The last couple of years have seen a new form of online winery sales strategy develop: The Closed Network or Flash Site. Most of these deals center around reputable sites that receive upwards of 100,000 page views per month such as wine.woot.com, wineshopper.com, lot18.com, cinderellawine.com and winestillsoldout.com. These massively popular sites have shown a remarkable ability to move an extraordinary number of cases in a very short time, albeit at a stiff discount. However, there is an email alternative that may be more palatable to many wineries.<\/p>\n
The process whereby these sites sell your wine is through special limited time sales. Although there are a number of alternative methods, most will only sell one particular wine at a time and they will continue until they\u2019re sold out. The stronger and more popular sites can sell out of hundreds of cases within hours or even minutes. They have accumulated a large group of wine aficionados who are ready to jump on deals for their favorite varietals and the sheer number of orders that can cascade in when the right wine is offered at the right price can be outright stunning. Due to the extreme discounts these sales sites apply to your wines, they are not to be considered a conventional sales outlet but only a place where you can go to turn some moribund stock into a bit of quick cash\u2026 with the emphasis on \u201ca bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aside from the reputable sites noted above, there are many other Flash sites (which shall go unnamed) that run strictly predatory operations. They will pay the winery barely a third of the heavily discounted retail price, so if your suggested retail is $25, they will sell your wine for about $12 with less than four bucks coming back to you. Some wineries are finding that if they have to sell their wine that cheap they\u2019re going to go out of business. If the regrettably low price they have to receive for their product is not bad enough, their distributors are going to object forcefully to the wines they are contracted to sell doing an end run around their own channel.<\/p>\n
If the bank is knocking on the door you might well be tempted to ship a considerable portion of your inventory to one of these sites. In those cases you\u2019ll find that it is a superlative way to accumulate some quick much-needed cash, as many of these sites will cut you a check within a few days. If you\u2019re not skirting financial disaster to quite that extent, you might want to consider adopting some of the Flash sites\u2019 tactics but in a way that preserves your relationship with your distributors and allows you to actually get a respectable amount of money for each bottle: The Email Marketing Closed Sale!<\/p>\n