The Basics of taking a Local Retail Wine Store Online
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
- Repeat Customers – turn new customers into repeat customers probably through great customer service and follow up marketing.
Where to get this software and service from:
eCommerce software
- Specialist wine eCommerce providers, the biggest of which are: Inertia, eWinery Solutions, WineZap, vin65
- Small business eCommerce providers (100s), of which three representative ones are: volusion, yahoo, miva merchant
- Wine shopping comparison websites: snooth.com, winezap.com, wine-searcher.com and a few others
- Local web developers
- Large eCommerce brands e.g. IBM, Varien
- Do it yourself with software like www.magentoecommerce.com with help from a service like mine
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This incorporates every method of driving traffic to a website including search engine optimization (SEO), adwords (Google, Yahoo, MSN bing), wine shopping comparison websites, and social media (facebook, wine blogs, twitter).
- specialist wine online marketing consultants or agencies
- most of the eCommerce providers offer this as an add-on service sometimes with their own marketplace (e.g. winezap), the wine shopping comparison websites do this very well (e.g. snooth.com)
- large SEM agencies
- local SEM services
- a plethora of services found on the internet, sometimes of dubious nature
- media agencies
- DM agencies
- ad agencies
Regulation and Legal Compliance
As you no doubt know the legal environment of selling wine online is a complex and dynamic area including:
- Complying with laws re minimum age to purchase liquor.
- Complying with US inter-state liquor shipping law or “shipping compliance”. Many US states legally restrict the distribution of wine from out of state (and in-state) suppliers.
A Rapidly Changing Internet Environment
What you might not know is that the internet environment also suddenly changes:
- Google/Yahoo/MSN Search Engine and Adwords rules suddenly and (unfavorably) change
- Adwords bid prices rise above seemingly profitable levels
- Social Media share of traffic is said to be increasing (especially Facebook) resulting in concerns that Google et al marketing programs are leading to less traffic.
Internet Services Rapidly Improving
And more positively internet services are also rapidly improving
- DIY websites: websites have become easy to set up (see blogger.com and wordpress.com). eCommerce websites have also become simpler to set up and administer though certainly still requiring some technical knowledge.
- DIY SEM: Google increasingly makes basic SEM a simpler process especially with keywords and Adwords campaign set up. Although there will always be a component of art (research and copywriting) to SEM this is slowly shrinking.
