Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/998810
26 WINES&VINES July 2018 TECHNOLOGY heightened sense of service." According to eCellars Founder and CEO, Paul Thienes, a major tasting room trend is appointment-only style tastings, or a mixture of appointments and walk-ins. "We are the only vendor in the entire wine industry that has a completely integrated reservations system that complements our Point of Sale, ecommerce and wine club modules," said Thienes in an email to Wines & Vines. Thus, the system provides a seamless POS integration for Goosecross. Unlike Duckhorn, inventory data is needed for just the one loca- tion. Again, purchase history, frequency, and preferences are all documented within the same system. The only "missing link" Bason mentioned is the online booking component. Previous to eCellars, Goosecross used CellarPass, arguably one of the most popular booking agents in the wine industry, according to Bason. "CellarPass provides a certain amount of co-marketing," he said. He said he was worried at first that taking Goosecross off the third-party website would decrease traffic. "That doesn't seem to be the case," he said. "We get more traffic through Google search, TripAdvisor and Yelp than we ever did from CellarPass." Digging up data Flora Springs Winery & Vineyards' tasting room in St. Helena, Calif., falls somewhere in the middle. The venue does book by-appointment tastings, but it also sees a steady stream of walk-ins throughout the day. Like Crum and Bason, Elisa Sherburne, director of direct-to- consumer for Flora Springs, has been through a couple of software programs during her time at the winery. Her hospitality team currently uses eCellars, which they use to make reservations, process wine club information, email campaigns and track e-commerce sales and shipments. She said that while she's able to keep general DtC information within the system, if she ever wants to look up something specific — like which wines sold most frequently during a certain time during the day — she has to "dump it into an Excel file" to better sift through the data. This goes for campaign man- agement as well, such as email open rates, clicks and navigation toward the winery web- site. "I really just want more customization at the user level, so I can customize the reports I want to look at," she said. AS PART OF THIS REPORT on winery software, Wines & Vines surveyed winemak- ing and sales staff at small wineries (making 5,000 to 50,000 cases per year) with an aver- age bottle price between $30 and $60 about the software they use. Of those who respond- ed, 86% use software specifically for the wine industry and 70% use separate systems for winemaking and other operations such as sales and marketing. Of all winery operations, 71% said software for managing wine clubs and direct-to-consumer sales is of paramount importance but 25% said existing options are "poor" and only 33% use a system to sched- ule and manage tasting room visits. 1. How would you describe existing software options for winery sales and marketing? Average 43.7% Poor 25% Good 31.2%