Wine Store Websites Are Terrible

[David_K2]

Thanks for your thoughts, Doug and Julian. That really brings home some of the challenges. To be clear, except in truly egregious cases like listing purely phantom inventory, I do not fault the wine stores for what they’ve got. Very few stores have the ability to program their own sites, and most are doing the best they can with what they have. In addition, probably very few people order wine online in the first place (the people who use this board are not the typical consumer, to say the least). Especially when you involve shipping, it just makes no sense to ship a bunch of $8 wines across the country.

I raise this now because with the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot of stores who didn’t used to do much in the way of internet sales (or any) scramble to get their inventory up online. Now that consumers have started shopping for wine online, it may be something they continue to do and those retailers with better sites will be at a competitive advantage. You would think that even if it isn’t feasible for any one retailer to invest heavily in this that COVID should be a kick in the pants to the industry and specifically the upstream players to coordinate better on programming and UPCs. Maybe that’s too much to ask but it seems like that could benefit everyone in the long run.

[John_Morris]

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.

But the stores most of us are complaining about DO do a lot of their business online. Which is why it’s so bizarre that their sites are so bad.

[John_Morris]

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 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 many, many industries, businesses rent industry-specific, off-the-shelf software. I edited a lot of stories about private equity firms investing in such software companies in the mid-2000s. They’re nice businesses, because if they produce a good product, the customer base is loyal and it’s expensive to change products. (I remember one that leased software for auto-body shops to process insurance claims – a useful, specialized product that it would never be practical for a single body shop to develop.)

So no halfway competent management is going to find itself with software worth more than the business. You just rent it.

I don’t know if such products exist for wine retailers. Sadly, it looks like too many sites are DIY/one-off efforts.

It’s a pretty simple matter of contract-drafting to protect the store in the second case. You negotiate to get the software for free or cheap if you help the developer. Or you insist on a share of sales or a royalty or some payment for your contributions. Or both. You just have to come up with a financial arrangements that work for both parties and you memorialize it. Business owners and lawyers do that every day.

[David_Fischer]

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.

But the stores most of us are complaining about DO do a lot of their business online. Which is why it’s so bizarre that their sites are so bad.

That is a good point. The websites of the dozen (at most I would say) wine stores that truly sell nationally do need improvement. But even they are very small businesses compared to other retailers. (And even some major national retailers still have, I would argue, poor sites - anyone been to macys.com recently?). It’s a lot more work than most folks realize to have a real time, inventory tracking system that is also reflected (in real time) on a website. It has been a few years since I worked in retail but inventory management is difficult and, while it has improved the last few years, it is still a lot of work. And then tying to the website is a whole other thing. It would be great if wine retailers had better websites, but I understand why it is tough for them to be like they are. (Fun detour - looks t Amazon’s website 10 years ago in web archives. What a strange, weird detour that is).

[Wes_Barton]

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.

That’s always been an issue with various websites, far from just wine. Facebook will shuffle the order and presence of notifications, for example. I just standardly have 2 windows open and drag the item from the master window on the left to this here window on the right where this thread is (and this second tab to post this response, while not losing my place reading the thread).

[Mattstolz]

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.

That’s always been an issue with various websites, far from just wine. Facebook will shuffle the order and presence of notifications, for example. I just standardly have 2 windows open and drag the item from the master window on the left to this here window on the right where this thread is (and this second tab to post this response, while not losing my place reading the thread).

yeah, i end up doing a lot CTRL- clicks on sites like JJBuckleys, which is one of the most annoying to me. it is especially annoying for this due to the lack of page numbers. you just have to keep scrolling and waiting for more items to load 15 at a time. makes an activity like scrolling through their burgundy collection exceedingly annoying to have to repeat halfway through.

[davidkong]

This is something we are trying to fix. PM me if you’d like a demo or have any strong opinions on features you would like.

[T_Hall]

Two of our local wineshops have sites with A LOT to be desired. Filter on region=burgundy and I get a slew of CA wines… One had a 20% off of everything in stock this past sunday, however, i cannot peruse what might interest me as he does not have any inventory online. At least post a weekly pdf with your inventory! A third wineshop just enabled online shopping about 2 months ago, they have a few hiccups, but I applaud what they have done.

[Chris_Crutchfield]

This may be better in the ITB board, but posting here to get all perspectives. It continues to amaze me that here we are in 2020 and most wine shop websites are still so poor. Common problems include difficulty in browsing, missing vintage information, lack of live inventory data, and generally just being riddled with errors. I mean, I think I know a big part of the reason - given how decentralized the industry is, no one shop or handful of shops can afford to design their own website, and they rely on website infrastructure that is basically pre-programmed and out of a box. Be that as it may, it’s hard to believe better solutions have not been made available. Even a fairly basic website like Wine.com is easy to use in a way that most other sites are not.

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.

You can exclude out of stock options in your search results on wine.com (just click a little box). Also, the out of stock issue is an issue with wine-searcher, not wine.com. Wine-searcher seems to assume that each website has a single warehouse from which they ship out all of their inventory. However, wine.com’s warehouses are regional, and what you see in CA is not the same as what you see in NY.

[Alex_Valdes]

Agree KandL has a pretty good engine with an early 2000s look and feel. Also agree the comments mentioning wine-searcher is your real entree to most retail sites.

I wish stores had the search and save options of Acker’s or HDH’s auction apps. They are unparalleled out there. I also have a soft spot for “just give me a big spreadsheet so I can comb through your inventory.”