It might not have happened overnight, but one day you realized you were in a love affair with wine and everything that encompasses it — in a healthy way of course. Maybe you’ve even trained your tastebuds to pick out all the minute notes and flavors, which is no easy feat. With this being said, you’ve now come to the realization that you’d be interested in selling wine and providing customers with your expertise. Here are the finer points of what you need to know.
Get to Know all The Legal Surrounding Selling Alcohol
This might not be the fun part but it’s a very important topic to cover since the selling of alcohol is a serious subject. If you happen to live in California, firms like Cory Briggs San Diego Business Lawyer group can help you with information in regards to setting up an alcohol-related small business.
There are licenses you need to acquire prior to selling and regulations to follow. So get yourself an appointment to talk over the “nuts and bolts” of the business. It’s better to be safe than sorry in this instance as your business can face tons of legal trouble for selling alcohol improperly and you don’t want any of that.
Take a Trip to Sample the Fruit and Build Relationships with the Vintners
Once you’ve gotten past the obligatory legal stuff, you can now have some fun and take a trip to sample the fruit you plan on selling. As wine comes in many different varieties and flavors vary, it’s vital to get to know everything you can about the product. Since you’re getting into the business of selling, traveling to wineries to taste the vintages and build relationships can help your cause.
Your best bet is to start with the smaller wineries as you might have more luck starting up a partnership with them. They can provide you with the wine you’ll need, in order to sell on your website. So get out there and experiment around to see what you like — you don’t want to try to push a product that you, yourself, aren’t interested in. Then, see if the owner is ready, willing and able to start a partnership selling their product.
Prepare Your Website
After you’ve gone through the legal hurdles and obtained the licenses and documents to sell alcohol online and created a budding relationship with a vintner or two, it’s time to build a website showcasing all of your delicious finds. Building a website from the ground up takes some time and skill, but it’s not impossible. If you’d rather leave that to the professionals then having your website designed just the way you like, will, in turn, be an upfront cost you’ll need to factor into the startup.
As an online eCommerce business, having an easy to navigate website with beautiful pictures and information on the wine is crucial. Be sure to research your products so you can provide insightful information that might sway your potential customer into buying that bottle of wine. The more facts you can provide the better, a nice story to go along with it is also nice for the customer to read.
Be Sure to Market Yourself
What’s the use of a website that no one knows about? Not much, so be sure to heavily invest time and money into your marketing. You can use social media platforms to help your cause and online advertising to help bring in the traffic. No matter if you have a lot of money to invest or maybe your bottom line for marketing investment is lower, be sure to do it. You’ll need as many eyes as you can to look at your offerings to help your business grow. With a sound marketing strategy, you’ll be able to bring in the customers and hopefully, they won’t leave until after hitting that buy button.
There are many exciting facets to starting an online wine selling company, but like any other business, you’ll want to do all your preparation. Make sure you fully understand the legal obligations you have and source out the only the best vintages to market and with a lot of marketing and a little luck, you’ll be the shop everyone visits to buy their wine.
