Research eCommerce accounted for 15% of the total holiday sales in 2011, but instead of social commerce, email and search remained the

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 the social media sites, and much of their web activity might be on a mobile device. They have access to retailers on those channels and stores want to make sur

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