The direct-to-consumer wine industry has undergone tremendous changes, experiencing the heaviest shift yet to online sales. And no signs show of this trend slowing. To meet this growing consumer demand and the evolving needs of our clients, we at WineDirect are excited to share the new ways we are improving our platform and services.
The All-New WineDirect will complete our top-to-bottom transformation to bring you the most up-to-date technology — all while maintaining strong security and reliability. This is just one example of how WineDirect, as the Winery’s Champion, is helping wineries succeed as consumers continue to flock to DTC for their wine shopping needs.
To support our efforts to produce best-in-class tools, we’ve made a change to WineDirect Plans and Pricing. Our new Plans have a low monthly base fee plus a small transaction fee, resulting in more flexible and transparent pricing. This model completely aligns our mutual interests, and ensures continued investment in innovative, winery-focused products to serve your DTC needs now and in the future.
Throughout the past decade, the DTC industry has changed dramatically, and WineDirect’s service offering has evolved alongside it – without any pricing changes. After studying all the available options, we decided to shift to a transactional pricing model, which is the standard for most ecommerce platforms.
As the volume of traffic and transactions increase through WineDirect, the costs to run and service our platform increase. Many of the underlying services we use are usage based, such as Emails and AWS (website hosting and transactions). An often overlooked aspect of the associated costs is the transaction value. As transaction value goes up, our compliance does too, as we are required to have more security measures in place to retain & increase PCI compliance. Additional areas that have exploded lately are privacy compliance and anti-hacking measures. We have upgraded our end to end security and hardened our systems against threats.
For our clients, this pricing model ensures that your monthly fee adjusts as your business changes. If your sales go down, you automatically pay less. Conversely, as you grow your fee increases in line with your sales growth. Most importantly, transactional pricing squarely aligns our incentives with your success, enabling us to continue to build new tools to better serve your business.
Our new DTC plans include access to our full suite of tools and are available to all of our clients, not only those on specific plans. For ease, each tool is baked into the system for easy-to-deploy tactics, and they can all have an outsized impact on business outcomes. We encourage everyone to learn about all our features, some of which may be new to you.
To equip you for success, we have developed new educational programs, WineDirect Essentials and WineDirect Academy, which you have free access to through your plan. We created these resources to provide accessible, on-demand learning content designed to ensure that you are able to use all of the tools within our platform to grow your business.
The entire WineDirect team is excited that you are on this journey to excellence with us and thanks you for your continued partnership with WineDirect. We are incredibly grateful to have you as a client and look forward to supporting your DTC business through this next chapter and for years to come.
