Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/131907
JUNE NEWS Wineries Shift to Mobile Platforms One e-commerce provider says more than 17% of its winery traffic is mobile B ellevue, Wash.—Digital media consultant Rick Bakas of San Francisco, Calif.-based Bakas Media told wine industry members at marketing seminars in Oregon and British Columbia a year ago that indicators pointed to a breakthrough for mobile commerce in 2014. 20 W in es & V i ne s J U NE 2 0 13 Recently Bakas told Wines & Vines that wineries are still lagging in the development of a mobile presence—or what he prefers to call a digital strategy, one that takes a coordinated approach to desktop and mobile interfaces, social media and apps. "From what I see, approximately 75% of wineries using the social web still haven't figured out the basics of social media and are doing it wrong," he said. Andrew Kamphuis, founder of Canada's Vin65 in Abbotsford, B.C., said mobile traffic through the sites of the 800-odd wineries for which his company manages e-commerce platforms has doubled in each of the past three years. "Two years ago in December, about 5% of our traffic was on mobile," he said. "This past Christmas it was at 17.5%. That's a huge uptake in mobile traffic." Kamphuis expects the percentage of traffic coming from mobile could hit 30% by the end of this year. Wineries have responded accordingly, he said. Originally an inventory-management firm, OrderPort LLC of Bellevue, Wash., has developed a roster for its eponymous tasting room software since debuting it at the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers convention in February 2012. A partnership with Vintners Logistics LLC and Vintners Direct LLC allows the fulfillment of orders from consumers to wholesalers, with integrated management and keeping of records. "It does all their sales," said Stephen Ratzlaff, managing partner of OrderPort. "A lot of wineries have different systems to manage each one of those. We do it all in one place, so at the end of (the) month it's really easy to do all of your accounting, all of your compliance reports." Ben Williams of Wattle Creek Winery in Cloverdale, Calif., told Wines & Vines that the system has helped the winery boost its mailing list, helping it get the word out about its wines to more people. In addition, consumer data is shared securely across the winery, so that the existing relationship is honored if one of those consumers follows through and buys wine. This wasn't the case last year, when Wattle Creek was manually adding customer information to three separate databases. "We were running a wine club database system, I was running a separate system for our mass emailer, and I was running yet another database system for our online sales," he said. "They've been as close to a silver-bullet solution as I could ever hope to find." —Peter Mitham