We recently started a series on getting your online sales vehicle rolling. Today, we are going under the hood to talk about the e-commerce engine used to power your shopping cart. At Grape Thinking, we have an established relationship with Inertia Beverage Group, as Paul, Andrea, and crew, in our humble opinions, have the best grasp and influence on the changes in the industry and are truly “Powering the Wine Revolution”. As such, they rank as our recommended engine.

So, what does this sales engine do exactly? As a winery, it has the vital role of coordinating the sales request between your customer and their bank, your fulfillment center and your bank.

A good engine should: (more…)

If you own a website or a blog, it’s a hard feeling to beat when you receive your affiliate payments. Of course, it is always important that you set-up affiliate networks with products/services/companies that you trust and ideally use yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is through a service such as LinkShare. LinkShare allows you to choose who you will be advertising for, as they have a huge selection of merchants. Once you sign up, which is a very easy process, you can do a search “google style” or browse through their selection of merchants by category or product. You are then forwarded to a page to accept the terms and agreements for that particular merchant, and review their referral fees. Afterwards, you can then review the many options that you have for banner ads and links.

Now… here comes the fun part. Getting YOUR link out, and turning that funny looking bit of text into revenue to use for dinner and a movie. Here are some things that can help:

• Write a blog post, incorporating your new affiliate link
• Place the banner ads in rotation on your site
• Seek out people who need your product (forums and other blogs)
• Run a viral campaign based around one of your affiliates (We can help here!!)
• Don’t forget to include links in your newsletters
• Create an additional page on your site listing all of your affiliates, and why you chose them

Most importantly, remember that when you send people to someone else’s website you are laying out your reputation. Don’t be an affiliate just for the money, make sure you would actually use the product or service.  Check out our some examples by doing a search at TasteVine.

If your trying to sell your wine online, check out this post on “Building a Direct Sales Vehicle“