Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

Winery Services Vendor Scraps e-Commerce Software

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:56:00 -0500

You've probably heard the news that Inertia Beverage is scrapping their e-commerce software. If not, read about it at Wine Industry Insight. Our response was a letter to all our clients, as follows:

June 3, 2010

Dear WineWeb Clients:

Thank you for being a loyal client. We want to assure you that WineWeb will continue to provide innovative technology solutions to meet your business needs. With the publicized demise of Inertia's e-commerce software, we want to take this opportunity to reinforce that your technology decision was the right choice. We also want to thank you for speaking well about us to other wineries who are researching software solutions. Many new clients tell us that they are amazed at the glowing references from our client base. We believe that it's all about providing a great technology feature set at an affordable value, and backing that with great customer service.

Inertia's letter lists some features that their new software vendor will provide that were not part of their current software. The phrase "yeah, we do that" comes to mind. Here's a list of some of their "new" features and when they were implemented in WineWeb.

Feature	WineWeb Implementation
Upfront display of shipping rates	May 2006
Guest checkout	Jan. 1995
Product ratings and reviews	July 2005
Self-managed navigation	April 2006
Photo galleries	April 2006
Advanced customer segmentation	April 2008
List building and email marketing tools	July 2005

We have always believed in integrating our services with others. In 2006, we published a guide to our web services to enable any other service to integrate with us. We provide integration to over 20 payment gateways, a dozen fulfillment centers, multiple compliance services, age verification services, shipping carriers, wine club software, POS software and QuickBooks, with no additional setup fees.

We continually enhance our services, based on client input and technology trends. This year there have been over 60 enhancements. All of these enhancements are provided at no additional cost to our clients. Read the full letter.

iPad: First Impressions

Tue, 04 May 2010 15:31:00 -0500

We've been saying for a while that our winery POS system runs on an iPhone, which makes it very portable. Now, with the release of the iPad, I needed to see how the POS would look and function on that device (at least that's the excuse I used to justify purchasing this new gadget).

As expected, the WineWeb point-of-sale application displays nicely on the 1024 pixel wide iPad screen. We made a couple of very minor tweaks to the software to optimize it for this display and proclaimed the software "good to go". However, connecting other devices to an iPad is currently an issue. In a POS environment, a credit card reader and a receipt printer, though optional, are typically used. Since the iPad does not have any USB ports, we need equipment that can connect via the charging/sync port or the headphone jack, or over Bluetooth. Based on some limited research, there are products either announced or shipping that will work. I noted a credit card reader that attaches to the headphone jack, a Bluetooth credit card reader and a Bluetooth card reader/receipt printer unit. I'm confident that the coming months will provide more options.

My impressions of the iPad have changed in the past few days. My initial thought was that it would be just a larger version of an iPod Touch and it would replace a netbook for surfing and email when traveling. I'm now seeing more for this device. After spending time with the Apple developer guides and their interface standards documents, I'm sensing that the iPad will usher in a new way of interacting with web content. The eBay app is a good example of how a more visual, touch-oriented approach can be applied to an application.

Could Direct Shipping of Wine End? Oppose H.R. 5034

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:38:00 -0500

Dubbed the Wholesaler Bailout bill, House Resolution 5034 was introduced into Congress. If passed, this bill would essentially end the direct shipment of wine to consumers and put many of this country's 6,000 wineries out of business. If you ever needed an excuse to write your Representative, this is it. Don't let this bill pass -- oppose it, and tell your friends.

Tom Wark has done a great analysis of the bill -- read it here.

Proposed Wholesaler Bailout

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:01:00 -0500

In case you missed it, the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy yesterday conducted a hearing entitled "Legal Issues Concerning State Alcohol Regulation". Here's the link that includes the video and the statements from each witness. Lot's of buzz about this from both sides of the argument. Essentially the beer wholesaler's association wants Congress to enact legislation to prohibit direct shipping of any type of alcohol.

Here's a link to Wine Industry Insight's article listing 11 of the 14 members of the subcommittee that have accepted contributions from the beer wholesaler's association. Here's a link to the Specialty Wine Retailers Association statement and Tom Wark's blog post. Please read this information to better understand what's going on here, then get involved to raise awareness of this issue.

Winery POS on an iPhone

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:09:00 -0500

When we demonstrate our winery point-of-sale system, we tell people that it's portable anywhere there is an Internet connection. We also inform them that our POS can run on an iPhone, and we think it looks quite nice on that mobile device.

We usually joke that the only thing that our winery POS on an iPhone can't do is swipe a credit card. Now it appears we can't say that any longer as Mophie has announced an iPhone case that includes a credit card reader. Quite cool.

WineWeb is Solar Powered

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:05:00 -0500

As I was sweeping snow off of the solar panels (again), I realized that I had never blogged about our solar project. Our photovoltaic solar array came online Dec. 29, in the midst of the holidays and the year-end crunch to get the tax credits. We can now claim that all the energy needed to power, heat and cool WineWeb's office space comes from the sun.

I'm still amazed at the ability of the solar panels to generate electricity in less than sunny conditions. Currently it's totally overcast (one of those rare days in Santa Fe) with a few snowflakes coming down, and they're generating 345 AC watts, enough to power a computer and lights. It's a grid-tied system, so excess energy is fed back to the utility. The incentives are great to install solar panels. 30% Federal tax credit, 10% state tax credit, net-metering for all energy sent back to the utility, and an additional credit for every kWh that we generate, regardless of whether we use it or give it to the utility. Our payback on the investment is about 5 years.

Of course we opted for the ability to monitor the system in real-time over the Internet. The monitor was installed over the weekend, and now anyone can see the statistics on our solar system by going to solrenview.com. I like talking about this to anyone who would listen, and am happy to see the results of many years of research.

The 6th Grape

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:07:00 -0500

I had a flash of brilliance last night (at least that's what I'm claiming). We were readying the release of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for wineries, and I had been writing that this component "rounds out our service offerings". Then I glanced up at the WineWeb logo and started counting our services: websites, e-commerce, point-of-sale, wine clubs, email campaigns, and now CRM. That makes six, the same number as the number of grapes in our logo. Wow! Without realizing it, we had filled in our grape cluster. We had created the "6th grape".

Was our graphic designer psychic when he created the logo some ten years ago? Maybe, but I digress. We've reached a milestone. Our cluster is full.

The press release is at www.wineweb.com/pr/press_release_20091120.html.

100 Wineries and Counting

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:30:00 -0500

We were planning to make a big announcement when the 100th winery client signed up for our services, possibly even balloons and confetti. Well, that momentous event happened a week ago last Friday, and then last Monday a record three clients registered in a single day. We've just been "heads down, elbows out" busy with our new clients that we haven't had time to boast about these things. Not that we tend to brag about these things anyway -- we let our clients do the talking.

Wines of Another Glass Tasting Party this Sunday

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:02:00 -0500

We're busy preparing for the 2nd annual "Wines of Another Glass" tasting party this Sunday. We started this last year at the end of the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta to showcase some wines that weren't (and can't be) included in the Fiesta, as the liquor wholesalers don't stock them and therefore are not in the 3 tier (winery, wholesaler, retailer) distribution system. We'll have video conferences with the winemakers and a chance to order the wines direct from the winery. We plan to do real-time online user reviews and tweets so others can follow the fun we're having. We'll also have a wide assortment of food prepared by a bunch of amateur wine-loving cooks.

This is a private, invitation-only event, but if you are in Santa Fe this Sunday, contact me for an invite. Or if you're at the Wine & Chile grand tasting tomorrow, hit me up for an invitation -- I'll be wearing a WineWeb shirt.

Shoppers do return to abandoned carts

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:49:00 -0500

In a just-published study by McAfee, they found that 65% of abandoned online shopping carts are merely shoppers delaying the purchase, and that they soon return to purchase. That's good news, as we continually talk to our winery clients about abandonment rates. Our remarketing email that automatically goes out to people that abandon their carts provides an easy way to return to their in-process order.

The study also found an 11% higher conversion rate if the shopper is given a security cue. Another validation of our decision to use an extended validation security certificate that not only displays a security seal on each page of the shopping cart, but also turns the user's address bar green in their browser.

Are wine gold medals awarded by chance?

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:30:00 -0500

An interesting paper entitled "An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions" just published in the Journal of Wine Economics makes the following conclusion:

"An examination of the results of 13 U.S. wine competitions shows that (1) there is almost no consensus among the 13 wine competitions regarding wine quality, (2) for wines receiving a Gold medal in one or more competitions, it is very likely that the same wine received no award at another, (3) the likelihood of receiving a Gold medal can be statistically explained by chance alone."

Another reason to taste wine often and buy what YOU like.

Mobile Applications are Indispensible

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:33:00 -0500

Yesterday we distributed a press release entitled "WineWeb Releases iPhone Web App for Winery Websites", and today the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Smartphone Apps Fuel Business" that contained the following quote: "... if companies are not finding ways to provide these tools [they] will soon see drop-off from their customers". Good timing or dumb luck? You be the judge.

The WSJ article goes on to say that a typical iPhone app costs $6,000-$8,000 to develop. Hmmm, so I'm guessing we won't be accused of overpricing our app at $250 setup and $20/month. One reason that we can charge these low rates is due to the architecture we have built over the years. We chose early on to build an information system for wineries, not to create one-off winery websites. As any good information technology professional understands, a system should separate data from the presentation from the business logic.

What frustrates me (and I don't mean to go into a rant) is that people don't yet understand that having their brother-in-law create and host a website is not even close to what they'd receive with our website services. Maybe we should call it a "Winery Information Management System for the Direct Sales Channel, including Websites, e-Commerce, Wine Clubs, POS and Customer Management", but that would likely be as confusing (and a bit harder to roll off the tongue).

So, back to the point. We were able to price our iPhone web app service at this price point as we only needed to develop a new presentation layer for these mobile devices. The content that is entered in our system remains the same, it's just presented a bit differently on mobile devices. The business logic, such as allowing a visitor to tweet about an upcoming event, is the same, it's just presented in a way that is optimized for the mobile device. That doesn't mean that the development was easy, as we created over 50 programs to support the uniqueness of the iPhone display and screen flow.

The next time you see your web guy, tell him that you need an iPhone app for your winery, and you want to maintain one set of content for both the website and the iPhone app. As he's running away, take out your iPhone and see what we've done with our Test Vineyards site at m.testvineyards.com.

Integrating Social Media into Winery Websites

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:23:00 -0500

We've been working for the past several weeks to integrate social media into the services we provide for winery websites. We believe that it's important for wineries to publicize their social media groups throughout their website, and we wanted to make it easy for our clients to do that.

Phase 1 of the project brought out the ability to display fan and "follow us" icons throughout the website, including in a page pod (those areas typically to the right of the web page) and a social media web page. While our clients seemed happy with this, we knew that this was just the first step.

Phase 2 approached the integration from the social media-savvy visitor perspective. For example, a visitor is looking at an upcoming event at the winery and decides to tell his/her friends about it. They could login to their Twitter account, start a post, then login to another service that shortens the long website URL to include in that post. Or, as we've just implemented, they could click on the "Tweet" icon on the winery's event page and compose their post. The system creates the short URL and routes the tweet to their Twitter account.

Given that approach, we extended it to other pages on the website, included multiple social media services, and added expanded functionality on the user review pages. We knew our clients would be willing to pay for this enhancement, but we included it at no additional cost to our Enhanced Website Hosting and Premier Bundle clients.

We then added this functionality to the WineWeb.com portal site, including a page pod of our social media sites, a "Post to Social Media" menu option, and social media posting pop-up windows. You can see an example of this by clicking on the Tweet or Ping.fm links below this blog post.

Phase 3? We're not done yet. Let's just say that Phase 3 will involve an iPhone.

Are you PCI compliant with your POS?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:51:00 -0500

Further review of the POS software review article in Wine Business Monthly shows that almost all POS vendors say that they are PCI compliant. Great, but what does the winery need to do to be PCI compliant using that software, as ultimately PCI compliance is required of the merchant? The article missed this point as they were comparing web-based solutions to PC-based solutions. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, if the service provider stores the credit card information on their servers (typically web-based solutions), then the winery can complete the short form PCI assessment to certify their compliance. However, if credit card information is stored locally, then the winery must complete the much longer, more stringent long form to be compliant, even if the vendor's software is compliant.

POS Software review

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:19:00 -0500

The latest issue of Wine Business Monthly (July 2009) featured a well-written, in-depth review of point-of-sale software for wineries. WineWeb is included in the list of vendors that were reviewed. I know I'm not the only person that will read the article and conclude that based on the pricing and feature set, our services will need to be included on most wineries' short list of potential vendors. In the section on buying advice, the article included WineWeb along with two more expensive vendors when they stated "Be advised that only a few vendors offer a truly complete out-of-the-box solution that integrates POS, wine club, e-commerce and email marketing." Nice.

Another benefit of product reviews like this is that you get to see vendors' pricing, even those that are normally tight-lipped about that. We publish pricing for all our services online, so there's no surprises there to our competitors. The list included pricing of $10,000, $15,000 and $20,000. Maybe these companies need to get that kind of money to make a reasonable profit. I've learned in over 25 years of information technology experience that a technology company must leverage technology so that their services are affordable and still be able to make a profit.

The standard sales line from a vendor with a more expensive product/service is "you get what you pay for", and I'm sure that's being said about us. But all a winery needs to do is compare, and I'm happy that this article provides a good start for that.