We recently started a series on getting your online sales vehicle rolling. Today, we are going under the hood to talk about the e-commerce engine used to power your shopping cart. At Grape Thinking, we have an established relationship with Inertia Beverage Group, as Paul, Andrea, and crew, in our humble opinions, have the best grasp and influence on the changes in the industry and are truly “Powering the Wine Revolution”. As such, they rank as our recommended engine.
So, what does this sales engine do exactly? As a winery, it has the vital role of coordinating the sales request between your customer and their bank, your fulfillment center and your bank.
A good engine should:
- have a simple and fluid shopping interface
- automate orders from customers
- track discounts, coupon codes, taxes, and shipping
- be integrated with your fulfillment center for tracking product depletion
- automate wine club shipments
- allow wine club members to easily manage their accounts.
- automate credit card processing
- provide easy access to sales reports
- self-update without disrupting your business
- offer sales volume and ship-to-state monitoring for compliance issues. (a service now free for anyone)
- provide simple tools for updating product selections, descriptions, and pricing
- come equipped with customer service and support tools for shipping and billing issues
Some of the most well-known sales engines available in the market today are Inertia Beverage Group’s “ReThink Engine”, eWinery Solutions, and Nexternal. They all require a set-up fee, which is used to create the shopping cart on your site, and have ongoing expenses - a combination monthly fee and/or commission. The great thing about paying them a commission is that it creates motivation to set up multiple affiliate networks with sites such as: RadCru, Wine.Woot, WineSpies (coming soon), Wine.com, Ambrosia Wine, … to name a few.
Part of getting set-up with the engine of your choice, will require you to establish merchant bank accounts, to accept payments from Visa, MasterCard, etc… This is not a difficult task, and can generally be accomplished by phoning the Merchant Bank, filling out an application, and faxing it back.
You will also need a website and webhost. Some of the providers, like Inertia, offer web-design and hosting as an additional service. There are also some up and coming online communities that will offer you a profile as a winery, that can be used as your webpage, and linked to your shopping cart/landing page/e-commerce engine.
We have invited all e-commerce providers to post their information on our site to try and bring the discussion to one place, and have a true resource and guide for those of you interested in direct sales. If you are a winery, feel free to comment with any questions you have regarding being set-up in direct sales. If you would like to inquire about our services, just Contact Us. As a peak into the future, we’ll get into more detail on fulfillment and distribution, web-page design, and marketing techniques.
Tags: Direct Sales, Marketing
