The Wine Retailer

Wine Retailer Blog Posts

This whole blog is about wine retailers! But the blog refers to financial topics and occasionally other topics to do with Strategies and Unique Propositions.

Latest Posts

• My New Book Shows you How to Make More Money, with Fewer Customers, Without Discounting I describe how a hypothetical wine store stops discounting, refocuses on very profitable customers, by sharing the store owner's passion for wine. The store starts with 1467 customers, it drops 259 customers and turns a financial loss of -$46,374 into a profit of $214,354. However its revenue increases by $300,000. My imaganiery store owner has had a larger discounter open up next door. He has tried to match the prices but has quickly found himself in a hopeless financial position. This book follows him as he creates a business plan and an internet oriented marketing strategy to refocus on the most profitable customers.
• Thought of Opening another Wine Store? Here's a Financial Model that may help Thought of opening another wine store? Here's a spreadsheet which I'm using to evaluate volume by segment, margin, revenue, costs and profit. It also evaluates marketing promotions.
• 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 Revenue = Traffic Volume * Conversion% * Order Value. So the amount of revenue you get depends on the volume times the % who buy times the dollar value. Wine Online Cash flow = Net Revenue less Variable and Fixed Costs...

• Local SEO and Wine Stores in 2011: an Update of the Top 10 tasks Google is putting more focus on local businesses and location services. In this post I go through all the things you can do to make sure your local store is at the top of the search rankings. It is an update of the blog post I did back in Feb-11.
• Wine Stores and Local Social Media Much of this blog is about wine and social media. It goes through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, social media monitoring, and various strategies. However there is a different perspective on all of this - the local perspective. Local social media is simply social interaction around a particular location, usually a city. It includes: Location Based Services, Your Local Blog, Other People's Local Blogs, Local Review Sites, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This post is an overview of what services you can use to boost your local results.
• How to Find Local Wine Customers: Local PPC If you're a Wine Store in Chicago, you don't want to spend money on ads being showed to Miami residents. On the other hand if a Miami resident wants to buy a bottle of wine for a friend in Chicago, then you do want them to see your ad so they can buy in Chicago and save on freight costs. How does this work? Google identifies a search phrase as "local". It's the realm of Local PPC and I'll go through how you do this in Google Adwords by using geo-targeting, ad extensions, keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
• Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do A survey is done each year to see what Local SEO experts think the most important factors are. I go through the top 10 here from a local wine store perspective. In 2010 they included: 1. General Importance of Claiming Place Page; 2. Business Address in City of Search; 3. Associating Place Page with Proper Categories
• Google 2010: end of empire, hail the new order Since the mid 2000s you could expect to make a reasonable return on Google SEO and Adwords marketing expenditure. With the increase in competition, and the explosion of Social Media, Mobile and Local services this is now not necessarily the case. Or at least it is much harder. The good news is that a local business is at the heart of the three changes we've seen in 2009-10: Social, Mobile and Local.
• 9 Ways a Wine Retailer can use Mobiles to Sell More Wine In-Store This post is about customers using their mobiles in-store. We’ll cover the burgeoning area of mobile QR codes, how retailers are using them, and glimpse into the future with augmented reality. I'll also give a list of 9 ways QR codes can be used in-store.
• Find Me, Find You, Find Wine: location based services in wine stores Groupon, foursquare, SCVNGR, Yelp, Facebook Places are just a few of the Location Based Services available from a mobile app. LBS apps can tell your friends you're at a particular place, by checking in to that place using an app, facebook and/or twitter. At the end of the day its just another way to help you have fun with your friends - who needs serendipity if you have foursquare! I see quite a few good ways to use LBS in wine stores.

Resources

As per the Company chapter in How to Sell Wine Online here are the financial spreadsheets (using Google Docs):
New Wine Shop Financials Spreadsheet
Tony’s Wine Store Profit and Loss Statement Years 1-3

To download them as Excel files go to File > Download As > Excel. If you have any issues contact me and I’ll email them to you.

The Wine Retail Company Forum

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