The Winery Web Site Report

2 Things To Do *Before* You Waste Time With Google Analytics

From this brief-but-insightful-article at Search Engine Guide:

1. what needs to happen on your site to get your business where you want it to be, and
2. identify which metrics will tell you if what you want to happen is happening.

Simple to state, but it requires you to think more deeply about your business.

Is Your Winery a Priest or a Coaster?

If your winery sells wine online (doesn't everyone these days?), this analysis of online wine store growth patterns is relevant.  The money quote:

Repeat business is where your investment online becomes truly viable, but without new customers you will never reach your full potential online.

Of course, you have to have the data about your web visitors to decide where you stand.

E-Commerce Innovation

Your winery could do this: pre-fill a shopping cart for returning customers, based on their previous purchases.

Jeez, this is brilliant.  If you want e-commerce lessons, study the people who spend lots and lots of money to make sure it's optimized (e.g. Amazon.com, Wine.com).  

I wouldn't call it "Guess My Order," though.  I think this copy is particularly confusing.

The Little Things Count: Link Color

Yes, there are winery website disasters.

But even small changes, like a red link vs a blue link can make a gigantic difference in click-throughs (and perhaps, conversions as well).

And that's why you have to test and measure!  For the record, I guessed wrong.

(PS - if you worry about website conversion rates, Which Test Won? is worth subscribing to...)

Pay By Webcam?

This is an interesting development in the world of e-commerce: pay by holding your credit card up to a webcam.

I can't recommend this payment service to wineries for their websites because of the delay in payment (30 days with a 10% rolling reserve), but it's good to keep up with the latest advances.

And hey, it's kinda cool.

(via Dave Kaminsky's Web Video University)

A/B Testing: A Wine Example

Many of you know about A/B testing on websites: showing one of two versions (A and B) of a given page to visitors, and seeing which one generates a better result.

The ElasticPath e-commerce blog, GetElastic (recommended), has a nice post about A/B testing for wine, complete with a real-life example of a wine product page.  The results are, to say the least, interesting (and counter-intuitive).

We'd all like to think we know best when it comes to what appeals to website visitors (and, in my experience, wineries are particularly guilty in this regard), but testing reveals the (sometimes surprising) truth about what drives visitors to take action.

If you have an A/B testing story to share, please do so in the comments.

Update: here's a link to the full case-study documenting a 41% lift in revenue per visitor.

Should You Let People "Like" Your Wine?

I got some comments on a recent post which doubted the value of Facebook in actually driving sales.

You may find these statistics about the impact of a Like buttom on sales interesting.  One example:

American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors

The Perfect Shopping Cart?

This 16-item checklist from Get Elastic is a great way to see how you winery website stacks up.

After all, the goal of your website is to increase sales of your wine, right?

(If you do e-commerce and you don't follow Get Elastic ("the #1 subscribed ecommerce blog"), you're doing yourself a disservice.)

How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less

Check out what Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal says you might be doing wrong on your winery website:

How to Make Your Shopping Cart Suck Less

Warning: language and/or humor may offend some people.

 

Winery SEO for the Holidays

Last Minute SEO Tip for the Holidays is especially appropriate for wineries.

BTW, if you are interested in e-commerce and you don't follow the Get Elastic blog from ElasticPath, you should.  It's a great resource.

The Value of Test and Measure

(full disclosure: this is not the online sales graph for a winery)

What happened in December of 2009?  The company involved started to make changes in their Web site, one at a time, measuring the changes.

Notice that I didn't say "they redesigned their entire Web site."  And it was pretty horrible to start (and it's still no prize, in my opinion).

They just started with a pretty horrible design, and started removing the "rocks" that impeded customers from making a purchase.  Turns out, they didn't have to remove too many.

You can read the full story here.  If your site gets at least 50 visitors a day (which may be the first problem you need to solve), you can get the same treatment (for a price).

I apologize that this story isn't about a winery Web site, since that's what you come here to read about.  But I think it's valuable because it talks about incremental changes guided by measurement, which applies to your winery Web site as much as it does to a site selling The Amazing Bible Timeline.

Is The Server Working? Who Knows?

Here, with minor edits, is the opening paragraph of an e-mail I received from a winery today:

Dear [redacted] Customers,

We’ve decided to re-send last week’s e-mail announcing the release of two new [redacted] wines, since many of our customers encountered difficulty in placing their orders on our website. We have since learned that our website vendor was having serious server problems that prevented some of our customers from completing their orders (other orders were placed successfully). Over the week-end, the problems were fixed and the ordering system is now in [sic] working. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your e-mails, alerting us to these problems.

First of all, breathe a sigh of relief that this wasn't your winery.

What would have happened if some frustrated customer hadn't sent them an e-mail?  They might still have a broken e-commerce site.  They might be wondering why that e-mail offer they sent isn't generating as many orders as usual.

I could be cynical and assume that this is just a way of sending another e-mail blast to get people to take action.  But I'm not.  I feel sorry for whatever revenue this winery lost (my understanding is that they are, like many wineries, trying to move slow-selling products).  I suspect it also had some impact on their customer's perceptions as well.

I took a moment to look up the IP address for the winery's Web site (they host their own e-commerce solution).  Doing a lookup through ARIN (the entity which assigns blocks of IP addresses for the US), I could see that their IP address belongs to their Web host, Bay Area Network Systems.  Presumably, that's where the problem occurred, although it's hard to tell from the winery's description.

What can you do to ensure that you won't experience the same breakdown?  Ideally, you have a way to place an order (from outside your own network) that flows all the way through the system and shows up as received.  That's the only way to really be sure.  And even then, as the letter above shows, that's not a guarantee that it's working for everyone.

If you're like most wineries, where Web sales aren't all that important to the bottom line, you probably don't care.  But if you're doing significant revenue via your Web site, you should be asking yourself, "How do I know that my e-commerce site is actually working?"

(If you supply winery e-commerce solutions, I'd appreciate any comments you care to add.  Thanks!)

Split-Testing E-Mail Layouts

 

I'm just going to quote the e-mail I got from Anne Holland's Which Test Won?:

Can you guess which newsletter template got nearly 12% more clickthroughs? The changes are subtle, but they definitely made an impact. 

Let's face it, 95% of marketers probably don't bother to test their email templates ever ... even though email contributes significantly to the bottom line (especially considering its low cost.) This makes me nuts! 

Testing your email template is fairly quick, easy, and cheap. I hope this week's test inspires a few marketers to consider doing it. OK, my little rant is over.

Go, take the test, and be sure to sign up for her weekly newsletter/reminder.  It's fun (and educational) to see if you can pick the winner each week, and I'm sure it will give you some ideas for improving pages on your winery Web site.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

 

Do you know what percentage of visitors to your site put something in their shopping cart, but fail to complete the transaction, i.e. abandon their cart?

If you do, then a big hurray for you!  Take a look at How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment: 10 No-Brainers.  It's a great summary of things you should be doing to help customers complete their purchase.  I particularly like the last one about e-mail followup.

As for the rest of you: are you really serious about this whole wine e-commerce thing?  

Even if you're more focused on your tasting room sales, the same rule applies: you can't improve sales without somehow measuring the process.  How many people come into your tasting room?  How many buy something?  What does that correlate with?  How can we improve our numbers?

Tasting room abandonment, anyone?

Your Credit Is Waiting

Here's an interesting way to encourage repeat orders.  Rather than offering a discount, offer a credit.

An added bonus of the credit idea is you are not reducing the perceived value of your products by reducing the price. Rather, you are selling at full price (and full value) and giving the customer virtual dollars to spend. Sales are boring, and “come back and we’ll give you 10% off something” is overdone and not that exciting.

There's even a sample e-mail for you to copy.

Like I said yesterday, maybe all you need is One Good List.

Review Your Forms

One of the reasons I think it's important to control your e-commerce experience is because many off-the-shelf e-commerce packages frankly suck.

Here's a great article on the best way to design forms for your Web site.  But you can't take advantage of these lessons if you can't change anything on your site.

Pet peeve: forms which don't allow spaces or dashes in credit card or phone numbers.

Moshin Vineyards Won A Free Web Site!

The winner of the SSU Winery Web Site Challenge has been announced: Moshin Vineyards, a maker of Russian River Pinot Noir.  They were chosen from 60 entrants, and will receive a new Web site designed by students at SSU's School of Business and Economics, and hosted for a year by eWinerySolutions.com.

This is a screen shot of their current home page (courtesy of the most-excellent ScreenGrab! plug-in for Firefox).

 (click for a full-size image)

Currently, the site has no e-commerce capability.  To order, you need to print out an order form, or call them on their toll-free number.  Of course, adding that facility has potential impact on other winery systems like inventory, billing, and accounting.

It will be interesting to see what the new and improved version will look like.  The new site is expected in May, 2010.  I hope the SSU students will blog about the process of designing a new site (and integrating it with Moshin's current systems and marketing).

Congratulations to Rick Moshin and his family on the win!  But what happens when that free year of hosting at eWinerySolutions.com is up?  I hope the site is making money for the Moshins by then...

Ah, To Be Harlan Estate

 

At the Direct To Consumer Symposium last Tuesday, I ate lunch at the same table as three emissaries from Harlan Estate.

First of all, it was interesting to see Harlan representatives at a show where, ostensibly, people are trying to figure out how to sell their wines direct, a problem which Harlan doesn't appear to have.  Perhaps it's related to their recent acquisition of Diamond Oaks.

Second, they make 2,000 cases of a $500 a bottle wine ($6,000 a case).  About 60%, or 1200 cases, is sold to their mailing list.  30% goes to the trade, and the remaining 10% is donated or placed in their wine library.

(I'm probably overstating things, since 600 - 800 of those 2,000 cases are significantly-less-but-still-expensive The Maiden, not the Proprietary Blend).

If they have real costs of $100 a bottle (hard to imagine, even with the fancy stationery), that's a  very nice profit. $5.76 million from the mailing list alone.

Nice work if you can get it.

A $100 Bottle Of Wine

I recently wrote about Jo Diaz's post, What Are The Marketing Costs For a $50 Bottle of Wine? At the time, her post reminded me of something Dave Coffaro wrote a long time ago, but I didn't have time to chase it right then.  

Today, I took a moment to visit the Coffaro Web site and turned up not only Dave's original rant on the difference between what a bottle costs and what it is sold for, but this article from Brendan Eliason, entitled My $100 Bottle of Wine.

(BTW, Brendan is now the owner of urban winery Periscope Cellars.)

One of the things which the Internet has done so well is to remove intermediaries (anyone remember travel agents?).

Brendan's article  show that it's possible to make 95+ point wines for a cost that would allow them to be sold direct and still yield a substantial profit for the winery, even if you can only sell them in states that allow direct shipment.

It occurs to me that there's probably an opportunity for an extremely high-end winery which sells *only* direct to consumer/trade via the Internet.  It would require (I think) a whole new approach/mindset to be successful, but it's possible.

Unfortunately, I'm not rich enough to run that experiment (though I'd like to).  If you know of someone who's trying it in a serious way, please let me know in the comments.

Guest Post: Just How Big Is Winery E-Commerce?

Today's guest post is from Andrew Kamphuis the owner of Vin | 65, which offers "solutions for managing winery websites including website design, ecommerce, content management, and customer relationship management."  It grew out of a conversation with Andrew during the holidays about whether wineries really care about actively improving their Web sites, given that most wineries see a tiny amount of revenue from e-commerce.  Andrew had some interesting information to share, so I asked him to guest blog...

We provide our e-commerce solution to over 200 wineries and wine stores (mainly through white-branded solutions).  Less than 10% of clients make up 90% of sales going through our system.  (Big surprise, ­ but it’s really lopsided).

The real surprise for you is that those 10% are really doing some giant numbers.  We aren’t talking club or allocation sales either.  The sales they are doing would rival tasting rooms.  And while I don’t know their total sales I’ll tell you, this ain’t no 5% of their gross Direct to Consumer  (DTC) sales.

I believe that a few more wineries will get 20 - 40% of their DTC sales from the web this year (2010).  I believe that online sales is the most profitable segment for a winery.  What we need to do is to get wineries to believe.

I ordered wine at several high-profile wineries right before the holidays.  My wine all shipped, but I didn’t get a single tracking e-mail ­ -- a couple of the brand sites didn't even send me an order confirmation.  I ordered wine in the tasting rooms of 10+ wineries in Napa over a month ago ­ -- not one asked me for my e-mail address.  This is all basic stuff ­ before they start optimizing the site.

I believe that until a winery makes the website a part of their business ­they won’t see numbers.   Apple, Amazon, Zappos,  etc. -- ­ these guys all send tracking info, order info, etc.  and they all encourage feedback, encourage second orders, etc.  Wineries get how to set up their tasting room to maximize customer experience, but until they maximize customer experience on the web, the web is just going to be a sad number on their sales sheet.

That’s my two-cent holiday rant.

I believe. And this year I think I will have the customer and case study to prove it. 

Thanks, Andrew! I hope to have another guest post from you in a year's time with that case study.

In the meantime, if you don't already subscribe to the Vin | 65 blog, you should.  It regularly provides similar insights into wineries on the Web.

PS - tomorrow is the last day to take my 2010 Winery Sales Survey.  Please do!

Test And Measure

Here's an interesting approach to re-designing your existing Web site.  Rather than the "one fell swoop" approach, you might want to try "test and measure."

Net result: a 210 percent increase in sales of a $29.97 product (no, it's not wine - so sue me!  The principle is still valid).

Again and again, the secret to improving your winery Web site is the ability to easily make changes (and test them).

 Is your site easy to change?  If not, what are you doing about it in 2010?

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(If you haven't already, please take my 2010 Winery Sales Survey.  Thank you!  The results will be summarized in a future post.)

(I note that I'm not the only person conducting a winery survey.)

Lessons From Wine.Com

Wine.com sells a lot of wine.  As a result, I think that wineries looking to sell more wine online should look at wine.com to see if there are any lessons to be learned from how they do things.

Here's a brief MarketingSherpa case study of how wine.com lifted order value 15% by making better recommendations to site visitors: 

The system made relevant suggestions in real time as customers browsed the site. The types of recommendations included: 

• Customers who viewed this item also viewed...
• Customers who bought this item also bought...
• Products ultimately purchased by customers who viewed this item...
• Top sellers in this price range...
• Customers who searched for "xxxx" ultimately bought...
• Items related to search "xxxx"...

Obviously, this doesn't apply to a winery with just one wine to sell, and the level of technical sophistication is beyond many winery Web site owners.  But you're probably not making any recommendations at all, and that is a mistake.  For example, you could routinely suggest adding some of your best-selling wine when someone makes a purchase of a different wine.

If you're interested in the article, be sure to print it out, as it goes behind the MarketingSherpa "pay wall" after November 28th.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment.

A Free Web Site For Your Winery

Courtesy of Sonoma State University and eWinerySolutions.com.

The winning winery will receive both the completed new design and the ecommerce website, and free hosting and maintenance services for one year from launch date...The website will be designed and built by Sonoma State student teams during the 2010 Spring semester, under the guidance and tutelage of Sonoma State faculty and eWinery Solutions management.

Apply here.  Note: your winery must be located in Sonoma County.

You may want to read the rest of the rules before throwing your name in the hat.   Technically, you're nominating yourself to be in the running for a new site, which is perfectly fine.  As I write this, there are already six nominated wineries.

I guess someone forgot to include me (recognized authority on winery Web sites) on the announcement.  I had to find out from Wine Industry Insight this morning.  Some days, I'm just not feeling the love.  <grumble>

Seriously, I look forward to seeing the results.  Maybe they'll ask me to judge. <grin>

Smart marketing on the part of Richard Kline to get the SSU wine program's tacit endorsement of his product.

Add To Cart?

If you look at most winery e-commerce pages, particularly if they are part of an off-the-shelf offering (e.g. Nexternal), the buttons which place a bottle or case of wine in the visitor's shopping cart all seem the same:

In contrast, take a look at the way wine.woot sells its wine offerings.  This button is certainly more compelling:

 

Nick Usborne offers several more good reasons why you might want to reconsider an "Add to Cart" button.  Usborne's point is that online retailers carefully craft their headlines and copy, then blow it with a lackadaisical  "Add to Cart." 

He does allow that 

It can make sense to say something generic, like "Add to Basket", or "Add to Cart" when you have a large online store and are trying to get your visitors to buy more than one item at a time. People are very familiar with the process.

but really, you're not Amazon-dot-freaking-com.  Unless you're a top-30 winery, you're essentially selling hand-crafted products, each of which deserves a hand-crafted story.  

 My point is that wineries need to devote the energy you find at wine.woot to create a one-of-a-kind copywriting treatment for each of its current wines.  Something that says "Here's a story that will engage you while it convinces you to buy this wine." 

True, writing that story is nowhere as easy as slapping up some tasting notes and other information in a standard (boring) way, but I bet it sells more wine.  Note that wine.woot does provide the standard stuff as well, but not without leading with great copy written specifically for a particular item.

Does the wine.woot copy technique only work for inexpensive wines?  Twisted Oak does a woot-like treatment for its most expensive wine -- The Spaniard (at $49 a bottle) -- along with its 16 other wines (priced from $16).  Note also that the copy for the 2007 vintage of The Spaniard tells a whole different story than the  page for the 2006.

Each of your wines is different - why do your product pages all sound the same?

Another Way To Improve Your Winery Web Site

I can attest that this technique from 37signals works really well:

A great way to figure out the weak spots in your product is to demo it live in front of an audience (not just a couple people at an office). Talk through it and read the UI out loud as you click around and do stuff. You’ll notice all sorts of little things that can be improved.

If you pay attention to yourself while explaining to someone how to order a bottle of wine from your site (either starting at the home page, or perhaps as the result of searching), you'll see places where "Why do I have to do that?" or "Why isn't this clearer?" are obvious questions.

On your Web site, it shouldn't take more than 3 clicks for someone to put a bottle (or a case) of wine in their shopping cart, starting from the home page.  First click: select "Buy Wine".  Second click: choose the wine you want to buy.  Alter quantity if necessary. Third click: add to cart.  And a properly-designed list of wines for sale can eliminate the third click.

How many clicks does it take on your site?  Why is that better?  Please leave a comment.

Live Chat

This is more of a survey question: are any of my readers offering a "live chat" option for their site visitors?  Why or why not?

Have you ever used live chat while shopping or researching for yourself?

(BTW, if you're in charge of your winery's e-commerce efforts, and you don't subscribe to the Get Elastic blog, you're missing some great stuff.)

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Yes, people actually give wine as gifts.  That's why Wine.com makes it part of their main site navigation (3 times!), and why you might want to consider adding it to your site navigation (at least for the holidays, if not year-round):

Here is some excellent advice on pre-holiday e-commerce preparations for your winery Web site.  The best part of the advice is to shop your own site now, so that you have time to make changes before the holiday rush.  And don't forget to devote some thought to how you'll be getting people to visit your site to do that shopping (mail, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc.).

People give holiday gifts.  It might as well be wine, and it might as well be your wine.  The secret: get the idea in front of people early (the week before Thanksgiving?) and make it trivially easy to give your wine as a gift.  Having a gift presentation that will be memorable for the recipient doesn't hurt, either.

(Need more inspiration?   Take a look at what Wine.com does.  There's plenty of room for your winery to improve on their offerings, perhaps in conjunction with a local gift basket company.)

Check Out Your Checkout

Elastic Commerce has a great post on 12 checkout blunders that lose customers.

Take a couple of minutes to buy something from your winery Web site and see if any of them apply to you.

BTW, all the major credit card issuers provide "test" credit card numbers, e.g. 

American Express	3782-822463-10005
MasterCard	5555-5555-5555-4444
VISA	4111-1111-1111-1111

which are valid digits, but non-existent accounts.

Change one digit and you've got yourself an error to test with (card numbers include a check digit based on what is called a Luhn code).

AVIN: The ISBN Of Wine?

Just as every book has its own International Standard Book Number (ISBN), there's a nascent movement to give every distinct wine its own AVIN (which doesn't seem to be an acronym for anything, but probably came from Adegga Vintage Identification Number).  The whole idea is to make it easier to search online for information on a particular bottle of wine.

Unlike ISBNs, an AVIN is free to create and use.  This is an important distinction, and could lead to broad adoption.  The question is whether wineries will see value in using precious back label real estate to make it easier for consumers to compare and evaluate their wines.

This post at Adegga called my attention to the fact that at least one winery (Cortes de Cima) is actually putting the AVIN for a wine on the label, with directions to Google it (try it for yourself).

What's keeping you from putting an AVIN on your label (or at least on the product page on your Web site)?  Please leave a comment!

Buttons

Here's a great example of why testing is so important.  Your intuition about what works best is probably no better than 50/50, even when the magic phrase "best practice" is invoked by you or your designer.

Testing is important for Laura Ashley, and it's important for your winery Web site.  Google Analytics plus Google Web Site Optimizer are free tools which allow you to accomplish this kind of testing yourself.

(By the way, I picked the right answer.  Did you?)

Persistence

Here's a quick test of your shopping cart that you should do right now:

1. Place a item in your shopping cart, logging in if it's necessary to do so.
2. Close your browser completely. 
3. Open a browser and return to your site. 

If your shopping cart still has the item from Step 1 in it, congratulations!

Otherwise, you may want to consider an improved shopping cart.  Nowadays, most customers expect a persistent shopping cart  (thanks to places like Amazon.com).

Don't disappoint them.

Why Visitors Abandon Their Shopping Carts

The number one reason?  High shipping costs, which seems a reasonable concern for winery e-commerce.  It's always good to let people know right up front where you can ship, and how much it will cost.  

You can find the other eight reasons people considered "very important" here.  Comparison shopping may come into play if your winery is available through other channels.

Question for winery owners:  how do you decide what to charge for shipping?  Leave a comment (anonymous if you'd like).

Question for shoppers: how do you feel about shipping charges?  What's fair?  What ticks you off?

Our Wines Are In The Wine Shop, But Why?

Paige over at Erath Winery invited me to take a look at their new Web site.  While it will take me some time to look around and do my "winery Web site evaluation thing" (much as I did for Twisted Oak recently), looking at their site navigation prompted me to ask this question:

Why do wineries have main navigation elements for both Our Wines and Wine Shop?

Lots of sites do this, but it seems like a false dichotomy: we describe our wines over here, and you can buy them over there.

Maybe I'm missing something, but Amazon (who arguably knows a thing or two about selling stuff online) doesn't describe books in one place, and make you go somewhere elseif you want to buy them.  There is no Our Books and Book Shop in their navigational scheme.

So, winery Web site owners (and designers), what's the rationale behind this split?  Please leave a comment!

Wine Fulfillment Companies

What are your options now that, as the Wall Street Journal reports, "the company [New Vine Logistics] plans to shut down permanently"?

There are a number of companies involved in fulfillment for the wine industry.  Here's a partial list (alphabetical - no recommendation implied):

• Bacchus Fulfillment
• Copper Peak Logistics
• Pack 'n' Ship Direct 
• ShipCompliant (software)
• Terravant (Santa Ynez) 
• Vintage Logistics 
• VinTrust
• The Winetasting Network (WTN)
• Wineshipping.com 

If you know of others, please feel free to add them in the comments.  And here's an older Wine Business Monthly article on selecting a third-party fulfillment partner.

Lew Perdue at Wine Industry Insight has a great summary article on what went wrong at NVL.

New Vine Logistics Suspends Operations

UPDATE 2009-06-01: Wine Business News has confirmed the suspension.  You can follow the realtime reaction on Twitter.

Someone gave left an anonymous comment to on one of my recent posts which alleged that the bank had padlocked the warehouse at New Vine Logistics (NVL) on Friday morning, May 29th.

I tried to contact NVL on Friday at about 4:30 PM Pacific to confirm the rumor.  I did reach David Yewell, one of their two sales managers, who didn't have any information, having been out of the office on sales calls all day.  I tweeted looking for another contact to confirm the rumor, without luck.

LarryTheWineGuy tweeted this morning (Sunday, May 31st) that NVL has suspended operations.

If this is true, there will be lots of repercussions.  They are believed to be Amazon's partner for shipping and compliance, and have wine in inventory from a whole slew of wineries.

I love wine.woot

I bought some woot wine last night, and the checkout page just cracked me up:

"Click this stupidly large button" indeed!

Having drunk Trent Moffett's other reds, I couldn't resist this $13/bottle offer.  The copy and the checkout page were just the icing on the cake.

Checking Out

I guess I'm on an e-commerce kick (I even created a new category for it).

Today, I'd like to point you to this post from Get Elastic (an e-commerce blog; worth subscribing to) on how the very best e-Commerce sites handle checkout.

Lots of good information for you to use when looking at your own checkout process.  You *have* actually bought something from your own site, right?

This also brings me to a pet peeve: inflexible e-commerce providers.  When you are paying for a (hopefully integrated) e-commerce solution from a vendor, you need to be able to control what is going on in the checkout process.  Once a customer decides to buy something, you want to make sure that you are doing everything possible to help them complete the transaction.

If your vendor or Webmaster doesn't agree with this, find another source.  Losing customers because your e-commerce provider is inflexible is simply unacceptable.

What Can You Learn From LandsEnd.com?

LandsEnd.com is among the world's largest (and best) e-commerce sites.  They have teams of people and plenty of time and money to spend on making the conversion rate for their product pages as high as possible.  Nevertheless, this GrokDot.com product page makeover shows that there is always room for improvement.

Take a moment to read the makeover article.  There are some simple and obvious lessons which you can apply to the product pages for your wines (like placing the "Add to Cart" button above the fold).  As is often the case, you really need to be able to see and think like a visitor.

There's a second part to the makeover, if you're interested, but IMHO, the real meat is in part one.