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Selling Wine Online

Here I cover the general principles of selling wine on the internet.

I would step through these: Traffic, Conversion, eCommerce admin, Repeat Sales.

If you are interested in long tail wine marketing then you may want to start with Long Tail Wine Store.

An illustration of what to look for on Google when checking out your area is Wine Stores in 90210. This includes a video of a search in zip code 90210.

And there are lots of others as selling wine online is what my website is all about!

Selling Wine Online: Taking a Local Wine Store Online – the Basics

26 November 2009

Put simply you need:
* eCommerce – have an eCommerce website i.e. online catalog, shopping cart and order administration system
* Traffic – generate traffic to your site, especially from Google
* Conversion – convert this traffic into sales through probably good content, user shopping experience, suitable wine range and fair prices
* Arguably Repeat Customers – turn new customers into repeat customers probably through great customer service and follow up marketing.

Selling Wine Online, a Criteria: Marketing to eCommerce Process

27 November 2009

In order to sell wine online you need to generate traffic, convert the traffic into sales and nurture repeat business. You also need support for any technical or marketing issues you may have along the way.

Selling Wine Online Process 1: Traffic

28 November 2009

This post is about generating traffic to your wine retailer website. As you will see they are reasonably simple – the obstacle isn’t understanding them so much as doing them. Note that I am skeptical about secret SEO software and processes – they may help at the margin so to speak, but not with getting most of the results (i.e. 80/20 rule). Three types that I’ll split out below: SEO, PPC and Email Marketing.

Selling Wine Online Process 2: Conversion

29 November 2009

This post will look at converting traffic. The Landing Page. As mentioned in the last post you should build you SEO and PPC campaigns so that people land on an individual page, the “landing page”, rather than just a general home page. There are a number of reasons for this but the key one is that your customer is hot on the trail of an attractive wine and we don’t want to throw any obstacles in the way of that purchase – such as having to search the site.

Selling Wine Online Process 3: eCommerce Administration

30 November 2009

In the two previous posts I covered how wine retailers can generate traffic and convert it to sales. In this post I’ll cover ecommerce administration. In a fourth post I’ll cover repeat business. That’s the process of selling wine online. Orders. There should be a simple way to be notified of an order such as email, or a RSS feed.

Selling Wine Online Process 4: Repeat Business

1 December 2009

Regularly emailing interesting and valued information to a list of customers ensures that the $10 sale becomes a $50 or $500 customer. It also means you might be able to outspend other wine retailers who only rely on PPC to get most customers and don’t have a good follow up marketing system. My key tips for wine email marketing…

Selling Wine Online: Wine Online Competitors – The Market

6 December 2009

The online wine market has many competitors. I’ve taken a representative sample and created an Online Wine Market Model for illustrative purposes. The larger the circle the grater the online presence and/or sales in the US online wine market. The closer a competitor is to a word in italics the more likely it is positioned that way.

Selling Wine Online: The Local Wine Retailer’s Market Opportunity

7 December 2009

If you’ve read my post about the Online Wine Competition you may feel a little stunned at just how competitive the online market is. This post is about finding your gap in the market where you can elbow your way to get your fair share of customers. I see two clear gaps depending on your particular interests.

Selling Wine Online: The Long Tail of Wine- an opportunity?

8 December 2009

Chris Anderson, wrote a book called “The Long Tail”. It was a best seller, and is all about the millions of niches in the world and the successful businesses that have been built around this concept e.g. Amazon with books, iTunes with music, and Google Adwords with small business advertising. But the truth is the concept has a serious flaw.

Selling Wine Online: Your Point of Difference

9 December 2009

This post is about possible points of difference for an online wine retailer. First what most of the good online wine retailers offer, the “price of entry” rather than your point of difference. Second potential points of difference.

Plan to start a long tail online wine store?

6 April 2010

I had this great idea. I’d create a website that appealed to all those wine connoisseurs who loved niche wines. I’d work with wine retailers around the world, to offer niches, to wine lovers around the world. Here’s the key part of the wine marketing plan that was aimed at a particular group of wine drinkers called Experimenters and their particular needs.

The Long Tail Wine New Venture

12 April 2010

In a previous post about my Long Tail Wine Marketing Plan I wrote about a particular market segment called the Experimenter. This keen group of wine drinkers love to try different wines and find out more about varietals and wine regions. The venture I planned to set up would connect this group of wine drinkers [...]

The Local Wine Store’s Advantage vs Pure Play Internet Retailers

19 April 2010

In previous posts  A Plan to Launch a Long Tail Store Selling Wine Online and  The Long Tail Wine Website I outlined a wine drinker type, called the Experimenter, who wanted to seek out information about wine niches and give them a try wine retailer experts who had all the information the fellow above wanted [...]

What the wine internet shopper sees in CA 90210

25 May 2010

Ever wondered why a customer who lived round the corner bought wine off an online competitor rather than yourself? If so here is a simple way to find out, just go to google.com and search for relevant phrases like wine shop 90210, pinot noir, brand X … and see who dominates the search engine results page.

“Pimp Up” your Wine Retail Website: A New Service!

21 June 2010

I’ve been showing small wine retailers how they can sell wine online and obliquely referring to my service. The service was essentially something like taking your car in for a “tune up”. It took your existing website and added traffic, removed obstacles to conversion and helped with repeat business. The problem is the search engines. Most normal retail websites do a brilliant job with the shopping cart and the catalog but struggle to give the search engines and social media sites what they want. This is because they are focused on the eCommerce technology first. Not on an overall process, or system (fair enough too, wine eCommerce can be very complex). And that’s what my new service does, it puts in place a system to generate sales.