February 24, 2023
•
11 min read
The wine market has gone beyond the restaurants, bars, and supermarkets. It’s infiltrated e-commerce. From independent brands and natural and organic wines, with quirky labels, to well-known cupboard heroes and prestigious names, they’re all online. Here’s our roundup of some of the most exciting e-commerce wine brands out there right now.
In the past, wine brands were synonymous with outdated e-com stores with small font, lots of text, over-detailed navigation, confusing T&Cs, and enough pop-ups to send you off the page and back to Google. But, following the pandemic, there has been a number of wine distributors, wine clubs, and independent merchants breaking onto the scene, as well as established brands who gave their e-com store a refresh with quirky, bold, bright, and exciting sites to get your taste buds going.
Before we get stuck in, it’s worth noting that most of these innovative and exciting brands are on Shopify. Shopify enables exciting experiences and creative opportunities for merchants through their available themes. For example, wine shops feature information-heavy items, so they need to be presented correctly, including options to create collections and easy filters - Shopify themes allow this.
There’s also a lot of high purchasing in the wine industry, so for brands, it’s essential to identify return and loyal customers – you can do this through third-party apps like Mention Me, available in the Shopify app store. Once you’ve identified them, you can reward them through loyalty programs courtesy of third parties like LoyaltyLion or Yotpo, offering up points for purchases, referrals, and even downloading your app! You can also offer loyal customers exclusive VIP memberships. Shopify allows you to do this by providing a member login via an integration key.
Lastly, creating bundles and offering subscriptions is a great way to increase ATV and add a sommelier touch to the e-com experience. Solutions like Recharge offer both a bundle and subscription feature, which many of the wine brands we’ve selected have integrated.
Now, on to the bit you’ve been waiting for…
E-commerce platform: Shopify
Subscription: Recharge
First up, Plonk wine club. Plonk specializes in rare organic wines and offers customers the option to sign up for a wine club based on their preference, red, white, or mixed. This one is for customers who already know what they like but are keen to discover new brands.
The site itself provides users with really straightforward navigation. For example, Plonk has lots of wine to offer but keeps the user journey simple with icons to break up text and a ton of filter options to narrow the search for the perfect bottle. We’re particularly excited by Plonk’s accessibility navigation bar, which also features adjustments for cognitive accessibility challenges, including dyslexia-friendly text and reading masks.
Plonk’s subscription service is powered by Recharge and is paired with more use of icons to break down the subscription package.
E-commerce platform: Shopify
In Good Taste takes a different approach to selling wine, opting out of subscriptions and instead honing in on unique experiences. Customers can shop and choose from their wine collection or head to their curated flights' section, easily found in the navigation bar, to discover different regions worldwide through wine collections hand-picked by their in-house sommelier.
The brand uses icons throughout their site, but in particular, to visually describe what flavors customers can expect to experience in each wine. In Good Taste uses lots of visual elements throughout the PDP to avoid long paragraphs of text and keep the user excited.
Instead of subscriptions, In Good Taste has a loyalty program using LoyaltyLion, “The Pour More Club,” where customers can earn points and redeem awards through their purchases, reviews, and UGC. However, In Good Taste could point customers toward their loyalty program more clearly. Other than an icon in the top right corner of the landing page, the loyalty program isn’t mentioned. Loyalty programs are a great way to encourage loyal customers and gain personal referrals, so it’s important to highlight this to customers before purchase.
E-Commerce platform: Shopify
We love Vine Box for their unique spin on wine subscriptions. Rather than doing bottles of wine in their subscriptions, customers, who are novices to the many brands, body, acidity, tannin, flavors, and more, receive vials of wine - just enough to decide if they like it. If they don’t, they’re not wasting a whole bottle.
Once you’ve discovered your favorites, Vine Box’s simple navigation allows you to head to buy the bottle, filtering between red, white, and rose. Although Vine Box could elevate this offer further by linking the full bottles to purchase on the pairing collections pages to extend the user journey.
Vine Box also has a “make it a gift feature,” which is a great way to encourage loyal and long-term customers to refer friends and family to the brand.
For the user experience, Vine Box has included an accessibility adapter on their store to give all their customers an equally enjoyable onsite experience.
E-Commerce platform: Shopify
Subscriptions: Recharge
One of our clients, Dry Farm Wines, bridges the gap between well-established distributors and modern influence. As a result, their site has a sophisticated, premium feel, differing from our other quirky picks. Offering customers a natural wine subscription, Dry Farm Wines hones in on nature throughout their site, using imagery, video, and earthy color pallets.
As for the user experience, their site is clean, easy to navigate, and features a simple but effective subscriptions section by Recharge. Dry Farm Wines also offer customers a one-time box. Instead of logging in through separate accounts for each type of purchase, they’ve kept things simple. Regular and subscription customers can access their accounts to manage their one-off purchases and subscriptions from one place.
E-Commerce platform: Shopify
Subscriptions: Recharge
Shop Cuvée uses bold fonts and illustrations to excite customers, put a fun spin on a product requiring heavy information, and articulate details clearly.
And, of course, they use Recharge for their subscriptions - offering customers a monthly bespoke wine box or the option to purchase other alcohol brands one-off. Adding a touch of personalization to their subscription through a quiz could mean the difference between customers returning after enjoying their box or being put off after receiving wine that didn’t suit their taste.
One feature of this e-com site that stands out on Shop Cuvée’s site is their blog. Blogs come in handy when the product is complex, or the user requires lots of information before purchasing. Using their blog, Shop Cuvée can support their customers at any stage of their journey, from what wines to drink in Autumn to a blog post dedicated to their recent collaboration with links to products available for purchase.
E-Commerce platform: Bespoke
Good Pair Days is one of those all-rounder sites. Clean, simple navigation, illustrations to portray information more effortlessly, reviews, a blog, and the best part - their subscription offering.
Good Pair Days subscription isn’t left to you to hand pick your wine box, nor is it a curated box (with potential wines you won’t like). They use a fun and informative quiz to create bespoke monthly boxes suited to your taste (with the option to swap wines out). So whether a novice looking to find your favorite wine or an experienced sommelier, this website caters to everyone.
They also have a solid loyalty program, providing users with a unique login portal to review previous purchases, sign up for wine courses, and gain points through referrals, rating their wines, downloading their app, and topping up wines. Customers reach different stages of their loyalty program with each point they collect, receiving gifts, extra bottles of wine, and more.
E-commerce platform: WooCommerce
That Wine Is Mine is a natural wine subscription service offering customers the option to sign up for their membership program or buy old editions. The brand uses fun animations to keep things light and interesting for consumers. But, their real winning ticket is their ‘create account’ section. The form asks customers for information like their age, how often they drink wine, preferred wine type, how they discovered the website, and where they usually buy wine. That Wine Is Mine can use this first-party data to create a personalized customer experience with bespoke offers and promotions related to their preferences. And to guide their marketing strategy.
E-commerce platform: Shopify
Subscriptions: Recharge
Sometimes Always has a lot of products to offer, which is common for wine merchants. However, when customers don’t have the option of browsing in-store, brands have to get creative and consider the best navigation experience. Sometimes Always nailed it - they have a filtered navigation bar separating wine by the color - red, white, rose, orange, and sparkling. But that’s not the shining star of this site; it’s their subscription package powered by Recharge.
Under their ‘wine club,’ customers can create a bespoke subscription catered directly to their needs. Customers can skip, change, or cancel their subscriptions at any time. They can opt for a classic or premium box of 3 or 6 bottles delivered every 1,2, or 3 months. And they can then pick their variety - red only or mixed, followed by their style, e.g., lo-fi, progressive, or signature, making the whole box completely customizable.
E-Commerce Platform: BigCommerce
Transparency is key on this site - Stompy is all about how their wine is made, where it’s made, and who made it. And they allow the customer access to this information through lots of messaging throughout the site, a ‘how it works’ page, and icons indicating the sustainable element of their wine offering.
For their subscription box, Stompy has a taste mapper quiz to help narrow down the preferences and capture their customers' first-party data, emails, and locations. Each question filters Stompy’s wine selection down to the perfect box for novice wine drinkers. More experienced wine drinkers can opt for a more sophisticated quiz with complex questions. Customers can also buy one-off boxes.
E-Commerce Platform: Shopify
Similar to Sometimes Always, Low Intervention has a lot of products available to purchase. To combat the confusion customers could experience navigating their site, Low Intervention uses clever drop-downs throughout the site to hide information that might be overwhelming but is essential to helping customers find their perfect wine. On the main menu, customers can narrow their search by color, country, grape, producer, and size before landing on the type: embedded-entry-inline id: c63QzI1Zcin7mSpMfKoSp2Y.
Once on the PLP, they can narrow the choices down further by setting price ranges. Continuing the theme of keeping things easy and simple, Low Intervention has included quick add-to-cart buttons on each product so customers who are more confident in their decision can head straight to cart. For the customers that do need a little bit more information, they’ve included drop-down sections with more information on thetype: embedded-entry-inline id: c7E5PQ3tcbmzY5YanqSB6UV.
E-Commerce Platform: Shopify
Bundles, bundles, bundles!! Drink Laylo specializes in boxed wines available to buy one-off or as a bundle. Bundles allow customers to pair up products that complement each other for, sometimes, a discounted price and help boost AOV for merchants. Drink Laylo could enhance this by adding a subscription option for customers, making purchasing easier and securing recurring revenue.
Other nice features across their site are payment options displayed throughout, helping to convert customers with preferred payment methods, easy, quick add-to-cart buttons, and a specific call-to-action page to refer customers - receiving a 15% discount in return. All of this is geared toward securing conversions, creating a seamless experience for customers, and creating opportunities to build revenue. All while selling aesthetically pleasing boxes with a positive sustainability impact (also called out across their site).
E-Commerce Platform: Shopify
Bowl Grabber is a fun, colorful, and exciting brand that uses illustrations, icons, and animations throughout to grab users' attention. The slow pace of the animations sets the speed for the user's experience of the site, encouraging users to slow down and read and understand the content rather than skip past it.
They’re quirky in their design and quirky in their offering, opting out of subscriptions and instead offering customers bottles, boxes, and cans of wine - to suit all use cases. They’re low on waste, hence cans of wine, so when you only fancy a glass, you don’t waste a bottle. And the brand really hones in on this message throughout their site with a dedicated sustainability page. To solidify this messaging, they could use icons and callouts across their store, highlighting the sustainable element of each product.
Another nice feature of Bowl Grabber is their clear specifications section on the type: embedded-entry-inline id: c7E5PQ3tcbmzY5YanqSB6UV allowing customers to identify the product specifications clearly, and compare products with each other.
While there’s still some work to be done on the perfect user experience, these independent and some of the more prestigious brands, like Dry Farm Wines, are paving the way for the future of wine e-commerce, which looks a little like – subscription-first, customer-centric, and no-nonsense. Shopify Plus is the platform driving success for e-commerce wine, and as subscriptions make perfect sense in this industry, Recharge is the solution behind many of their monthly wine box offerings.
If, like these brands, you’re looking to refresh your e-commerce store or expand your wine business into e-commerce and want to get off to a winning start, reach out to our experienced team.
