Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

Wine clubs make great gifts, especially at this time of year. How easy is it for your winery or wine shop to accept gift wine club subscriptions? Do your current wine club members realize that it's an option for them to give a gift subscription? Your club members should be talking about your club and wanting to share their experience with their friends.

We've just added some enhancements to the WineWeb's wine club system to make wine club gift subscriptions easier. When a club member logs into their account, we prominently display a link for them to click to give a gift subscription. Once they are aware of giving a gift and decide to start the gift process, we pre-fill all appropriate data so they don't have to type much. If the wine club offers prepaid 3, 6 or 12 month subscriptions, that makes the gift setup easy. But what if the wine club is a variable cost per shipment, where you don't want to setup any prepaid amounts (or if it's even more complex, like Club WineWeb, where a different winery processes the credit card each month for a different amount)? Again it's easy for the customer to specify an end date for the gift, and we charge the credit card for each shipment that happens before that date. Once the gift is confirmed, we even provide the customer with a gift card that they can print -- ready to write a personal note and place under the tree.

I mentioned "customer". So who is the customer, the person who gets the gift or who gives the gift? We think they are both customers and give them both access to login to the club member's area. While they can both login to the member's area, they don't have the same level of access, for security reasons. "Simple for the customer, robust under-the-hood" -- hmm... maybe that could be our new motto.