Winery's across the country need to focus on their online wine sales. Steve Gross, the Wine Institute director of state relations, reported that the latest figures indicate that it is now legal to ship wine direcly to 80% of the US drinking population. This comes after a supreme court decision two years ago making it unconstitutional to treat out-of-state wineries and in-state wineries the same. At that time, the legally ship-able population was just 52%. However, with this greater marketing freedom comes more compliance regulations as each state develops their own permit system. But with the right education, and tools such as ShipCompliant and Inertia Beverage's forthcoming REthinkCompliance engine, wineries can still focus on sales and marketing and allow the software to help weed through all the compliance B.S.
I think this means that wineries need to get web-savvy. Check out your favorite shopping carts (amazon.com for example) and learn from the pros. Make it simple, secure, and if possible, pretty. Then start to track your web conversion and statistics with something like Google Analytics. That way you can make educated decisions when you tinker with your shopping experience.
1 comment:
Now if wineries prioritize the channel and focus on good customer service using great software to help make their jobs efficient and effective the entire world will benefit from having access to great wines. It is my hope to see small wineries really start putting more and more resources to direct sales and we will see a whole wonderful new world of wine to consumers.
Inertia - Powering the Wine Revolution (and hoping to be the Amazon engine powering most of the wineries for direct sales)
---Paul Mabray - CEO
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