Bright Cellars, the wine club adopts DRINKS on Shopify to streamline its regulatory compliance and alcohol taxes besides helping scale e-commerce operations. Using the company’s completely integrated regulatory technology solution get rid of bottlenecks, handles compliance and as a result enhances customer experiences.
DRINKS has made Bright Cellars’ recent migration onto the Shopify platform seamless and smooth. It has eliminated the complexity, friction and time-taking process that comes with state-by-state tax compliance and revenue transfer. Hence, Bright Cellars can now focus on providing the personalized and best down-to-earth wine experiences. It can also leverage the business-building apps of Shopify.
Using DRINKS immediately solved our tax and compliance needs on our new platform. Their deep partnership with Shopify and the Shopify ecosystem allowed for a very rapid deployment while actually expanding our capabilities.
Joe Megibow, CEO, Bright Cellars
New Shopify Store
Bright Cellars’ new Shopify-powered e-commerce store enables its customers to shop in completely new ways. For example, wine lovers can now select and purchase wines they like through the bundle, not just through a monthly subscription.
“DRINKS is incredibly customizable for our needs, works seamlessly within our Shopify workflow, and has exceeded our expectations in our first month,” said Joe Megibow, CEO of Bright Cellars.
“Using DRINKS immediately solved our tax and compliance needs on our new platform. Their deep partnership with Shopify and the Shopify ecosystem allowed for very rapid deployment while actually expanding our capabilities. These changes have reduced our internal labor needs, which not only delivers better financial performance, but has allowed us to spend more time on improving the overall customer experience, which is going extremely well,” says Megibow.
About DRINKS
DRINKS’ solution is trusted by national wineries, e-commerce marketplaces and Fortune 20 retailers. Moreover, its integration with Shopify has only added to its credibility and popularity.
“We’re excited to team up with Bright Cellars to help them do what they do best—creating amazing wine experiences for their customers. By solving their regulatory technology needs, we’re enabling Bright Cellars to stay focused on customer experience and continue to help consumers find the wine they love,” says Zac Brandenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of DRINKS.
About Bright Cellars
Bright Cellars was established to allow more people to discover their love for wine. It aims to push back on traditional wine culture. Bright Cellars match people with the wine they will love through a simple quiz. It has over 80 different types of wine and the personalized wine picks are delivered to your doorstep. Bright Cellars boasts a community of more than 400,000+ who have wine subscriptions.
Bright Cellars claims its wine is sourced from across the globe and sampled by a team of in-house sommeliers. “Finding wine you love shouldn’t be this hard,” is the basic idea of the company.
“What started with an algorithm that matches people to the wine they’ll love has become a coalition of people passionate about breaking down the barriers that make wine exclusive and difficult to understand. We’ve brought sommeliers, software engineers, and normal people together to the same table to create the wine we want to see in the world,” states Bright Cellars. Its team of wine experts includes wine education expert Karis Kontilis, Master Sommelier Catherine Fallis and viticultural and vinification expert Jason Candelario.
$250 Billion Alcohol Business
DRINKS powers e-commerce for the $250 billion US alcohol market. It helps retailers, online marketplaces and alcohol companies by removing red tape with simple-to-use enterprise-grade technology. Its Wine as a Service (WaaS) platform allows unlicensed and licensed businesses to bring beverage alcohol directly to the doorstep of the consumers, delivered in 1–2 days across 38,000 zip codes.
“DRINKS was twice named one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes, a top place to work by Built In LA for the last four years, and was recognized as the Most Innovative Retail Model by Modern Retail,” the company states on its LinkedIn page.
DRINKS and Shopify Collaboration
On August 11, Shopify and DRINKS app joined hands to help retailers and wineries sell wine online. Currently, the DRINKS app is available only for Shopify Plus merchants operating in the United States. DRINKS App for Shopify provides Shopify merchants with real-time alcohol tax and regulatory solutions. This partnership directly integrates wine-specific real-time tax and compliance with the Shopify checkout experience to help retailers and wineries expand their Direct to Consumer (DTC) business.
“The days of substandard technology stifling DTC growth for our industry are over. DRINKS’ partnership with Shopify is a massive leap forward for tens of thousands of wineries and retailers who can now leverage DRINKS’ regulatory technology seamlessly within the world-class Shopify ecosystem,” Zac Brandenberg, Co-Founder and CEO at DRINKS, said in a statement.
The DRINKS app enables accurate tax and compliance that just works:
- Real-time tax and compliance seamlessly integrated into Shopify checkout
- Hundreds of pre-configured compliance rules that can be managed natively in Shopify Plus, automatically updated as tax rates and rules change
- Dynamic store customizations that prompt shoppers for their age and date of birth restrict non-compliant wines from being added to the shopping cart in real-time or held for manual review, display state-specific messaging, and apply volume limits per order and customer
- Detailed report generation for state tax filings
Digital Transformation
“The wine industry is undergoing a digital transformation where customers expect a streamlined experience no matter how they engage with brands. For many wineries in the United States, it’s been difficult to innovate and grow online because of complex compliance and tax requirements for selling directly to consumers,” Pete Jones, Market Development Lead for Wine and Spirits at Shopify, said.
“With DRINKS joining the Shopify Plus Partner Program, and launching their app for Shopify Plus merchants, they’re removing barriers to entry for wine producers and retailers,” Jones added.
In 2022, DRINKS acquired Electriq. It is a Shopify-focused digital retention and growth agency offerings services related to marketing, design, tech stack optimization and integrations. Electriq works on the basis of customer experiences to help brands lower their costs of customer acquisition and increase a loyal customer base.
Shopify For Wine
On August 19, 2022, Shopify roped in Evey Events as the app partner to manage tickets for wine tastings. Evey is a Shopify app that allows merchants to sell event tickets directly on their e-commerce stores. Announcing the same Lauralynn Drury, VP of Experience at StayTuned Digital said in a tweet: “In time for the weekend, @shopify announced major moves in making it easy for wine retailers to manage & grow their ecom and IRL biz. Our app, @eveyevents was picked as an app partner to manage ticketing for tastings, reservations and tours. Cheers!”
Also Read: Now, Sell Wine Online! Thanks to DRINKS App on Shopify Plus
Apart from DRINKS and Evey, there is a list of apps selected for the Shopify For Wine business. They are Recharge Subscriptions, Point of Sale, Simple Bundles & Kits, Linkpop, Shopify Email, Shopify Inbox, Skio Subscriptions (YC S20), Sesami: Appointment Booking, Smile: Loyalty & Rewards,Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS, QuickBooks Connector, Octane AI: Quiz Growth Tools, Better Reports, Rebuy Personalization Engine and Gorgias ‑ Helpdesk & Live Chat. On the Shopify App Store, these apps are mentioned as “fully integrated apps to help wine brands market and sell their products to new audiences and better engage existing customers”.
2023 DTC Wine Symposium
To host the 2023 DTC Wine Symposium, Shopify established a strategic partnership with DRINKS and the membership platform Recharge. The 16th edition of the annual event was held on January 18 and 19. It featured workshop sessions to help e-commerce merchants deal with common challenges that come with online wine selling.
On the first day, the companies hosted an invitation-only dinner for wine merchants which served as an informal session for them to learn from industry experts and form a network of professionals.
