E-commerce for Wine Stores

In promoting your store to customers there has rarely been an opportunity like email; you can reach almost all your customers using a single communication tool. According to a recent Forrester Research report, 97% of consumers use email; "consumers and businesses are raising their hands and asking for email," says Stephanie Miller in "Email Marketing Comes of Age."

Sadly, this opportunity is being largely squandered. The prevailing wisdom has been that an email blast should be sent as far and wide as possible, in the hopes of churning up interest from the farthest corners of the Internet. Email campaigns have been treated like direct mail without the associated costs. Stores would send emails to every customer, irrespective of whether the customer was likely to be interested in the message. "Many marketers think of email as a broadcast channel, not as a way to connect with individuals," adds Miller.

The Problem with Spam
The result has been Inboxes that are overflowing with unwanted messages. The outcry against Spam led the Internet Service Providers (ISP) to introduce Spam filtering techniques that block large mailing lists and suspicious keywords. Most customers can anonymously report any email as Spam, which results in e-mail traffic from that domain being blacklisted for a time. Many customers receive email from multiple addresses of differing priority, making it much harder to ensure your message is read.

Read more about above Creating Value with a Personal Message.

The full opportunity on the Internet for a wine store is to reach customers that are predicted to purchase a significant portion of the total retail sales for wine, whether those sales happen online or offline. Unfortunately, this potential can be restricted by state laws that are intolerant of interstate shipping.

Meanwhile, there are likely to be significant legislative changes over the next five years that could improve this situation for online wine merchants in more restrictive states. Legal battles are still being fought over whether wineries and retailers can legally ship interstate and some expect that the Supreme Court will have to be more explicit about what states can and can't do with regard to the 2005 Granholm ruling.

The newest wave of lawsuits is challenging revisions to state laws that were written to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Most lawsuits deal with the question of whether volume caps and in-person purchasing requirements represent discrimination against out-of-state wineries.
If the open market advocates win their day in court there is a possibility that more states will update their interstate shipping policies to permit retailers to ship in and out of their markets. Such a concession is likely to be accompanied by a tax collecting and reporting responsibility, which is a sure sign of legitimacy.