Wine Retailers
Are you looking to start selling your wines on Shopify?
Recent years have seen the ecommerce platform become a powerhouse for DTC (direct-to-consumer) alcohol sales. The Covid pandemic played a massive role in this, of course – as bars closed, and consumers began having their favourite beverages delivered to their homes instead. But the trend has stuck, and you can capitalise on it too using some of the fantastic online sales tools provided by the Shopify platform.
Experts suggest that by 2025 online alcohol sales will hit a value of $42 billion. For customers, the DTC model means more choice, better value, and door-to-door convenience. But there are also huge benefits for the seller: no middlemen, no store overheads, plus many processes with the potential for complete automation.
However, not every DTC wine-selling store on Shopify succeeds… and many fail to use the platform to its full potential. So in this guide, we are going to talk you through some of the powerful tools that will allow you to get the very most from your online wine sales – as well as sharing examples of ecommerce stores who are already selling wine on Shopify with excellent results.
Let’s dive in, and find out how a Shopify store will soon have you on cloud wine.
Key Features for Selling Wine on Shopify
Product Subscriptions (Start a Wine Club!)
Shopify features an option allowing buyers to set up recurring subscription purchases – and it’s an absolute game-changer for brands and retailers offering consumable goods.
Why chase single one-off sales, when you can build a community? You could start a “Wine Club” for example, sending your subscribers a handpicked box of fine wines every month. Models like this have proven to be a massive success for many brands, and when you start selling wines on Shopify you’ll have all the tools to quickly and seamlessly set up fully customisable subscription plans.
Custom Discounts
The intelligent discounting system built into Shopify’s seller tools will allow you to set up some very appealing deals on your wine store. You could offer customers a “Box Builder” option, for example, allowing them to pick their favourite six wines from a selection to earn a 25% discount on the box. You’ll see custom discount schemes like this being offered by many of the wine and beverage retailers on Shopify, often to fantastic effect.
Age Verification
It goes without saying that any retailer selling alcohol products online will need to have robust age verification tools in place. This is another area where Shopify excels though, with some great options to create reliable age verification systems that fit seamlessly into your customer journeys… while also being fully customised to match your store visuals and branding.
Here at Inspira we’ve had great success in the past implementing age verification tools, for example for the knife and tool retailers Leatherman and Whitby & Co. We will be glad to do the same for your Shopify wine store.
Alvio
You can take your Shopify ecommerce store to the next level using Alvio, a collaborative ecommerce model that will allow you to partner seamlessly with other brands and retailers.
Alvio is an easy-to-use, code-free tool that allows Shopify retailers to list products from various partnering brands on their own ecommerce storefront. This means your wine store could be selling stock from a whole range of linked suppliers, earning you a commission, while offering your customers a massive choice – and plenty of reasons to keep coming back. Alternatively, large-scale wine suppliers on Shopify and other ecommerce sites can use Alvio to get their stock seen in more places than ever before.
Seasonal Offers
There are plenty of occasions throughout the year when it might make sense to create seasonal offers on your store. Black Friday and January Sales are tentpole events in the ecommerce calendar of course, but what about a Wine Special for Valentine’s Day? Or some warm seasonal reds in autumn, when the nights start getting longer?
Here are some great ways you can make use of seasonal sales in your Shopify wine store:
- Use the Shopify Bundles app to curate seasonal product ranges – for example, “The Perfect Mother’s Day Wine Box,” or “Sparkling Summer Favourites.”
- Shopify lets you plan ahead and automate everything, to give you seamless control over your discounts and campaigns, and even save recurring discount schemes for future use.
- Gather additional value through your Shopify wine store, when you build a database of returning customers. You could create bespoke offers in return for sign-ups, for example. How about offering 10% extra on a Black Friday discount when buyers sign up to your newsletter?
Frictionless Payments
Shopify streamlines every stage of the customer journey, and the checkout process is no exception to that. Tools like Shopify’s one-page checkout – plus full integration of payment options such as Google Pay and Apple Pay – ensure it’s as easy as can be for your customers to complete their purchases. You can even allow visitors to buy directly from your wine store’s product page.
Wine Retailers We’ve Worked With on Shopify
There are various stores already selling wine on Shopify to great effect, but we want to highlight three in particular.
Somm Picks, Splash Wines, and Cellar Stash are all past clients of ours. You will notice immediately how they take advantage of the various Shopify features for online wine sellers – from age verification checks, to the ever-changing list of newest acquisitions on the Somm Picks store. Splash Wines features a “refer a friend” scheme to reward buyers who bring new customers onboard, while Cellar Stash offers a first-purchase discount to customers who also sign up for their newsletter.
We invite you to take a browse through these websites for yourself – and see how many other tips and features from this guide you can spot!
- Somm Picks (www.sommpicks.com)
- Splash Wines (www.splashwines.com)
- Cellar Stash (www.cellarstash.com)
Sell Your Wines on Shopify
As you can see, here at Inspira we have plenty of experience working with wine retailers on Shopify. For our past clients we have built powerful ecommerce stores for dynamic online wine sales and loyalty programmes. Now we would love to help you get set up to successfully sell your wine on Shopify too.
So let’s talk. Why not get in touch with us for a no-commitment chat about your wine retail business?
Once we understand your big picture goals, we will then be able to advise on what we can do for your business – using all the game-changing tools available to Shopify retailers.
