More Wine Bought Online than in the Tasting Room
According to Wine Business’s article “Consumers are cutting back” gas prices have made consumers want to stay closer to home — which means lower on-premise sales. However, they have noticed that online wine sales are “increasing rapidly.”
How does this effect you?
If You Don’t Have A Shopping Cart:
Well, if you don’t currently have a shopping cart, you may want to think about adding one (and it doesn’t have to be as expensive to add as you may think — I offer a simple order form for around a $100 and more full-featured ecommerce solution for $500). If you are not sure the demand is there, there are several things you can do to try and find out:
- Check your website traffic logs to see how many visitors you have and what pages they are visiting. (If you don’t know what traffic logs are, check with your web person — they should know) If you are getting a lot of visits and people are hanging around on your ‘Wines’ page — seriously consider a shopping cart.
- Have your web person add a simple ‘Poll’ on your site asking visitors if they would buy from your store or not.
- Start collecting email addresses by using a simple ‘Email’ form on your site.
If You Already Have A Shopping Cart:
It may sound redundant, but have someone who is unfamiliar with your shopping cart go through the order process and give you feedback (this is something you could ask and friend or relative). If they have any problems during the order process, discuss it with your web person to see if any issues can be addressed.
You also want to make sure you appear correctly in the Search Engines — especially Google! If you aren’t where you feel you should be, talk to your web person to see if they can ‘Optimize’ your website.
And you may want to consider finding where on the Internet your wines appear (like at Wines.com and so forth) and make sure they have updated descriptions of your wine along with a picture of the label or bottle. The reason for this is if a consumer is going through a site such as ‘Wines.com’ and they run across your wine, without a picture and/or description to go with it they may move on to the next wine.
Tags: buy wine, buy wine online, ecommerce, online, online ordering, shopping cart