Many would cite the 2010 Winter Olympics as this year’s greatest achievement and export from British Columbia, Canada. However, I would argue that the highlight of the year from the West Coast of the The Great White North comes from two winery ecommerce companies who are succeeding where their spiritual California forebears have stumbled.
2010 was a crossroads year for winery ecommerce. At no point in time has the need been more glaringly apparent for wineries to wrest their customer sales destiny out of the hands of others. Yet, seemingly, all of this year’s online innovation has been with intermediaries including the now ubiquitous flash sales sites.

At the same time, domestic ecommerce providers in the wine value chain have been experiencing transition, opening the door to our friends from the north who view U.S. winery ecommerce as not a challenge fraught with compliance issues that require decoding, but as an easier path to growth relative to their own byzantine legalities as well as an opportunity to lead U.S. wineries through the forest of trees.
Direct-to-Consumer Wine Ecommerce
In June of this year, the former Inertia Beverage Group (now “IBG”) announced a licensing agreement with Vin65 from Abbotsford, British Columbia (BC) to use Vin65’s ecommerce and customer management platform as IBG’s standard going forward.
“As an outsider, we can relate well to all of the other outsiders placing orders online. I’m 932 miles from Napa and all I really want is great wine without a huge hassle. A local Napa person can walk into a winery – I have to wade through the website, the checkout, the shipping, and deal with that experience,” said Andrew Kamphuis, President of Vin65, commenting to me on his company’s detached perspective.

With the IBG deal, Vin65 cemented their growing reputation amongst the wine and technologically savvy set that they were the new leader in the direct-to-consumer winery ecommerce space.
Not mentioned in that deal, however, was the impact Vin65 might have on the other direct sales portion of IBG’s customer solutions—Direct-to-Trade (DTT), a void that may soon be filled by a BC neighbor to Vin65.
Direct-to-Trade Wine Ecommerce
DTT is a program that allows wineries to legally sell to trade customers, at retail or restaurants, currently available from IBG in 13 states (with more states legally able to be accessed).
When officially announced by IBG in 2007, DTT was heralded as an industry game changer – an opportunity for small and medium size wineries (who have had near-term historical difficulty securing distribution in states) to control their sales destiny and get their wines on and off-premise in a compliant way, enabled by technology.
Simply, upon launch, wineries could legally sell their wine into a given states’ retailers and restaurants via ecommerce-enabled self-distribution, or legal routing through the three-tier system (read: paperwork). I should know: I helped put the program in place at IBG leading the Direct-to-Trade efforts under Paul Mabray’s (now founder of VinTank) leadership.
By all accounts, what the DTT system afforded in access it lacked in usage. Wineries weren’t (aren’t?) ready to command their own sales activity. Though efforts were made to bridge supply with demand via a marketplace at the still existing WineRevolution.com, those efforts were met with more sales potential then reality.

Shortly after leaving IBG, I talked to a wine industry insider with both technology and distribution experience who remarked, “Direct-to-Trade is a good idea, but they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Wineries won’t put feet on the ground to sell and it will take 10 years for the program to get off the ground. With the venture capital money invested in IBG nobody is going to have the patience for that long of a development life.”
It was sage wisdom. Yet, one harbinger of successful development around Direct-to-Trade that did come from IBG was a press release announcing an, “Online Wine Wholesale Platform” in October of ’09.
The premise behind an Online Wine Wholesale Platform is to attack the problem of small-to-medium size wineries now being able to access a market (yet not knowing where to sell into said market) by focusing on the small-to-medium size distributor who is as equally challenged as his wine brethren in managing cash flow and inventory.
By turning the situation 180 degrees and giving a distributor a “virtual” inventory of wine to sell that can be fulfilled from the winery (or winery fulfillment operations) it seemingly solves the problem of winery sales effort while giving the distributor a bigger book of wines to sell with little risk in cash outlay.
That’s called a win-win.
Quoting from the IBG press release, “We expect this new model to bring a significant boost to wine distribution in the states where we are looking to launch it,” said former IBG CEO Ted Jansen
The press release continued, “By incorporating IBG’s producer clients into their wholesale portfolio, distributors can expand their product line for retailers and restaurants, giving those customers access to products which allow them to differentiate themselves from competitors.”
Since the time of the announcement in October of ’09, IBG has been quiet on the DTT front with a new stable of senior leadership who have, perhaps, different priorities, which may include pacifying venture capital investors.
Another Shot on Goal
However, filling this void in Direct-to-Trade progress brings us to the other shining star from British Columbia—Onlineorderdesk, who recently announced that their technology was going to be used as the online ordering system in Virginia facilitating sales between wine producers and trade retail and restaurants, very similar to the IBG program, with a keener focus on reporting and ease of use for users.

The specificity with which the Virginia program launched appears to be a beachhead for Onlineorderdesk who are poised to launch a larger scale Direct-to-Trade effort in the U.S., capitalizing where others have sputtered.
I caught up with Onlineorderdesk founder Kevin Blucke who was coy on his plans, but did note, “We don’t replace sales reps. or distributors. We work with these individuals to give them the tools they need to do their job better. We want to turn a sales rep. into a relationship builder not an order taker. They should be focused on doing their job and making more people aware of the wines they want to focus on selling – we will give them the tools they need to do their job and the confidence that we will handle the ordering process.”
Blucke’s statement to me substantiates the press release for the Virginia wine deal where he noted, “Now that we have entered the USA marketplace, we plan to aggressively pursue other jurisdictions at the state level and the wholesale distributors.”
In other words, Blucke’s plans sound very similar to the Online Wine Wholesale Platform initiated, but never fleshed out by IBG.
As 2010 draws to a close, I’m comforted that despite U.S. progress in faddish intermediary wine sales, our friends to the north have their eye on the prize and the bigger goal – affecting positive change with domestic wineries and wholesalers. If the question is: Can the Cancucks save winery ecommerce, the answer should be: Let’s hope so.
Source: http://goodgrape.com/index.php/site/can_the_canucks_save_winery_ecommerce/
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