Two Questions To Improve Your Winery Web Site

Here are two questions to improve your winery Web site:

1. What action do you most want your visitors to take?
2. Are you making that action as effortless as possible?

Assuming a major goal of smaller wineries is to sell more wine direct to consumers, it amazes me that their Web sites don't make this easier.  It's not just the checkout process, it's the whole idea of orienting your site to sell wine.

And there's even nuance to that.  If you'd like people to buy cases of wine (instead of just bottles), what incentives do you provide to make it worth someone's while?  Free shipping?  A simple discount?  Schwag? That's part of making the action effortless as well.

In designing the original Winery Web Site Report evaluation, I started with the 4 types of visitors to your winery Web site:

1. People who want to buy your wines right now (buyers)
2. People who want to resell your wine (distributors, wholesalers, restaurants)
3. People who who want to tell others about your wine (the media)
4. People who want to find other information about your winery and wines (browsers)

and discussed the need to make it easy for each type to reach their goal successfully and with a minimum of fuss.

As part of making it easy for buyers to reach their goals, I strongly encourage wineries to use the phrase "Buy Now" as part of their main navigation, as opposed to "Wines" or "Online Store" (or worse, something more cutesy and less obvious).  You might want to keep "Wines" as a navigation item for those seeking information, but it's not a call to action for people who arrived with the goal of buying your wines.  "Online Store" identifies a location where your wines can be bought, but again, it's not as clear a call to action.

Here are some other questions related to how effortless you make it for visitors to buy your wine:

• How many clicks does it take to buy a bottle of wine on your site?  What can you do to reduce that number?  
•  How many clicks to buy your most popular wine?  
•  Do people have to sign up before they can add something to their cart? 
• Do you offer a buying suggestion on every page of your site?   
• Do you offer one-click ordering for previous customers?   
• Do you tell them about restaurants and retailers where they can buy your wine offline? 

Yes, effortless e-commerce is hard to do well.  It's one reasons that people choose ready-made solutions from Inertia Beverages, eWinery Solutions, Cultivate, and Nexternal (although I've seen a lot of bad uses of Nexternal, Orin Swift Cellars has one of the most seamless Nexternal shops I've seen,).

How well have you answered the two questions for your site visitors?

(Here's the original post from ProBlogger which posed these two questions in slightly different form.)

 

Comments

[Andrew]

Mike,

It's interesting, I read your post and at first I was looking at the four types of visitors and I was thinking that really you have way more consumers visiting your site than you do have trades people and media, so I was thinking that really the website should be geared around consumers and people browsing more than trades and media.

However, the more I started to think about it tonite, the more I realized that really all four types of people are in general equally important. Trade and media may be a way smaller segment of your total website traffic, but they are way more important because they give you access to a much larger market.

Thanks for the post.

Andrew

[amy]

Great points!

I'd like to pipe in that AmericanWinery.com does have an e-commerce solution. I don't know that they've gone public with it yet, but there are a number of wineries using their WineStore. Purple Cow Vineyards, for example, has been making sales through this route.

It's a good looking solution in a market that can get too hung up on being catchy or trendy and loses focus on streamlined, easy-to-use interfaces. I'd suggest checking it out.