Co-founder and CMO of DRINKS Dives Deeper Into Shopify Integration

The following is excerpted (by permission) from an email sent by Josiah Gordon, Co-founder and CMO of DRINKS in response to Wine Industry Insight’s request for additional information about their recent news release: DRINKS and Shopify Partner to Power the Next Era of Ecommerce For Wineries. Subheads and paragraph breaks have been added for readability

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Wine as a Service (WaaS) platform to wineries and retailers on Shopify.

Shopify sought a real-time best-in-class solution for wineries and retailers and tapped DRINKS to extend its Wine as a Service (WaaS) platform to wineries and retailers on Shopify.

 

The key confidence-builder for Shopify, and hopefully wineries, is that DRINKS is already trusted by the nation’s largest retailers – many of them public companies – to manage the entirety of their ship-to-home alcohol ecommerce programs. DRINKS took its battle-tested compliance solution and worked with Shopify engineers for months to integrate the platform directly into Shopify checkout.

Why Have Wineries Been Held Back From Online?

Our point of view is that wineries have been held back from online sales for several reasons, from DTC shipping regulations to inadequate technology to oligopolistic distributor relationships.

 

It’s telling that there are estimates out there that the pet food category has 10x more online penetration, by share of ecommerce to brick and mortar, than alcohol. We don’t see improved technology meaningfully increasing aggregate alcohol sales, but we anticipate that breaking down barriers to entry for producers will shift purchases online in a massive way.

How/Why The Shopify Alliance Can Change The Industry

• Consumer behavior has changed permanently with the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices. In all other CPG categories, consumers have shifted to demanding anything, anytime, and from anywhere. Habits will change for alcohol purchases, and the category will no longer be an exception.
• DTC sales have higher margins. The industry will follow the money over time.
• We’ll see a mix of producers from 100% online ship-to-home to offering online sales solely so tasting room customers can reorder bottles they like without a phone call. Wineries with no online ship-to-home offerings will be the rare exception to the rule, regardless of price point.
• We feel strongly that over time the online buying experience will be better than in person. Most consumers buying wine in stores stare at a “wall of wine” with no idea what different wines taste like and have no one to guide them on their purchase (even specialty wine shops are not providing a retail associate for 100% of purchases).
• In almost all cases, consumers can’t taste a product before they buy it, stores have virtually no information about products (save a tiny shelf talker), and stores must put their bottles on the shelf in one configuration with no ability to alter their merchandising for each customer. Online sales have no such limitations, and our patented tech addresses those shortcomings.

We’re in the early stages today, but in the future, with more volume, we will create meaningfully better shopping experiences online, personalized to each shopper, that reduce friction and increase customer satisfaction. Wine’s virtually endless SKU count may be a hindrance offline, but it’s an incredible asset online when you can tap AI and ML to aid in the recommendation process.