We thought that the discount/promotion code features in our e-commerce and point-of-sale services were quite robust, with multiple types of discount methods, effective dates, cumulative discount options, minimum purchase requirements and specific item selection.  However over the past few months, several of our winery clients have asked us for more…

We've moved the blog and discussion forum to a new platform. There's many more features with this social network platform, and we're excited to learn about them with you. More information to come later as we continue to explore this tool. But for now, please sign up and invite your friends.

We just released flavor profiles on WineWeb.com. After several months in development, we are so happy to get this live. We think this will be HUGE!

WineWeb's wine flavor profiles are a way to quantify the flavors (aromas & tastes) in a wine, to allow consumers to find wines by flavor and to find wines matching the flavors of another wine. We've identified over 240 flavors through considerable research from numerous wine tasting authorities and references. We've grouped these…

We released this enhancement in July. I just saw a blog post that made it on one of the wine industry news feeds, suggesting a portion of this as a great idea. Glad to see that we are ahead of the curve again.

WineWeb understands that QR Codes are about more than printing a code, and has integrated the generation and management of QR Codes into its service offerings. As QR Codes can have a long life, especially if printed on a wine bottle label, a winery needs to have a strategy to…

One of our clients a long time ago remarked that our enhancements were like gifts each month. Well then, here's a big package.

All of our winery clients who use our website, e-commerce or POS services can now generate QR Codes for each of their wines. As I've said in a previous blog post on , the underlying URL for the QR Code should be short to allow for easy scanning, so we shorten it using our own short domain (ww8.co). And finally, what good is a QR Code if it doesn't display…

Many wineries are looking at how best to present their company and wines to the increasing number of people accessing content through their smartphones. Now, with the increased use of QR Codes for wines, it becomes more important to have a mobile strategy for your winery. So the question we get asked frequently is whether to create a mobile app or a mobile website.

First, the similarities. Both a mobile app and a mobile website display content formatted to the small screen of a mobile…

There's been a lot of chatter of late about whether to use a URL shortener service to reduce the length of the URL (web page address) that is used in a QR Code. Opponents of shortening usually say that the shortened URLs aren't friendly enough. Here's my take.

Many QR Code scanning apps for your mobile device automatically translate the shortened URL into the friendly version, so the visitor can see where they are going before launching their web browser.

QR Codes can handle up…

Here's an example of how changes are made to the WineWeb services, and why I love what I do. Sunday morning I get an email from Steve L., one of our winery clients, asking some questions about how members can customize their wine shipments. One of the questions was why the system would let a club member customize their shipment with less expensive wines that totaled to less than the minimum price of the wine club. When I responded that the club price range was used only for display purposes…

On July 1st, New Mexico became a permit state for direct wine shipments to consumers. It was the last state to change from the reciprocity law, which was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 (Granholm v. Heald). While most other states moved to a permit system within a couple of years after that decision, it took our (I live in NM) legislature over 5 years to get a law in place. So with that extra time, did we get a good law?

First, some background. Before the legislative…

In case you missed the ShipCompliant conference earlier this week, Wines & Vines published an article with links to the presentation and slides. Some interesting items from the presentation on the trends in direct wine shipments were:

• Direct-to-Consumer (DtC) shipments (amount and value) were up over 11% this year…

When Maryland becomes a direct shipping permit state tomorrow, it comes with a twist on sales tax calculations. My understanding is that to get the wine shipping law passed, the legislators raised the sales tax on wine shipments to 9%. All well and good, but if a winery ships a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a bottle of olive oil to a Maryland consumer, their e-commerce software must calculate sales tax at three levels: 9% on the wine, 6% on the merchandise and 0% on the food item. As a…

According to research published in an article entitled Why Merchants Need to Board the Mcommerce Train, a majority of customers are more likely to buy from retailers with a mobile specific site. It also quotes a survey stating that 2/3 of customers perfer shopping on the mobile web versus through apps.

Does your winery have a mobile version of its website? Is the mobile site…

The Retail Bulletin posted a good article on the effects of sending an email to a potential customer after they abandon their online shopping cart. Their research shows a 12% conversion rate on these emails. That's good to hear as WineWeb has been offering this feature as part of the e-commerce service since 2006. The article states that only 13% of online…

We attended the Direct-to-Consumer Symposium in Santa Rosa on Wednesday and had a booth in the trade show. I attended most of the sessions and came away with a lot of information and some good ideas on where to focus our technology enhancements in the coming months. The conference was well-attended, but in case you weren't able to attend, here are some of the notes I took.



From the keynote with Marc Andre Roy from American Express, their analysis of consumer spending found that…

We just released a new beta version of the POS service. The major new benefit of this version is the ability to store transactions locally, if your Internet connection is lost, then synchronize the transactions once the connection has been restored. This version also further improves performance by caching many of the pages locally on the user's computer, and it leverages the component-based environment used in the website e-commerce, mobile e-commerce and Facebook e-commerce…

Our Facebook e-Commerce app can be used by our winery clients to take orders for wine, merchandise and events directly in Facebook. This app uses all the components of our website e-commerce service, so payment gateways, discounting, compliance checks, shipping carrier, and fulfillment center integration are all built-in. The Facebook app is integrated with the winery's products, inventory, event reservations, customers and wine club members.



The winery's Facebook page can link to…

I was catching up on my reading over the weekend and found an article in the current issue of Website Magazine entitled "Want a Completed Form? Get Out of Your Visitors' Way". It had some very good points about effective web forms, and I'm happy to say that WineWeb's shopping cart service does over 90% of them. I recall a where I tried to make the case for not requiring a visitor to register before completing the order form. A…

There's an article by Paul Franson in the Napa Valley Register today about Hogue Cellars' plan to use screwcaps on all its wines. I, from a wine consumer perspective, think that's great, and hope that other wineries take notice.

I also recently read about the cork producers' association marketing campaign to get wineries…

We started off the Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta activities with a winemaker dinner at Restaurant Martin last night. In addition to the wine seminars and the large tasting events during the Fiesta, many of Santa Fe's restaurants host wine dinners that pair their food with wines from a specific winery. These wine dinners aren't cheap -- Restaurant Martin charged $150 per person for their wine dinner. For that price, we expected to be wowed. The ingredients were there: star chef Martin…

I can't believe it's already been a week since Cabernet Day in the social media world. If you weren't aware of this event, check out http://cabernet.eventbrite.com and search Twitter for the hash tag "#Cabernet". WineWeb organized a meetup in Santa Fe and served wines from two of our clients. (Note to our clients: send us wine and we help promote your brand.)

Here's my tweets about Cabernet Day.

# Heading to the cellar to see what to…