I am curious to hear your views on the pros and cons.
Thanks for any feedback!
Speaking strictly from the consumer side of this question, if an online retailer doesn’t post prices it makes me very reluctant to buy, for reasons that are fairly obvious - at least to me. In this day and age, if I’d wanted to talk to the store on the telephone I would have called. Forcing the customer to do that in order to purchase requires him to do just that much more work.
Yes - there is no reason no to…
Yes, I do.
Michelle,
Online retailers need to post their prices. Stores that are not engaged in online sales kinda have the option and a lot depends on what consumer base you are targeting, (Yellow Tail Shiraz @ 7.99 vs Shafer Hillside Select @ 250.00). Restaurants have the option of listing them in their online wine list, (too pricey, patrons would rather pay corkage vs reasonable pricing where the patrons see its a wash on bringing their own or paying corkage.)
An example: A local “big box” liquor store in Napa doesn’t post their prices online but has daily ads in the local newspaper that wine “X,” normally 29.99 is on sale for 27.99. (Targeting local consumers, ((sheep)). Our regular price for the same wine is 26.99. People who shop using the internet will eventually figure out who really has the best prices as well as availability.
We’ve had people drive a couple hundred miles to get wine we have that they can’t get else where or at a price that by planning a trip to Napa and stopping by to buy the wine make it worth their while.
In other words, it is or can be a marketing tool for your store.
As a consumer, any retailer who has an online site, and doesn’t list their prices thereon, is a JOKE, and will receive ZERO of my wine-buying dollars. At the risk of coming across as offensive, any online retailer who even considers not listing prices online is effing stupid.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies. My store is a major player in a very small town of 9,000 or so. But we get a great deal of Interstate traffic as we are just a stone’s throw from I25, the Denver-Texas corridor.
The county I am in is actually still classified as “frontier”, believe it or not. Because of our interstate volume, I am able to offer prices (on balance) noticeably lower than my competitors and about on par with larger stores in the nearest larger city (90 miles away with about 140,000 people).
I don’t expect to ship much as the cost to do so are prohibitive from here. I am sure I would, however, pick up sales from local customers who value shopping online and from those in even smaller towns within 30 or so miles. Many actually come to our town regularly just to shop (we have a Walmart and Safeway…wow!)
I guess I should be proud of my prices and just post them online. I have only been open for about 16 months, but I have noticed a culture of secrecy around prices in this town. My nearsest competitor has actually been known to send in spies to check competitor’s prices. Another store actually forbids the use of cellphones in the store because of this.
I was just looking for reassurance. It seems to me that customers value transparency, so why the hell not?
One other thing Michelle. Are there any state laws prohibiting you from shipping outside the state of Colorado?? If not, you need to set up your web site for on-line sales. While there is plenty of competition out there, there is always somebody looking for a certain wine and you are either the only store who has it or are one of the cheapest. It takes awhile to get a grip on key words and pay per click advertising but it all brings you business, right down to somebody Googling Wine stores in southern Colorado.
Check shipping prices with UPS. They can set up an account that isn’t all that expensive and offers incentives for the volume you ship. Since you are closer to the center of the USA, your shipping will cheaper than ours to just about everywhere but California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
Even if you don’t ship, setup a way to order, pay and hold for pickup. The reason to do this is that you can then send out a newsletter (you ARE collecting emails, yes) and link a wine name back to a product page from which the visitor can buy.
Building a secure shopping experience can be a project so I’d look at something like Shopify - there’s a monthly fee that’s SKU based but I think for most places it will end up being something like $29 a month which is very reasonable. I haven’t confirmed that you can use Shopify for a pickup only system, but if you can it’s an easy way to get into this.
Thanks, Randy. You and Carrie have helped me so much since I started this journey nearly two years ago. And thank you, Rick…very helpful comments.
You make a great point, I (think I) have pretty good taste in wine and the wine geeks in town gravitate to my store. I even have a professional ski racer from Vail who regularly stops into my store when in town for my Rhone selection. But, a lot of my high end wines languish, especially during the Winter months when Interstate traffic is lower. I have seen times where I have a wine on my shelves, which is marked up noticeably beyond my price by big nationwide retailers because of scarcity.
Anyway, I am studying adwords and click rates and I think I can do this!
Thanks, Rick for the Shopify tip…will definitely look into this.
Have any of you had good experience with LiquorRun Mobile for iPhone and Android?
Randy…forgot to answer your question. No, there are no laws prohibiting me from shipping out of state. Maybe I am wrongfully assuming that the rates would be too high. I just remember when i part-timed for four years between NYC (where I am originally from) and “frontier” Colorado, that the cost of shipping my belongings was very high. Maybe volume and a direct account will make all the difference…thanks!
The stuff languishing is one good reason to have a newsletter. You can do an offer, send it out and if they can click through to buy, sell that.
ask if you have questions about Adwords… I’ve managed campaigns before and there are good and bad ways to set them up. I’d consider, too, whether you want to use Adwords or hook up with wine-searcher to drive traffic. There are also SEO things you can do to attract traffic if you have well done product descriptions on your site.
thanks, Rick. I am a newbie to all of this. Just bought the book, recently published “How to Sell Wine Online” by Bruce McGeoghan. Seems well researched, but I am open to ideas!
I think selling wine (shipping and legal issues aside) isn’t that different from other things online. Understand how people find you and make it easy for them to do so, make it easy for them to buy your products, give them great customer service and engage online just as you would if they were in person.
The reason I push getting permissioned emails (emails where people explicitly opt in to getting your emails) is that you are sending product information to people who want it. Giving them clickable links that lead back to a storefront makes it easy for them to buy from you. Other things will help - having a good product description helps. For example, if someone’s looking for a Russian River Pinot Noir and all of yours have those keywords in the product description you’re more likely to be found. Likewise, if someone’s looking on Wine Searcher for a wine and you have that wine and are listed there, they can find you.
There are operational considerations… if you have 10 cases of a wine in you don’t want to put 10 cases on the site and then put it out on the floor (seen that) and if you split that 5 and 5 and then want to move, say, 2 cases from the floor inventory to the online inventory you need to watch that you don’t double sell those bottles.
There are point of sale systems that make this easier so that you can track and report on things. They’re somewhat pricey, but useful if the online stuff takes off.
If you are going to sell online do yourself a favor and make sure your “in store” inventory and your “online inventory” are the same. Make sure your POS system updates inventory on the web in real time as you sell in the store and that wines in customers shopping carts are purged after an appropriate amount of time (say 15 minutes).
Yeah, that’s the best way to deal with it. You can also, in most systems,set rules e.g. “don’t show wines with less than 12 bottles in inventory on the website” which can avoid issues if it’s a hot seller.
Excellent advice…thank you all! I have my work cut out for me. Rick…look for my email, I may need help.
Biggest con for having a web presence with online prices is that consumers will see that you’re charging sustantially more than other retailers.
Biggest pro for having a web presence with online prices is that consumers will see that you’re charging sustantially less than other retailers.
After discovering Wine-Searcher a couple of years ago my wine shopping radius increased from 15 miles to 150 miles. If a retailer is willing to hold my order for a few weeks I can then usually schedule travel to coincide with pickup.
I rarely if ever purchase “in store”, all my shopping is done online.
Now, if I could only get out of state shipments I would be really happy.
Just because Massachusetts frowns on it doesn’t mean that it isn’t done. If you find something you want on wine-searcher but the retailer is out-of-state, give them a call to see what their policy is.
I wouldn’t. I know someone who has had wine taken by the state of Maine for doing this kind of thing (on the receiving end) and had to pay hefty fines on top of losing the wine.