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Home: How to Sell Wine Online
Helping small US wine retailers sell wine on the internetDone using a systematic approach of Traffic > Conversion > Repeat Sales.The…
How to Sell Wine Online
Here's the process:Traffic - generate traffic to your site Conversion - convert this traffic into sales through good content, user shopping experience,…
Want to sell more wine on the internet? Here's how I can help....
Your web developer built you this great website with a shopping cart but you're just not selling any wine on the internet. In fact you're not even getting…
Interesting Websites
Some Interesting Wine Industry Related LinksI have no affiliation with any of these companies, nor do I endorse them just because I list them below.…
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MyLocalWineStore by Bruce McGechan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this…
Helping Wine Retailers Sell Wine Online
Some Blog Highlights & Recent Blog Posts...Selling Wine Online Wine eCommerce Wine Social MediaWine Marketing Comparison…
About Me
Hi, I'm Bruce Bruce McGechan (pronounced mc-gec-kin). I'm a wine internet marketing consultant and researcher.I've owned a JV website with a local wine…
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Bruce McGechanManaging Director MyLocalWineStore.com
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Category: Wine eCommerce
In this category I help you assess what wine retail eCommerce solution is best for you. I also point out that wine eCommerce is just one part of the process…
- What wine eCommerce site is right for a medium size retailer?
  I look at two more types of wine retailers' eCommerce requirements: small-medium, and medium-large. I then showed how the two different size wine retailers…
- Two Very Different Wine Retailer eCommerce Websites
  I've talked about whether you should have a custom built wine eCommerce website or one "Off-the-Shelf". In short I said pretty much everyone actually uses…
- Wine eCommerce website: Custom Built or Off-the-Shelf?
  Will an "off-the-shelf" eCommerce website be right for me? Or should I get a custom built eCommerce website? Here's what you consider.
- Conversion analysis of the shopping cart leads to 34% increase in sales
  Fairfield undertook some conversion analysis of the shopping cart page (not the following checkout process). This indicated a number of obstacles to checkout:…
- The Profit of an Online Wine Store: some Financials
  But here's the problem, many websites look fantastic and fail to make a return on investment. The frustrated wine retailer then writes off the internet as…
- An affliction known as eCommerce "featuritis"
  I'll admit it, I love Apple products. I was forced for so long to use Microsoft products and "wintel" laptops that when I went out on my own account the first…
- This will make you cry - shopping cart abandonment
  I've always found shopping cart abandonment dispiriting! But don't worry it's not just you, it's every other merchant as well. Charles Nicholls of SeeWhy says…
- There's a well known story of two naked rowers
  It's going to take a while for me to get to my point in this post, but I promise I will get there. Anyhow - it's great story! In fact it's such a great story…
- I was caught up in a frenzy of techno love
  My learning from this experience was that you focus on the 20% of things that your customers really demonstrably value. That might be technology or it might…
- What's the Best Wine eCommerce store?
  I try to help out on various networks I'm involved with for free. Not all to do with wine retail, marketing and the internet - here's my response to do with…
- Wine eCommerce: what should I do with wine descriptions?
  I like wine, I really do but when I get a rush of new releases from wineries I get real bored of writing the last few descriptions. Now I'm trying to find a…
- Wine Ecommerce: What to do with Vintage, a real Quandry
  I've avoided mentioning how to handle vintage in my posts. Its quite a difficult issue which I will cover here (hopefully with your input as I'm not convinced…
- Wine eCommerce: WSJ.com on Buying Wine Online
  In essense the WSJ says that wine drinkers have awful website experiences especially with Phantom inventory, Slow delivery, Cluttered sites, Tedious “drill-do…
- Wine eCommerce Solutions Ranking
  Here's my analysis, I've done it by finding a representative sample of eCommerce and internet marketing solutions, rating them based on a criteria outlined in…
- wine eCommerce and SEM: Ranking and Review Criteria
  In this post I'm going to nominate a weighting to put to the criteria. The idea is you can make up your own mind what the eCommerce options are, what the…
- The Cost of Wine eCommerce and Marketing Solutions
  I've shown that most attention is given to only one part - the design - yet there are many other parts that need to be done well to make a profitable online…
Category: Wine Internet Marketing
This category covers some social media related posts as well as diverse topics from your customers browsing online and buying in-store.
- Robert Parker and his wine retailer page
  eRobertParker.com has the superb creditability of a brand name critic with a searchable database. Importantly this is matched with the 150,000 actual Wine…
- A Selling Wine Online Financial Model
  I've done a number of financial models looking at the ROI of a online wine store. Here's my top level calculations for you to put in your own spreadsheet. Wine…
- "The Big Five Fundamentals of Ecommerce Strategy"
  Mathew at FastPivot wrote a post similar to what I have been saying in my posts on the process of selling win online: Traffic - Conversion - Administration -…
- Wine Internet Marketing: Why use social media, it's not that obvious
  I'm a keen supporter of social media because it gives you 'reach'. I'm yet to be convinced that social media will give you sales. Which for a direct response…
- A wine retail eCommerce store in 2019, end of an industry?
  I'm reading lot's of predictions about the end 2010 so I thought I'd make some predictions for the end of this decade. Google will: ask how much you want to…
- Wine Internet Marketing: Five Wine Store Sub Markets
  There are a number of submarkets within wine online stores: 1. Wine Gifts, 2. Wine Clubs, 3. Single Wine purchase by individuals, 4. Corporate beverage…
- The next Sideway's wine film?
  Maynard Keenan of Tool will release his new film about making wine in Arizona, Blood into Wine next month, which means two things for the wine industry.
- The Wine Retailer's Internet Dream
  "So I'm going to be a multi-millionaire - with my own gleaming white super yacht - surrounded by gorgeous bikini clad women - right!?" Well, you might... But…
- Wine Internet Marketing: How to Use Twitter
  Ken McCarthy is one of the few people I seriously follow. He seems to be able to absorb all that's going on in the internet world, sift through it and find the…
- Wine Internet Marketing: WSJ.com on Great Wine Stores
  A few weeks back I wrote posts on possible points of difference and potential opportunities for a local wine retailer. The WSJ wine writers* also have an…
- Wine Internet Marketing: Why Web Design Must Die
  Just as I had completed the first draft of an earlier blog 'Wed Design: the Traditional Model' I saw him commit designer heresy in his blog post, 'Why Web…
- Wine Internet Marketing: “every dollar spent online influences .70 spent in the store”
  Wine Internet Marketing - Cannibalization of instore sales? I think the evidence is that once you start doing it yourself, selling wine online is about…
Category: 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…
- Christchurch Earthquake - pic of a lucky escape for a Premier Cru
  A wine store near the epicenter of the 7.1 earthquake that struck Christchurch New Zealand last week, sent this email and photo to his subscriber list,
- "Pimp Up" your Wine Retail Website: A New Service!
  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…
- What the wine internet shopper sees in CA 90210
  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…
- The Local Wine Store's Advantage vs Pure Play Internet Retailers
  In previous posts A Plan to Launch a Long Tail Store Selling Wine Online and The Long Tail Wine Website I outlineda wine drinker type, called the…
- The Long Tail Wine New Venture
  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…
- Plan to start a long tail online wine store?
  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…
- Selling Wine Online: Your Point of Difference
  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"…
- Selling Wine Online: The Long Tail of Wine- an opportunity?
  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…
- Selling Wine Online: The Local Wine Retailer's Market Opportunity
  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…
- Selling Wine Online: Wine Online Competitors - The Market
  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…
- Selling Wine Online Process 4: Repeat Business
  Regularly emailing interesting and valued information to a list of customers ensures that the sale becomes a or 0 customer. It also means you might…
- Selling Wine Online Process 3: eCommerce Administration
  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…
- Selling Wine Online Process 2: Conversion
  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…
- Selling Wine Online Process 1: Traffic
  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…
- Selling Wine Online, a Criteria: Marketing to eCommerce Process
  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…
- Selling Wine Online: Taking a Local Wine Store Online - the Basics
  Put simply you need:* Traffic - generate traffic to your site, * Conversion * eCommerce * Repeat Customers
Category: Wine Email Marketing
In this category of posts I outline the best practices for running a wine email marketing campaign: Your list Double Opt In Unsubscribes Personalization Content…
- Wine Email Marketing: Content is King (again), some Suggested Topics
  The content of your wine retail email marketing. There are two types of emails: 1. Information type emails, 2. Promotional emails. Information emails keep…
- Wine Email Marketing: Personalize, Everything
  Have a customized Thank You / Subscription Confirmed page. Always personalize your emails - both ways. Have a text format 'Plan B'. Regularly send out emails.…
- Wine Email Marketing: Paranoid ISPs
  How to handle email unsubscribes and paranoid ISPs. Use a professional email marketing service (e.g. aweber or mailchimp) to automatically handle the regular…
- Wine Email Marketing: Double Check with Double Opt-In
  The Double Opt-in Process is where a subscriber is sent an email asking them to click on a link to confirm that they have subscribed. When they do this the…
- Wine Email Marketing: Responsive Lists are Better
  Let's do some math. It's real simple math: List size * Delivery rate % * Open rate % * Click through rate % * Conversion rate % * Order value $ = Value of one…
Category: Wine SEO
Wine SEO can be split into many sub themes: Local Search (starting with this post) Search engine optimisation (start with this post) The biggest challenge for…
- The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US
  The top 5 by SEO factors only. Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors - just industry SEO analysis for the broad term…
- How a Cheese Store did better than a Wine Store in Google
  Showing how to do better on Google by analyzing the search engine results for local wine stores in CA 90210. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills is ranked in the…
- The SEO Problem with Normal Wine Retail eCommerce site Set Up
  The problem is around categorization and I get a little technical on ya, so please bear with me. I first outline how to categorize your wine eCommerce website…
- Are you using Wineries' Wine Descriptions? If so, you have a Problem.
  Copying wine descriptions isn't really an issue with wineries given that they are usually very happy with wine retailers using their "poetry" (note there are…
- How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google
  Local Search is more important for the local wine retailer selling wine online than the normal SEO guidelines you may read about
- Local Retailers Selling Wine Online have a Seriously Big Advantage
  The advantage of being a local wine retailer close to a customer's location - the Location War between Google, Yelp, Foursquare etc
- Your local retail advantage will get even bigger: twitter
  I've said elsewhere that facebook may take over your google advertising by 2012. That your local advantage is significant. But the more I look at what goes on…
- Wine SEO: Local Search and Review Services like yelp
  This continues my latest series of posts on local internet marketing for a wine retailer. There are a number of local search and review services such as…
- Wine SEO: Google's Local Business Center
  Other great features on the Local Business Center: Statistics, Coupons, Photos and Video, and Reviews. Adwords as per normal but also along with your local…
- Wine SEO: 80% of What Your Customers Buy is Within 15 Miles of their House
  80% of what a person buys is within 5, 15 or 20 miles of their residence - you have a natural advantage as the local wine retailer. So despite how competitive…
- How To Leverage your Local Wine Retail Business Advantage
  This is the start of a series on a local wine retailer's local business advantage. The US (and UK) internet wine markets are super-competitive however I still…
- Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic with Great Content
  Useful and compelling content. If you draw people to your site through great content then Google will start to notice and rank your site higher. Which means…
- Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via Navigation and Sitemap
  In this post we look at how a wine retail website's navigation can boost search engine rankings. Your navigation should: make it easy to go from general to…
- Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via the URL
  In this post we look at how a wine retail website can improve the structure of their URLs to boost search engine rankings. A URL is what you type into a web…
- Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via meta description
  This is where the meta tag description is. If you're looking at a Google search result then you may see this as the description of what this page is all about…
- Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via title tag
  The title tag tells search engines what the topic of the particular page is about. Many businesses don't bother doing this, they use a default title (e.g.…
Category: Wine Adwords
New to Adwords? Then check out how to best set up your wine adwords campaign with the five posts: Your First Campaign Choose your Keywords the Ad Copy Increase…
- Wine Adwords: Carefully Add Some More Keywords
  We're going to start adding some keywords to our keyword list. Go to Google's Keyword Tool and type in Napa Valley Merlot. Which shows the following fascinating…
- Wine Adwords: Increase Click Through Rate
  Let's do some testing to increase our click through rate. We'll create a second ad that tests which headline drives more clicks and sales conversions. That ad…
- Wine Adwords: the Ad Copy
  Writing your wine retail adwords ad copy. Headline: I would always recommend you have your keyword in the headline as per above. Description needs: A call to…
- Wine Adwords: Choose your Keywords
  In this post we'll go through keywords for beginner wine retailer adwords advertisers. In particular the difference between broad match, phrase match and exact…
- Wine Adwords: Your First Campaign
  At some stage you're going to see so many of the other local businesses start Google Adwords campaigns you're going to want to try it out yourself. As long as…
- Wine Adwords: "new wine" an opportunity or trap for a wine industry advertiser?
  I got real excited about this the keyword phrase new wine. I saw 1000s of searches. New Wine!? That must be what may people call a new vintage or a new…
- Wine Adwords: Red red wine, a great song but a Wine Adwords Problem
  UB40 was a great band when I grew up and I loved Reddd reeeeddd wiiiiiiine. It looks like many people still do because when you use the keyword 'red wine' many…
- Wine Adwords: The Most Important Wine Tip you'll ever get
  If you search google for 'wine', guess what will be the top search you get? As at January 2010 nothing to do with the beverage 'wine' ... but rather 'Wine…
Category: Wine Web Design
This category of posts covers how wine retail websites are designed and goes through some well known US wine retailer sites. I suggest you start with Wine…
- How your Wine eCommerce website works Made Simple
  Wine eCommerce websites have three elements: 1. the content e.g. a tasting note or a photo; 2. the presentation e.g. colours, fonts, and columns; 3. the code…
- mywinesdirect website design
  Right then left column design structure. Super interesting navigation and search system, its by wine style rather than region and varietal. The website is…
- snooth wine web design
  Essentially a 3 column design website. Easy search, rating and recommendation. They focused on doing these things really well. Also have excellent SEO, often…
- BevMo wine web design
  A design with a left column home page and a 3 column products page structure. Simple and easy. This could be a top website if they just updated the look and…
- K&L Wines website design
  Left column design, clean, with an easy filterable navigation. Real time inventory is a biggie, a lot of hard work has gone into this one.
- Wine.com web design
  Uses a left column structure across the site. An expanding menu over all the ways people search for wine, wine.com use to have a more simpler design so I'm…
- Wine Web Design Basics
  Although the graphic design of wine websites can be as artistic or as functional as you so desire the overall structure really comes down to a few simple…
- Wine Web Wesign - the Traditional Development Model
  I've hired web designers all my business life. Until I started working with small businesses with small budgets. Then the bills that a corporate would sign off…
Category: Wine Marketing
This category is all about the different wine consumers in the marketplace and how to approach each segment differently. It takes many angles from formal…
- Breaking News: Australia invades New Zealand
  A bit of humor on NZ care of our Aussie cousins...
- People drink other People's Wines: the influence of others' advice
  Tony Spawton on why consumers buy wine. He says, 'the expectations of the consumer varies with the occasion for which the wine is purchased. The wine consumer…
- What is most important to wine consumers? Is it selection or price or both?
  We don’t make the purchasing experience easy for consumers. There is an overwhelming number of SKUs to choose from, many labels look the same, the classificat…
- Wine Marketing: How many women are you getting in your wine store?
  I've just been speaking to a senior wine industry figure and he has pointed out the issues that a traditional wine specialty store has with women. Many wines…
- Wine Marketing: Different Wine Consumers (4)
  I stumbled across this 18-month study commissioned by Constellation Wines US on Wine and Vines. Ties in nicely with the other studies I've seen in the wine and…
- Wine Marketing: Different Wine Drinkers (3) - Risk and Confusion
  Wine Drinkers are often confused about wine. They need to make a decision about what wine to purchase and yet often the quality and taste profile is uncertain…
- Wine Marketing: Different Wine Consumers (2)
  The best academic research on wine drinkers is an Australian study that I believe is also very applicable to the US, UK and New Zealand. The Segments are: 1.…
- Wine Marketing: Different Wine Consumers (1)
  If we can understand why people buy and consume wine then we can create better ad copy, website content and emails. So I'm doing some of posts on different…
Category: Comparison Shopping Engines
I cover all the intricacies of selling wine via comparison shopping engines such as Google Shopping/Merchant Center/Base/Product Search, wine specialist…
- Wine-Searcher, a Price Comparison Shopping Site Review
  Wine-Searcher is a large search engine of wine stores, winery, and wine auction, price lists and catalogues. According to wine-searcher it has almost 4mn…
- Google Goggles - that customer may not just be sending an SMS
  Say your customer is at your competitor's wine store browsing the aisles. They see a wine they like so they use their mobile phone to take a picture of the…
- Snooth Review - a specialist wine shopping comparison engine
  A review of snooth.com - a very interesting wine comparison shopping engine. How big it is, how to sign up, easy ways to upload products and maintain them and…
- Google Base Feeds and Wine
  This part of the internet ecosystem has it’s own peculiarities and optimization techniques. Your first port of call is the Google Merchant Center. You’ll…
- Why are Comparison Shopping Engines so Important?
  Wine shopping comparison websites is a seemingly dry topic but as you dig into it you see just what an opportunity and threat it is. You could now have a…
- The Most Important Source for Online Wine Sales: this will surprise you
  I've been doing some research into wine comparison shopping engines and have come across some eye opening changes in getting more traffic to your wine retail…
Category: Wine Social Media
Wine and Social Media are naturally linked. At the heart of most occasions of drinking wine is socializing – in the case of wine social media it’s…
- Wine Retailers and Local Wine Bloggers - an opportunity for both
  I believe a local wine retailer has a huge local advantage over large and online wine retailers in the internet world. There are many ways a wine retailer can…
- How to Rank Wine Blogs - a DIY rough and ready approach
  1. Choose a blog you want to rank yourself against - perhaps it's one of the top blogs, or just another local wine blogger 2. Go to compete and enter your…
- The Wine Drinker Engagement Pyramid and Socialgraphics
  One of the best ways I've seen of deciding how to utilize social media in the wine world is the Engagement Pyramid. Watchers are at the bottom with increasing…
- A Wine Retailer's Perspective on Social Media: why bother?
  Let's look at why you could be interested in wine social media, from a business objective perspective, not because it's the latest marketing buzz word. Here's…
- No one knows you? Wine blogs a wine retailer could advertise on
  Wine blog advertising is one way to boost awareness, if that's your objective. Using Google's advertising tools the only ones (from my list) are vinography.com…
- Social Media Objectives and Wine Blogs
  I've created a diagram of the interplay between social media objectives, success metrics, the Paid/Owned/Earned continuum, types of media, and the marketing…
- Wine Blog Traffic - some big differences between blogs
  Estimating traffic volume using Compete. Compete has a 2,000,000 member panel but it's not completely accurate so I've used their ranking system to come up…
- Wine Blog Engagement Scores - a surprising result
  PostRank analyzes the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. Using this method each wine blog is given a score for…
- Websites votes for wine blogs
  What I'm looking to do is replicate Google's successful ranking process to rank wine blogs. SEOmoz offer a free tool called the Open Site Explorer which…
- Using DoubleClick to find the best Wine Blogs
  One way to track down what websites the target audience is reading is to use DoubleClick. This has some excellent tools that show demographics of readers for…
- Tapping into the Long Tail of Wine Bloggers
  One of the things I'm doing is trying to work out the long tail of bloggers in order to find good writers and audiences for wine retailers. Rand Fish from this…
- Wine Blogger Audience and Blog Quality Factors
  The Social Media Brief, some initial thoughts but only partly completed. By writing a brief I'm forcing myself to set some objectives and specific measures of…
- The Top 28 Free Wine Blogs - an initial list based off Blog Search Engines
  An initial list of the top 28 wine blogs for a US wine retailer to be associated with. Used Google Blog Search, PostRank and Yahoo Directory plus some medium…
- Wine Social Media Types - a Diagram
  What are the types of wine social media and what is a wine blogger exactly?! Before I went any further with my wine blogger list I thought I'd try to define…
- A first, but failed ;), attempt at making a list of the best wine bloggers (for a wine retailer)
  The first step in coming up with the top wine bloggers is to compile an initial list. I want this to be objective and transparent, not subjective or using…
- Does a wine blogger's audience overlap with a wine retailer's shopper base?
  I’ve been looking into what wine blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. “Associated with” could mean anything from advertising in…
- What do you think are the best wine blogs?
  I've been looking into what blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. "Associated with" could mean anything from advertising, commenting,…
Category: Wine and Twitter
Twitter is remarkably helpful in selling wine on the internet. Sure it may the first contact a potential customer has with a brand not the contact that leads…
- Twitter, BirdBrain, Mavens and wine - tech fermenting
  We look at how to identify great wine tweeters in your local area. I’ll show you an interesting tool that might work called BirdBrain, then move onto some…
- The Top Wine Tweeters - hello @SommelierSara!
  SommelierSara was a surprise top 5 entry. Less of a surprise was garyvee, nectarwine, lenndevours, nytimesdining (think The Pour), and thirstforwine. All of…

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