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 without hesitation looked like an extraordinary usage of a limited sales and marketing budget. So I started to work out how to make it cheaper. I had to with a small business. The web (including Google and email) gave the best ROI on marketing spend compared newspapers etc. Then in 2008 a new Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla 1.5 came onto the scene. Instead of doing lots of work on the ‘framework’ of a website I could install this software on a third party web server – and focus on the content and store.
Wine eCommerce: WSJ.com on Buying Wine Online
December 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment
In essense the WSJ says that wine drinkers have awful website experiences especially with Phantom inventory, Slow delivery, Cluttered sites, Tedious “drill-down” menus, Web sites from another century, Too many emails. I agree with them but have some sympathy for the wine retailers.
Wine eCommerce Solutions Ranking
December 5, 2009 By 5 Comments
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 a previous post, and weighting and ranking them to come up with some suggested rankings.
wine eCommerce and SEM: Ranking and Review Criteria
December 4, 2009 By 3 Comments
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 weight of each criterion should be and then score each option so you can compare different internet wine marketing and ecommerce solutions. I’ll have a bash at this myself, but first this post on weighting.
The Cost of Wine eCommerce and Marketing Solutions
December 3, 2009 By 2 Comments
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 wine business. So when I talk about the cost I’ll look at the cost of the whole process not just the website.
Selling Wine Online Process 3: eCommerce Administration
November 30, 2009 By 9 Comments
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 2: Conversion
November 29, 2009 By 9 Comments
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, a Criteria: Marketing to eCommerce Process
November 27, 2009 By 6 Comments
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: Taking a Local Wine Store Online – the Basics
November 26, 2009 By 2 Comments
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.
