Sell wine on-line without breaking the bank

You’re a wine-maker or business owner, not a techie, right? So you may need some help learning what your options are for selling wine or products using online tools. If you have a limited budget for set-up, and/or not enough staff to manage a site for you, do some preliminary research about what’s available, affordable, and most important, what you will be able to maintain and use as a marketing tool for your business.

You have a few options for your online website, but here are two that Leaf and Vine Marketing recommends:

1. Do-It-Yourself blogsite (which can serve as your corporate website as well as your e-commerce cart, blog, and social media hub). Leaf and Vine employs this option in addition to a static e-commerce site., and here are the benefits to a blogsite:
   1. Your blogsite can be your Content Management System that you completely control. No more contacting your web designer for simple changes. Upload product, images, blog posts, recipes…anything that supports your product brand.
   2. Your blogsite serves as your Social Media Hub. In fact, any time you update your blogsite with new product or articles, events or promotions, you can automatically disperse that information to Facebook, Twitter, Yelp!, other industry forums.
   3. Blogsites engage your customers, and bring in new ones. You can set your blogsite to accept comments and suggestions from visitors (and you control which comments are accepted/rejected, etc.); this is a great way to engage your customers and keep them. And because blogs are highly Search Engine Friendly (because they are content/keyword-based), you can drastically increase traffic to your site.
   4. No expensive software to purchase: We really like the WordPress platform for blogsites, which is free and open-source. It is very easy to manage once it is set-up and it is the industry standard for blogsite production.
2. Hosted E-commerce Site (your corporate website, with compliant e-commerce engine, hosted on a company serve that manages it for you, charges monthly fee and initial set-up fee).
   1. This is a great option if you simply can’t or do not want to manage your online presence yourself. This type of site can serve as your corporate online presence, a shopping cart for your wine and/or products, a blog, and can also connect with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
   2. Use a reputable, compliant e-commerce site developer. We have one in particular we highly recommend (no, we do not work for them!); contact us for more details; we can help you get set up with them.
   3. There are many companies offering shopping cart solutions. Since this is one of the most important components of your site (after traffic building), you want to make sure to ask some very specific questions when hiring a company to provide a hosted site for you; the cart should offer:
      1. - Built-in Compliance
      2. - Search Engine Optimized/Placed Site
      3. - Marketing tools for your winery and brand
      4. - Your wines search-able by vintage, price, region, and more
      5. - Wine Club offering your wines
      6. - Secure Credit Card Processing
      7. - Shipping Carrier Integration
      8. - Sales Reporting

Feel free to comment on this post, ask questions, or send us an email for more info to: marketing@leafandvine.com