The independent wine industry had been gradually going digital before Covid struck; the shift in consumer behaviour that subsequently occurred to online over the last few months was striking, with the best positioned businesses experiencing high double-digit growth.
Events can act as a tipping point for long-term trends. Lockdown has been that tipping point for the fine wine market; merchants and retailers will need to quickly adapt in order to compete in a fast-evolving world. How they adopt new technology and shift to new platforms will be a key determinant of future success.
The easy way to save time and “go digital”
Now there’s an affordable, best-in-class option. In May 2020 Wine Owners released the Hub, a business operating system (also known as an ERP) designed exclusively for the independent wine sector. And because the Hub was designed to be Cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), there are no upfront software costs and no minimum contract period.
The Hub excels at management of all types of wine inventory and information (the complex bit), takes care of your main business processes and helps you to develop operational excellence. That means you can carry on business just as you do today, but in a more efficient way and in the knowledge that you’ll be able to more effectively track every purchase order and sale.
How many times have you heard wine businesses say “our ecommerce is taking rather longer to build than we had expected”? Going digital is made easy with the Hub Webshop, an out-of-the-box ecommerce option that enables you to develop online sales. It’s setup to be fully integrated with the Hub, and because the Hub is built around wine product data, it’s easy to build an engaging experience for your webshop visitors with content that helps them buy.
It’s the affordable and sure way to move your business to digital and sell wine online.
In the space of 12 weeks this summer 10 companies adopted the Hub.
Gilles Corre, Founder and CEO of Asset Wines, a fast growing fine wine merchant and importer, was the first to adopt the Hub at the start of May 2020.
Gilles commented, “the Hub works beautifully out of the box for wine merchants. We see this as a long-term solution which meets our immediate requirements, but we’re also excited that it offers a tremendous roadmap that addresses our industry’s needs. It will allow us to grow and evolve.”
“As far as day to day operations are concerned, we appreciate being able to view our entire stock wherever it is in real time, which was incredibly challenging before we went onto the Hub. We love it.”
Ludovic Surina, Private Client Director at Mr Wheeler, the independent family-owned wine merchants, added:
“The Hub revolutionised the efficiency of our order processing; intuitive, a perfect fit with our needs and with a brilliant dashboard to manage orders from inception all the way to payment and delivery. The cherry on the cake is the ability to take orders on a tablet or a phone – perfect to stay on top of purchase or sales orders even while on the move!”