Selling Wine Online, a Criteria: Marketing to eCommerce Process

Selling wine online requires you 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. I’ve outlined a criteria below that covers:

Traffic Generation: essentially Adwords New Traffic and Google SEO, possibly with some shopping comparison cart listings, maybe some social media (is anyone getting sales from this though?!)
Conversion: great user experience delivered through navigation, search, reviews/ratings/recommendations and other information. Shopping cart is without obstacles to an easy purchase. 
Administration: easy to use back end that allows you to deliver great customer service from inquiry to sale to refund. Also allows you to upload/update products and stock.
Repeat Business: seeing what works and what doesn’t through analysing reports on PPC and SEO conversions (and traffic).

Selling Wine Online Process – a Criteria of What you Need

New Traffic:

• Google Adwords PPC (pay per click advertising)
• Yahoo PPC
• MSN / Bing PPC
• SEO: meta tags
• SEO: URL
• SEO: Headline and body copy
• SEO: xml sitemap for search engines
• SEO: welll chosen directory listings and external links
• Shopping Comparison Site Integration (e.g. with the likes of snooth or winezap)
• Social Media: Facebook & Twitter

User Experience:

• Navigation
• Advanced Search capabilities
• Reviews
• Ratings
• Recommendation
• Upsell / Cross Sell
• Content Pages (CMS) for posts, articles, images and video.

Catalog:

• Category Management
• Product Management
• Easy Custom Attribute Setting (e.g. new custom field like “brand” or “appellation”)
• Bulk Product Upload/Download
• Bulk Inventory Upload/Download
• Live Inventory (i.e. linked to Point of Sale System such as Quickbooks)

Shopping Cart:

• Upfront shipping cost estimation
• Guest no-registration
• Easy process
• Discounts and coupons
• Gift messages / wrapping
• Payment methods: Credit Card (directly with your merchant account)
• Payment methods: PayPal (and Google Checkout, authorize.net …)
• Payment methods: Cheque / Bank transfer
• Payment methods: On pickup
• Payment methods: Purchase Order
• Security: SSL (i.e. the “s” in https://)
• Security PCI (credit card security standard)

Order Management:

• Shipping: Pre setup major couriers
• Shipping: Pick up
• Good Invoice / Credit process
• Legal Compliance: age
• Legal Compliance: interstate shipping
• Drop shipping facility

Set up:

• Design
• Ease of use
• Hosting / SaaS (i.e. Software as a Service, “cloud computing” or website based)
• Upgraded from a basic version
• Open or Proprietary
• Bulk Upload
• Multiple Websites / One Admin (“multi-store”)
• International Languages
• International Currencies
• Third Party Integration (API)
• Bulk Content Upload

Reporting:

• Analytics
• Adwords
• Conversion
• Bestsellers, Search
• Top Customers

Repeat Purchase:

• Email Marketing (i.e. an pro service with double “opt-in” and auto unsubscribe etc)
• Autoresponder sequence
• Clubs
• Allocation
• Segmentation (e.g. all New York customers who purchase $200 or more)

Support:

• Forum
• Email
• FAQs, Knowledge Base
• Tutorials
• Phone call center
• 24/7
• 8/5 (i.e. office hours)

My next posts will be more on the process and how important each part of the process is from marketing to shopping cart to admin.

Have I missed a key part of the process? Don’t agree or strongly agree? Please comment below: