Alcohol e-commerce company DRINKS has migrated its prominent Wine Insiders brand to Shopify Plus. The brand has been in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) business for the last 40 years. DRINKS is popular among wine sellers based on Shopify as it helps them manage real-time alcohol tax and provides essential compliance technology.
The latest feature can be embedded in the Shopify cart and check-out page with the help of the DRINKS App. The DRINKS app is available for Shopify Plus merchants operating in the United States. It enables wineries to manage DTC rules, calculate taxes and work under a set of regulations. The app comes with hundreds of pre-configured rules of compliance and tax rates that get updated automatically at the time of checkout.
Wine Insiders has demonstrated DTC leadership over four decades, and its re-platforming to Shopify illustrates where the future of alcohol is heading: a simpler, more streamlined and sophisticated way to sell alcohol online.
Zac Brandenberg, Co-Founder and CEO, DRINKS
The Shopify app provides an e-commerce marketplace to the physical beverage alcohol industry. It is quite easy for wine merchants to migrate from brick-and-mortar stores to Shopify.
Additional Features
The DRINKS App comes with additional features as one can customise the store with dynamic elements to attract consumers of the legal drinking age. It also helps merchants avoid selling non-compliant wines, showcase state-specific messages and ensure a certain limit of orders for each customer.
Wineries can also access a detailed report on sales, automatically generated on the app, for state tax filings. Besides sales, DRINKS also summarises reports on credits and returns for merchants’ use.
Now, with Wine Insiders, Shopify merchants can offer personalized checkout experiences to each consumer. It will not only help small businesses grow but also make complying with ever-changing laws and regulations easier than ever. With DRINKS’ new integration, Shopify is able to support an expanding beverage alcohol e-commerce. All this will be done as per regulatory compliance.
“The addition of DRINKS’ groundbreaking real-time regulatory technology has made Shopify the best way to sell alcohol online directly to consumers,” Zac Brandenberg, Co-Founder and CEO of DRINKS, said in a statement.
“Wine Insiders has demonstrated DTC leadership over four decades, and its re-platforming to Shopify illustrates where the future of alcohol is heading: a simpler, more streamlined and sophisticated way to sell alcohol online,” Brandenberg added.
Electriq Support
DRINKS has an in-house retention and growth agency called Electriq to help wineries manage DTC sales. Electriq is also an agency certified by Shopify Plus, providing the Canadian e-commerce giant with 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.
“Our mission is to empower Wine Insiders with the best tools to supercharge its growth. With DRINKS technology integrated into Shopify, that is now well within reach,” Electriq Founder and President Brandon Amoroso said.
“Migrating an e-commerce powerhouse like Wine Insiders is a lightning bolt moment for the alcohol industry, highlighting that Shopify is safe, easy, and scalable for large, sophisticated and regulated merchants,” Amoroso added.
Milestone For Wine Merchants
According to Shopify’s Head of Wine and Spirits Pete Jones, the new partnership with DRINKS “marks a milestone for the alcohol industry”.
“The migration of Wine Insiders to Shopify marks a milestone for the alcohol industry, which is undergoing an accelerated digital transformation. Bringing a leader with more than 40 years of alcohol marketplace experience onto Shopify will no doubt inspire other beverage alcohol businesses to follow suit. DRINKS technology coupled with Shopify’s best-converting checkout demonstrates how wineries and retailers can innovate, grow online, and better serve their customers through this thriving new partnership,” Jones said.
Wine Insiders was established in 1982. It has powered the delivery of more than 50 million wine bottles since then. For this, the brand covered two million households based across 38,000 zip codes. Most internet users prefer the brand to purchase premium wine at low prices. It was featured in the Wine Enthusiast’s 2021 Top 5 Best Value Retailer list.
Wine Insiders has received more than 2,200 awards for its selection since 2014. As many as 188 awards came in 2022, including nine Platinum and seven Best in Class medals.
Shopify’s Effort
In January, Shopify hosted the 2023 DTC Wine Symposium in partnership with DRINKS and the membership platform Recharge. The 16th edition of the annual event featured workshop sessions to help e-commerce merchants tackle common challenges involved with online wine selling.
At the 2023 DTC Wine Symposium, Recharge explained the offered club management tools, which can be personalized to boost cart values. The club membership aims at establishing long-term and close relationships with online buyers. Recharge also demonstrated how the wine-tasting experience can be provided online.
In August last year, Shopify partnered with DRINKS to allow Shopify Plus merchants to sell wine on their online stores. Directly integrated with Shopify checkout, this app provides marketspace to wineries and retailers to expand their DTC business. The Shopify ecosystem promises these businesses a platform to “create, customize, scale, and monetize”.
Prominent wine club Bright Cellars adopted DRINKS on Shopify to streamline its regulatory compliance and alcohol taxes besides helping scale e-commerce operations. It used the company’s completely integrated regulatory technology solution to get rid of bottlenecks. DRINKS helps merchants handle compliance and enhances customer experiences.
Happy Merchants
DRINKS made Bright Cellars’ migration onto the Shopify platform seamless and smooth. It 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.
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.
