Wine Direct

I found the discussion around wineries working with Wine Direct very interesting, and I kept thinking about my experience over the summer. I spent part of the summer in New York working with a luxury womenswear designer called Prabal Gurung who was using Shopify to manage his ecomm business.

I spent a lot of time working on ecomm and it was very interesting to see what kind of considerations small luxury brands in fashion thought about when considering ecommerce / tech partners.

I think a lot of similarities may exist with wineries, and I think these considerations could give Wine Direct a competitive edge over other tech players. 

The main considerations included:

1)      What other comparable players do you work with? Whenever we approached a tech partner over the summer (be it a retargeting agency or a website pop up optimizer), the first and seemingly most important question the team wanted to know before anything else is what other high fashion brands the tech partner worked with. Given Wine Direct’s extensive portfolio of top wineries, I would assume that they would be able to make themselves the top consideration for wineries given their proven experience in the field, even if other players had better or more cost-effective  tech features…

2)      What is the costing model? Given how new ecommerce was to the brand I worked for, and given the limited funds they were willing to devote to it, there was a higher propensity to favor and explore ecomm solutions that took a percentage of topline versus a flat fee (e.g. picking a retargeting agency that charged a Cost of Customer acquisition versus agencies that charged a flat fee, even if the flat fee would likely yield a lower total cost). I wonder how true this might be for wineries new to the ecomm game, and what kind of costing model Wine Direct has adopted