Wine Club Software for Small Producer (Cheap but powerful?)

Has anyone here gone through all of the options to see what is out there?

I Just came across this one: https://troly.io/

Cost is an issue until sales are up.

TIA for any help.

Doesn’t Squarespace sell a commerce product that can manage purchasers and subscribers info?

Gary, it does. I run my site for the wine glasses on SS - really a great platform.

Having surveyed the market recently for my own purposes, I can say it’s a lot more expensive than one would think. Most of them start at $500+/month or more. The one that offers the best value for money for my purposes was Orderport.

Used to be you could not sell alcohol via Squarespace’s ECommerce solution as their credit card admin Stripe, did not allow for any alcohol sales. Now, that might have changed since then, but for me it made more sense to be on migrate to another platform for the sale part.

Adam - There are wineries currently using the eCommerce function on Squarespace.

They probably are using PayPal as payment option then, which is a new feature. Stripe still prohibits it.

Adam - Looks like Apple Pay is also available in addition to PayPal. From what I’m seeing it appears that the eCommerce portion of Squarespace will continue to align and compete with other eCommerce platforms.

Adam, I have used/tested quite a few of the shopping cart vendor’s software over the years, and as an ex-techie, I am quite aware of how the products work, how they are built, and with what they integrate.
This past year I switched over to a product called truvi. It’s a complete solution with shopping cart, wine club as well as POS if needed (that is extra though).
The thing I like most about their offering is that it is a flat fee. There is no percentage of sales. The charge for this product is $99 a month. I use a version that includes a Point of Sales iPad system, as I have opened a new tasting room in Napa (which is what drove me to re-visit my backend solution).
Their website is (https://www.truvicommerce.com/). If you want any insite on solutions, feel free to PM me.
Cheers, tom

Thanks Thomas! I’ve kind of delayed pulling the trigger on my Orderport integration, just to make sure I’ve not missed any options. Had not heard of these, but will check them out before I do so.

Thanks, everyone, for your input so far. It looks like doing a detailed comparison between the two is a good place to start.

Thomas, I get the thing about not wanting to pay a percentage. The break even point is 8k/ month. Not sure how long it will take to reach that.

Yeah, I had to do that tradeoff with my previous shopping cart software. The months that I was really dinged was when I would do wine club shipments and possibly large wholesale orders. It’s nice not to think about it anymore, but I understand it is a tradeoff.

If there are any brave souls out there I have a young man with marketing and computer skills looking to rework an existing website or create a new site geared for efficiency, ease of use and marketing for small wineries. He is willing to it for free so he can break into wine marketing. He now owns a vineyard and has a lot to learn about farming but is a whiz on computers, has a genius IQ, poor people skills and cocky about his marketing and computer skills. 12 years experience and he is 28 years old. For an existing site, he has software to replicate the site, rebuild it as working model you can try out and replace your old site with the new one if you like it. PM me if you have any interest and I can give you more particulars and contact info.

Here is another one:

https://grapegears.com/

Anyone using it?

For the past twenty+ years I’ve owned DaVero, a small DTC winery in Healdsburg. I’m also a software guy (I created QuickBooks). Living at the intersection of those two worlds led me to create what I believe to be the best solution for managing a small winery. It’s called Captina (captina.com); do take a look.

Hi Ridgely,

Thanks for telling me about your system.

I am going to set up a demo. I am very concerned about cost and I notice that the cost calculator seems to show perhaps not the most current info for your competitors. The other one I am looking at is grape gears.

Wordpress is your friend. PLENTY of ready to go templates, some are free, some are well under $100 (and only IF you really need them, in most cases you do not). Plug and play install for all. Then add WooCommerce, also FREE, comes with shopping cart and FREE payment gateways of your choice: Square, Stripe and PayPal, takes minutes to configure. You can also switch between gateways on the fly, if need be, just disable one and enable another. And latest Woocommerce seems to have their own credit card processing gateway now, haven’t tried it yet, but will take a look in the next week or two. Great things about it is unlike others its all integrated and if you need to see sales reports its all in one place whereas with others you need to lg in to their websites.

I spent $200 all in, and that included $90 for Elementor, a great editor that plays well with Wordpress and Woocommerce, though Wordpress now comes with free editor built in, Gutenberg. Most of the great plugins for Woocommerce are FREE and you may spend a bit here and there on some, one time purchase mostly, but essentially almost any function you may think of has already been coded by someone and is on offer. Like I said, most free, some paid. I have maybe 3 paid plugins, rest are all free and good to go. For a club/membership plugin you may spend $75, but that is one of the most expensive plugins you see in Woocommerce, most are in the $10-20 range IF you need one.

Companies you and others pay to “create” web sites do exactly what I did, but charge crazy up front fees for essentially free code/plugins Wordpress/Woocommerce provide, and simply do what you and anyone else can do yourselves replacing/adding some graphics/backgrounds, adding or deleting some functionality (I actually dropped some features that are really mostly irrelevant, don’t need “carousel” graphics, etc.), and all for the privilege of paying $15-30K up front and then monthly fees of $250-~ (depending on greed). Plus per transaction fees on top of cc fees you pay already, so double fees right there. Mind boggling, but there is an entire industry taking advantage of wineries.

Look at my web site, I was done in 2 weeks flat, for under $200 all in. Now all I pay is credit card transaction fees (cannot escape those), and web hosting (comes out to less than $10 per month and is rock solid so far with no downtimes), and that’s it. Yes, I am a long time coder, but you really do not need to spend much and can save $$$ Thousands per year on maintenance fees alone.

Look at OceanWP, pick one for a “store”, comes with most anything you may need. FREE.

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Greg – you are absolutely correct; it is entirely possible to pull together a basic system to do ecommerce, very inexpensively.

However, running a DTC business involves far more than taking orders online. As with most things, good tools make a world of difference. Also as with tools, (a) price is not an indicator of quality, and (b) it’s hard to know how to pick the right one.

This is one reason why we invest so much time learning about a potential client’s business, and aspirations. It helps no one if the fit isn’t right, and we regularly steer people to alternative solutions – including, sometimes, WP + Woo.

Andrew – re the cost calculator, it is built using currently-available public information. If something’s off, please do let us know; we’re simply trying to shine some light on a remarkably opaque industry.

Tools?

Been coding for a living since 1977, though coding since 1975, not sure you can show me anything new by now. What “tools” are you talking about, just curious. Please be more specific, I am not your average winery customer. And will be happy to compare any of your offerings to what I have built for less than $200, all in, with Elementor Pro accounting for $90 of that, but then one can avoid even that, and most do. WP/Woo are free, include a nice Shopping Cart. Payment gateway plugins are all free. Shipping zones/rates are all free and included with Woo. Hosting is less than $10 per month, which is really our actual monthly maintenance cost for online/DtC presence. Plus any cc fees, of course.

Just curious, what do YOU charge for “monthly maintenance/support fee”? And “tools”. And per transaction, on top of the usual cc fees, as I’ve seen some do, which is mind blowing in itself? Even in months when there are no or low sales, in between releases let’s say, as it happens sometimes when they sell out small lots wines.

Membership club/mailing list plugins are less than $75, one time fee, an optional expense for some. I paid $10-15 for enhanced and more configurable shipping rates/discount rules plugins, IIRC. Other “tools”, as you call them, are most likely not really needed by small wineries. Customers need to be able to log in, verify age at some point, and be able to place and complete an order, and then receive their order, all in an easy to navigate and quick, no time consuming streamlined process. We provide our shipper with a spreadsheet we pull off our cc processor site, shipper then provides tracking number to customer’s email, and to us, when orders ship. That’s all the tools a winery needs. All mostly free, with a few that cost between $10-75, ONE TIME. WP+Woo are more than able to do all of that. FREE.

“… running a DTC business involves far more than taking orders online”. Seriously? Filing monthly sales reports, IF they are even needed, one can do in no time since you can pull them off your cc processor site, for free again, should not involve ridiculous monthly fees. For mythical “tools”. Small wineries, with small (relatively) sales figures do not need to file monthly. Hell, with sales of less than $500K per year they are not even required to charge county/city sales tax and only charge base state wide tax of just 7.25%. How many small wineries overcharge customers on sales tax? When one reaches $500K yearly sales figures, only then one may need to file quarterly/monthly, and also configure a different sales tax table based on county/city tax figures (on top of state base of 7.25%). Which you already have pre-coded, ONCE, maybe once per year at best, but then I am sure you still charge every customer separately for that, as part of your “monthly maintenance fees”. Correct me of I am wrong.

But, yes, we all make choices, and even though I keep telling wineries they can do way better when it comes to online presence and DtC expenses, that’s all I can do. In the end its their choice to spend way, WAY more than what is actually required.

Greg – that tidbit about the sales tax threshold is news to me. I did a quick cruise around the CDTFA website and can’t find any reference to a sales threshold that would exempt/activate the local tax requirement. Can you point me to a source for that?

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