We’ve been using Facebook for our web presence. Think it’s time to get a real site, with ecommerce, and hand over the pound of flesh to the credit card companies. I would love to hear advice, warnings, etc., on how to find a good host, build a good site, and of course, keep costs down. Wix lets you make free sites, and will host them for free, but if you want any ecommerce it’s circa $16/month. Also, Wix sites are all Flash-based, and I understand that’s frowned upon.
Thanks for the help.
Since most mobile devices have problems with or don’t support Flash, and many people these days disable Flash due to security/privacy issues, attempting to do business on a Flash site like Wix would be, well, bad business.
If you want to try out some things without cost to you, sign up for free hosting. The one I’d recommend is X10 Hosting, but honestly, many other such sites are just as good for this purpose. Who knows…you may find that your needs do not exceed the resource limits of free hosting!
WineWeb is about $60/mo to host with e-commerce, and I think they take 1.5% of each transaction. They’ll design your site for a reasonable fee – I think it was $600 when I did it, but it is probably more now. They are pretty aggressive about improving the features they offer and good about customer service, but I still run into a lot of glitches with them.
Matt - This past week we met Barrie Cleveland of Winery Advisors at the Wineries Unlimited show in Richmond VA. He and his partner are based in San Luis Obispo and they offer up many services I think you might be interested in. I have not done business with them but when we get our business off the ground they will be one of the companies we contact. At quick glance their pricing seems reasonable but I didn’t ask any questions related to upfront versus annual charges. Their website url is …http://www.wineryadvisor.com/ …Gary
Check out Vin65
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Check out Weebly: http://www.weebly.com/ Super easy website design and setup (drag and drop) and an ecommerce widget that is not only easy to set up but is cheap! It uses paypal or google checkout. I think it’s $4/month and registering your website will be another $35-40 a year. (It’s the same cost everywhere…) There are a couple other inexpensive options like Jimdo and Yola but I don’t have any personal experience with them.
Thanks, everyone, for the great suggestions. I’ve been on the road but am back now and will dive in and start exploring. I really appreciate the help.
Honestly? Don’t cheap out. This is your business. If you expect the website to be a significant part of your revenue it’s poor business sense to look for the cheapest way to set it up and run it. Your website is your face to customers and potential customers - for many, it’s their first impression and first impressions are important. You’re asking people to give you their money… present a professional, quality face to them. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of money, but it does mean that fees and things like point and click site creation might not be your best solution.
With a shopping site especially, you also want to have a site that attracts qualified traffic and converts it. So, for example, you make a Massa Ranch Syrah. You want people who are looking for wines from that vineyard to see you in search. You want a smooth and easy shopping experience that doesn’t glitch or do things like requiring people to create an account in order to check out.
Vin65 is certainly worth looking at and the other stuff above is worth it too. But I’d also look at things like Shopify. Shopify and Magento Go are both hosted commerce solutions that seem to be very robust and are used by a lot of different retailers. Downside is that they won’t know about wine-specific things. Upside is that they eliminate a lot of the work - hosting, etc - that you would need to do and also have a PCI compliant credit card setup.
Finally, realize that the site, even if well designed and smooth, won’t be something you can just launch and forget. You’ll need to engage with it, build traffic, look at how people are converting or not and post new content. You can and should continue to share things on FB etc but make the site the hub of your online activities.
Don’t ignore things like integration with Facebook, mobile awareness, etc.
Thanks, Rick, for the great insights as well as the hosting selctions. I’ll keep all that in mind no matter who I go with.
Matt,
You’re welcome. I wrote that later in the evening, so a couple of points were, um, not as clear as I’d like. At the risk of being pedantic…
Hosting: Cheap hosting usually is cheap because the hosting company overloads the server. Instead of fewer sites that each pay a bit more, they put on a lot of sites that pay little. This tends not to affect straight HTML sites because HTML is fast to load. It does tend to hurt database driven sites which need more resources and most product sites are database driven. Aside from a poor user experience (people start to abandon sites that take more than 1 second to load), slow sites are being penalized in search rankings now - Google uses page loading time as a factor in ranking site as of late last year.
Security: There are two parts to this. First, credit card security. If you store people’s CC information you need to worry about this. Even if you don’t, you’ll need SSL certificates, etc. And even if you don’t, more merchant services places are asking for PCI compliance which is a set of rules that describes how you’ve secured your site. A hosted commerce service like Shopify etc should take care of this for you. So, do look for information about that issue and ask if it’s not apparent from someone’s site.
Design: Important in that you want to present a professional look. Point and click stuff tends to look like what it is - inexpensive. There ARE exceptions, but my overall point here (pun intended!) is that you want to end up with a site that looks decent and brings you credibility in the eyes of a new visitor. Don’t forget about mobile either - Massa Ranch is in Napa… I can see people being on their phones and looking for you. Think about what they might want to see (hours, directions, etc) and cater to that.
CONTENT: Overlooked by many, I’d recommend that anyone doing a site pay a lot of attention to this. A former client of mine asked for my opinion on the site of someone she was working with and, while that site had technical issues, the biggest problem was the copy. The site sold equestrian riding clothes… but the copy for the clothes didn’t mention that they were for that purpose. It talked about construction, materials and the like but not that the shirts were riding shirts, etc. How could that product page ever rank well for searches like “riding shirt”? It didn’t and won’t until they revise the product copy to use the words that their prospective customers use.
The moral of this? Put yourself in the mind of the person looking for what you offer. If they want to find Massa Ranch wines, make sure that Massa Ranch is in your product copy. In the copy about where you are, clearly note nearby towns. Massa Ranch is near Yountville… You want people who are looking for Yountville wineries to find you. Sure, you can use the phrase “in the heart of Napa…” But if that’s all you use you lose the specificity. Do some keyword research to see how people search for the kind of wines that you offer and let that inform your copywriting. Finally, be aware of keywords like this, but write for humans. Don’t stuff keywords on the page, etc.
In fact, the main criterion I’d consider when thinking about a site is "How will this look and feel to someone coming here for the first time? Making their first purchase?" Simple example: Some stores still make you create an account before you can check out. That raises the number of people who abandon their purchase because some subset of buyers think “Screw this, I just want to buy a bottle of wine…” Instead, ask the person if they’d like to create an account after the purchase and make it clear why they might want to (newsletter with deals, etc).
Questions? Ask away…
PS: I’ve deliberately left off any talk about how the platforms deal with wine shipping, etc. Obviously places like Vin65 will have an advantage here. Whether that matters to you is dependent on whether you want to ship nationally, etc and whether it makes financial sense to do so. Raw product site hosting should land somewhere in the $10-$30 month range for a good host. If you could layer on shipping rules that are wine specific for a nominal fee over that it would be worth it.
Thanks again for the helpful and thorough advice, Rick. I am sure I will have questions! I have a bottling coming up soon that is consuming all my attention at present, but once that’s over with I’ll return to the website issue. I’ll start exploring the sites you and others have recommended and I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty of questions then. Thanks again for the help.
Also figure out what your ongoing costs are… can you maintain the site yourself, or do you need help?
We use Vin65, it’s not cheap, but neither is a good image, professionally presented and robustly served. Their templates are straight forwards to edit, and if you are willing to do a bit of FTP work, you can customize readily enough.
S
I have been following this thread for a few days and decided to check out http://www.weebly.com I am not a html geek or anywhere close, so working with their templates and widgets I am satisfied so far. I did sign up for the Pro service which is like $5/month when they sent me an email offering a 33% discount. I had some difficulty entering the code and they have already answered my support question to get the refund. So far I am happy with this service.
Sheldon makes a good point about working on the site, but I’d extend that to working on the site in general. Frankly, the site template isn’t something that you should be changing regularly. Get it where you want it, then leave it alone for a bit. Focus on the content and conversion paths. But whatever you do, the most important thing is not to put the site up, then ignore it. Many smaller businesses do this and it undermines success. Then, since the site didn’t magically produce sales, they don’t invest time and effort in it… so guess what? Yeah, it doesn’t produce sales because it’s not being worked on.
Don’t start thinking about HTML etc. Start by thinking of why you want the site up in the first place… is it purely informational? Do you sell from there? Do you not sell, but want to support sales elsewhere? Who’s your visitor and what do THEY want? Your site isn’t about you, it’s about the people visiting your site - understand what they want, then make sure the site gives that to them. A quick example - Nola’s site has a sales page for each wine… but in VERY small print at the bottom of the page they tell me that they cannot sell to US visitors but that the wines are available in the US. Don’t hide that - tell me at the top of the page, but ALSO give me a link to a Where to Buy page on your site or your distributors or even a link to a search page on Wine-searcher for the wine in question. Put up reviews as text on the page, not download links. Use pull quotes from great reviews as testimonials about the wines… glowing pull quotes on a product page are proof that the prospective buyer isn’t about to make a mistake in the same way that shelftalkers are in retail.
ALWAYS keep in mind the people visiting the site and their thought processes and goals. Schedule some time every week to work on the site content, even if it’s just checking your analytics to see what’s happened. Sites are marketing tools - like any marketing tool, you need to invest regular effort in them.
Our website http://www.dominiobuensvista.com is more tailored for the European market and was done by some people in Granada. We spent a pretty penny on making the site, I like it, but I am working on one that is tailored to the US market. I want to be able to update it easily and quickly. It will have the ability to buy my gourmet products and when I get the selling the wines over the net thing sorted out, then hopefully I will have them there as well. The site I am making http://www.veletawines.com will pull in the US distributors and retailer and those glowing pull quotes you’re talking about. And I like the wine-searcher link…so many ideas…
Rick,
Thanks for your insights as we are looking to revamp our website to include ecommerce again.
For Matt’s sake, let me just say that we used Magento for our last ecommerce attempt and it was just ‘meh.’ As it’s a user-custom platform and IMHO, unless you have someone who knows a bit about HTML and design I think it can be very time consuming to set things up. I was often quite lost when trying to make changes but we had a ‘computer guy’ who could do things fairly efficiently. On the upside, this was 4-5 years ago, and perhaps the Magento community has expanded enough that there are other businesses who could help you. They certainly have some wine retailers whose sites you could use as a model.
Nola - yeah, I was just picking on you since you conveniently had a link to your site in your signature. 
Brent - Magento has released a SMB product called Go. I’ve not looked at it too much yet but it is friendlier than the system they had a few years ago which, as you noted, was not that straightforward. Shopify is worth a look too.
Wine folks are in a special bucket too since the shipping rules vary by state. Not a big deal if you simply want to track it yourselves and just not ship to states that are a hassle, but folks like Vin65 etc probably give you broad coverage across the US with less hassle. As in many of these cases, YMMV from the norm. The BIG thing to make sure of is that you have an easy to use way to update all of your content from the home page to product information, blogs, etc AND that you can install and use analytics so you can tell what’s happening with your site.
If you’re selling from your site, you really have 3 main things to consider: 1) How to get people who are looking for what you sell to come to the site, 2) how to convert them from visitors to customers and 3) how to continually refine these two activities so you attract increasingly more qualified traffic and so that you continue to increase your conversion rate. A good, clean design and user experience is important to these (esp to the conversion rate as a wonky, hard to use cart will lose you sales), but a very large factor in getting traffic and converting it is driven by the content you have on your site. Good content is key which is why I strongly feel that you should have a way to update your own site without needing someone else to do things and that the content management system be easy enough that it’s not a barrier to you doing those updates.
Check out Vinespring if you are interested in a winery-specific solution. Very much like Vin65 at a fraction of the cost. I’ve been very happy with them.
Matt,
We (thegrandedalles.com) host on Bluehost – and I’m very pleased with their attentiveness and server ability (haven’t had any down time). that said, we don’t get a ton of traffic…yet…(but we try!). i think hosting your site there is 6 bucks-ish a month. then, our website is built on a wordpress platform, what people use for blogs. it’s flexible and easy to maintain, and i’ve been getting pings from WordPress that now e-comm is available to use, but we don’t use that because for the final part, the e-comm…we’ve tried Shopify (great small biz and customer service, friendly people, but they take a percentage of your sales, on TOP of your monthly payment to them), Nexternal (crazily expensive for small frye like us) and now Volusion, who does NOT take a percentage of sales, and is very flexible in what you can do with them, and we pay something like $20 a month, small set up fee ($100-ish) and so far so good. Those other Vine/Vin sites…like Nexternal, they are awfully pricey, but what you’re buying is their canned service to you. if you’re willing to do a little more yourself, you won’t have to pay so much with a solution like Volusion. i’d advise making a list of all your needs and then see how each one is dealt with on each site. good luck -
stephanie
thanks, Stephanie. I’ll take a look at your site and Bluehost. Thanks for the e-commerce tips as well.