Is he still around?
Except that your wine does not stay in your cart if you log out and log back in. Also, you can’t print a clear hard copy of the contents in your cart. My print work around is to cut and paste the cart into a Word doc and then print it after fiddling with various edits to make the hard copy clear. Pretty basic stuff that should be easier. But I do otherwise love the place and service!
We’re still waiting for him.
A great list. Should be every online wine shop’s 101.
I’m not trying to justify this (this is my precise area of work and expertise, so I’m as passionate as it comes), but the wine industry suffers from a couple of issues here. Namely, the convoluted data structure associated with wine - the specific datapoints you may want about a given wine vary based on region. Of course it’s completely possible to cater for it, but standardisation is difficult and to do it really well, expensive.
I have long contemplated working towards an open source standard for wine information, but the big guns who generate business through wine data that would need to get on board, have their own ideas. In most cases it’s not a good business decision for those entities as it’ll erode their IP advantages.
Issue number two is then the relatively low margins that wine merchants enjoy. Most don’t have the cash or risk appetite to splash on a well thought out inventory system that properly supports a great customer experience.
Many websites are left over from merchant’s early/first forays into the internet, and I expect they will have been pretty painful experiences which didn’t yield the results they wanted and therefore they will not want to repeat.
Couple that with the complications of US shipping with wine, and it’s an operational nightmare.
I’ve almost stopped buying from them with the buyer’s premium and increased shipping–but my favorite site is Winebid. If you set ‘Buy Weekly Auction’ as the bookmark, there is no better. I love all the filters. K&L is the ONLY site that doesn’t ship to my state (which I think is they are the ONLY store following the law). That said it’s rare that I don’t buy from something in my email and actually go to a store. The only reason I ever go to an online store is if they are the only retailer with a limited bottling. Often Chambers Street and Sec being examples. I guess big sales will get me there too. All that said, my two wine stores are Cellartracker and Wine-Searcher; Usually pretty limited interaction with the actual wine store’s site other then entering my cc info.
Garnet’s sites, old and new, have to be the worst!
There’s a widely used industry database of products/UPCs, no? I would think that that would allow some off-the-shelf software where the user interface could be customized for an individual store.
+1
That’s a checklist of recurring customer annoyances that needn’t be.
There are in fact several but none of them cater to the weird layers of structured data to adequately describe wine.
If I take an example bottle and search its UCC: Old Vine Red Lot number 69 from Marietta Cellars
I get this:
Marietta Cellars Red Blend Wine - 750ml Bottle
This doesn’t give nearly enough information that a wine consumer might want to search for: Country, Varietal(s), Vintage, State, Region, sub-region, specific vineyard, alc % etc etc.
Coupled with that you need that data in a structured way so it can be handled consistently. For example, sub-region is returned in the same way and in the same place every time.
The people seeding this data to start with also need to agree on its format. Different regions have different perspectives on the importance of certain datapoints and even how the datapoints should be described. Consensus is difficult.
I’ve never worked in the industry, but judging from what I’ve seen of grocery store & specialty store retail over the years, distinguishing wines by vintage is likely impossible [or very nearly impossible] for classical bar-code technology.
I suspect the industry didn’t have a sufficiently long “address space” to include another 4 to 6 bits for a vintage identifier of any particular wine.
And given that some houses, like Pépière, produce on the order of EIGHT BITS’ worth of labels per year, there might not have been a sufficiently long address space simply to give each individual wine its own bar code.
Now I’m sure there are more modern technologies [such as these square pattern Quick Response Codes] with vastly larger address spaces, but it could take years [decades?] for any particular sector [such as the grocery store sector, the restaurant sector, the specialty shop sector, the distributor sector, the importer sector, etc etc etc] to make the transition from 1-dimensional bar codes to 2-dimensional square patterns.
PS: Even if you set aside any possible mathematical obstructions to the inclusion of vintage data, my general impression is that the overwhelming majority of distributors & grocery stores & restaurants care not one whit about vintage designations of a wine: As far as they’re concerned, vintage (N - 1) of Cougar Juice “A” is indistinguishable from vintage (N) of Cougar Juice “A” is indistinguishable from vintage (N + 1) of Cougar Juice “A” is indistinguishable from etc etc etc…
And more generally, Cougar Juice A is indistinguishable from Cougar Juice B is indistinguishable from Cougar Juice C is indistinguishable from etc etc etc…
Infinite-scroll is a deal-breaker on any website.
The moment I find myself at an infinite-scroll website, I’m killing the entire browser window.
That’s a great list, and it’s nice to see Keith posting. I hope we get more posts.
On the shopping cart thing, I find that so bizarrely counterproductive that retailers empty your cart after a short time. Of course, if the wines have since sold out, then that makes sense, but otherwise, why wouldn’t you want the customer to see them there and make it easy for him to decide to buy later? Why create a significant hurdle to them deciding to buy your products?
That’s not unique to wine retailers, of course, but it makes no sense in any context.
I forgot a biggie:
IF I CLICK ON A PRODUCT, THE BACK BUTTON NEEDS TO TAKE ME BACK TO MY SEARCH RESULTS AND NOT MAKE ME DO THE SEARCH ALL OVER AGAIN… especially if you have one of those pages that requires 50 keystrokes and multiple re-loads of the page to get that search narrowed down
Too many don’t update inventory.
I suspect that almost every wine shop in the US sells 95% plus of its inventory to local customers (95% plus of whom walked into the shop). Most wine stores also have a single location. Very few sell wines on futures or which designed to age (i.e., wines that have a national market). I could go on, but I suspect that investing the time, money, and personnel into developing an online business simply is not worth the investment for most wine stores. (And different state laws, as noted above, certainly don’t help). My wild guess is that COVID-19 will result in significant changes to wine (and other retail) businesses’ online stores.
^^^^ Gary Vaynerchuk would dispute the above comment. ^^^^
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Yes, and it’s riddled with errors. So many wines come up with the wrong bottling from the correct producer, plus there are plenty of other problems. It’s also not nearly as comprehensive as you might think, so there are typically people trying to fill in gaps who don’t know a whole lot about wine. You can imagine the problems that causes.
Julian’s post touches on a couple of the key issues. Beyond that, there’s the fact that a lot of retailers are still using really outdated POS software, so there are limitations with what they can use for a website and how well their POS will work with it. Plus there are numerous data entry challenges and issues, with old or new POS. Small boutique stores can do extremely well with this, but a large volume retailer can’t have a wine manager or other highly knowledgeable person doing all of the entry. My experience was that I was always chasing problems, often only finding out when we got an online order for a product we didn’t carry. If you have multiple bottlings from the same producer, or a wine from a producer who makes tons of different bottlings (not that German wines aren’t already complicated enough), it’s especially easy to end up with numerous types of problems (inventory, price, correct listing).
There are several other challenges as well. Julian’s point about data structure means categorization is very tricky. It’s not impossible, but it’s very complicated, so you have to think about how much money/time you can throw at that at the store level and the developer level.
Even the terrible websites you often see are not cheap to maintain, and as Julian also mentioned, retail margins are very thin. Going beyond those means a much more expensive system that is very difficult to justify for most businesses, and is ultimately unlikely to generate enough additional profit to pay for itself.
As well as K&L, I think Benchmark does extremely well from an inventory/listing perspective. The website could be easier to use, but they all could. Overall I think it’s very good, not quite great.
I remember some years ago Wine Library switched to a new website that was the best I had seen for wine retail at that point, and probably still is. It must have been expensive. They later switched to a different site that I thought was a huge downgrade. I suspect the latter change was all about cost.
There’s so much more I could say about this. Overall, most retailers should be embarrassed about their websites for a number of reasons, but many probably are and don’t have any reasonable alternatives.
I absolutely hate wine.com’s site.
if you don’t have a wine in stock, don’t pop up 50 out of stock options. also, the fact that it gets hits on wine-searcher when the wines are out of stock bothers me.
the thing I hate most about wine websites is when you click on a wine to get more details, then go back to continue browsing and have to restart at the top of the list.
There’s a sneaky form of darwinism at work here, which is pretty horrifying for businessmen in the real world - namely, what does a vendor do if its software is effectively worth more than the business itself?
In particular, if a vendor teaches a software house how to build the perfect software for that vendor’s business sector, then what’s to prevent the software house from then selling exactly the same software to thousands of the vendor’s competitors?
In general, people who don’t own their own business logic simply do not own their own businesses - they’re merely renting their businesses from the higher-ups who do own the business logic.
You see a truly brutal version of this now at Amazon, which is always keeping tabs on the best selling products from independent shops which are advertising on Amazon, and when Amazon sees something from an independent shop start growing like wildfire, Amazon will immediately dial up their factory contacts in the third world [to include the sweatshops in China] for duplicates of the most popular products, and just as soon as the Amazon containers pass through customs and make their way to the Amazon distribution centers, the independent shop with the brilliant ideas will be ruined by Amazon.
We’ve seen similar phenomena with e.g. VISA & Mastercard & American Express since forever - unless he has his own bank, a vendor is obliged to surrender a 4- to 5-point transaction tax to the credit card processing firms from whom he essentially rents his business’s banking & bookkeeping.
And many small businesses eventually come to realize that their physical real estate holdings are vastly more valuable than any business they’ve ever run [from within the premises of that physical real estate], and so they get out of the small business business altogether, and into the bigger commercial real estate business instead.
[Although, if there’s any underlying justice to the cosmos, then the Coronavirus hoax will utterly destroy the commercial real estate business, and Congress will have the backbone necessary to refuse to bail them out of their misery.]