How to Sell Wine Online
Here’s the process:
- Traffic – generate traffic to your site, especially from Google
- Conversion – convert this traffic into sales through good content, user shopping experience, suitable wine range and fair prices
- Administration – easily administer invoices, shipping and any credits
- Repeat Purchase – turn new customers into repeat customers through follow up email marketing (and great customer service).
And here’s what you do, and how important each part of the process is:
Selling Wine Online Process
1. Traffic – generate traffic to your site, especially from Google.
What you do:
- Pay Per Click advertising (PPC): Google Adwords, Yahoo PPC, MSN / Bing PPC
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): meta tags, URL, headline and body copy, xml site-map for search engines, well chosen directory listings and external links
- Shopping Comparison Site Integration (e.g. with the likes of google, snooth or wine-searcher)
- Social Media: Blog, Facebook, Twitter, other blogs & forums where your customers hang out
How important it is for sales: ***A*** very important to have leads but still need to turn them into revenue.
2. Conversion – convert this traffic into sales.
What you do:
User Experience:
- Easy to understand Navigation
- Advanced Search capabilities
- Reviews, Ratings, Recommendations (from you, your staff, customers, and experts)
- Up-sell / Cross-sell
- Web (or ‘content’) Pages for articles, images and video.
How important it is for sales: ***AA*** hugely important to funnel your leads into sales through great copy and easy navigation.
Catalog:
- Category and Product Management with custom fields (e.g. “brand” or “appellation”)
- Bulk Product and Inventory Upload/Download
How important it is for sales: ***B*** important, still no revenue, most eCommerce software can do this.
Shopping Cart:
- Upfront shipping cost estimation
- Guest checkout (no registration required)
- Easy one-page-checkout process
- Discounts and coupons, gift messages and wrapping.
- Payment methods: Credit Card, PayPal etc, internet banking, purchase order
- Security: SSL (i.e. the “s” in https://) and PCI (a tough credit card security standard)
How important it is for sales: ***AA*** really important as 30-70% of shopping carts are abandoned!
3. eCommerce Administration – easily administer orders and stock
What you do:
Order Management:
- Shipping: Pre setup major couriers,
- Good Invoice / Credit process
- Legal Compliance: minimum age and shipping laws
How important it is for sales: ***B*** important for your everyday use but does not directly increase revenue.
Set up:
- Graphic Design
- Ease to Set up
- Simple to maintain (through “cloud computing”)
- Third Party / Other Software Integration (“API”)
How important it is for sales: ***B*** important but it’s spending money not making it!
Reporting:
- Analytics, Adwords and Conversion reporting
- Bestsellers, Search, and Top Customers reporting
How important it is for sales: ***A*** need to continuously improve by analyzing what works and what doesn’t.
4. Repeat Purchase – turn new customers into repeat customers
What you do:
- Email Marketing (i.e. a pro service with “double opt-in” and auto unsubscribe)
- Testing and Analysis
How important it is for sales: ***A*** it’s your list, your existing customers, that will provide 80% of your profit (if set up correctly).
So that’s the process for a small ‘bricks and mortar’ wine retailer to sell wine online – profitably.
What’s your priority?
To convert traffic into sales.
This is the hardest task and requires the most work (mainly creating good content).
But here’s the problem, many websites look fantastic (“flash” slides, great vineyard images, trendy artwork) and fail to make a return on investment. Indeed many are commissioned for, say $10,000, and never recover that investment.
The frustrated wine retailer then writes off the internet as useless.
And yet research† shows that 4-6% of a retailer’s business is now over the internet. The same research showed that 8% of sales will go online by 2013 (some small wine stores already have 15-25% of their sales online).
What’s more the phenonoem of people browsing online and buying in-store is now accepted by big retailers all round the world. Macy’s CEO says‡ that for every $1 of online spend that same customer will then spend $5.70 on in-store purchases!
Source† “Retail v e-tail in America. Bleak Friday, Bricks-and-mortar shops struggle to win customers back from virtual ones.” Nov 26th 2009. The Economist.
Source‡ “Macy’s chief addresses power of e-commerce.” Sept 23rd, 2009. Las Vegas Review-Journal.
So let’s do some numbers to illustrate this point:
$1,000,000 Store Revenue
$40,000 4% via the internet
$12,000 Gross Margin (30%)
PLUS
$228,000 Internet sales $40,000 * later in-store spend $5.70
$68,400 Gross Margin (30%)
LESS
$6,000 Less advertising, web hosting and Club fees.
= $$? A good profit no matter how you look at it (i.e. with the ‘Macy’s sales’ or not).
Now it could be a lot more or a lot less than that. One thing is for certain eCommerce is increasing and driving in-store purchase.
How about that $228,000 of extra sales!?
Can you do as well as Macy’s? Find out by signing up for my email series,
“5 Things you Must Know about Selling Wine Online”:
(I will not sell your emails nor give them to anyone else.)
Want to know more now then search through my blog posts, watch the preso below or, send me an email.
Cheers
Bruce McGechan
Managing Director and Founder
MyLocalWineStore.com