January 2014 – garyswine.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.garyswine.com/

Description: Gary’s Wine & Marketplace began as a small wine shop in Madison, New Jersey in 1987 and has grown to be one of the largest fine wine businesses in the New York metropolitan area, with three brick and mortar locations in Northern New Jersey (Madison, Bernardsville, and Wayne), as well as the website. Geoffrey from Gary’s Wine states, “Commitment to friendly, attentive service by knowledgeable employees and a myriad of wine and food events for the public set us apart from other wine stores.

We travel extensively each year to the wine producing regions of the world, establishing relationships with winemakers and producers internationally, to expand both our knowledge of wine and our ability to bring you exceptional wines and exceptional values. We complement the great well known wines of the world with our own “discoveries” – distinctive wines we’ve discovered in our travels. These are excellent wines that are unheralded by the wine critics and reviewers, and our volume of sales affords us the superior buying power to bring you popular selections at excellent prices as well.”

Technologies Used: Geoffrey continued, “From a beginning web presence on a “shared” wine retailer site, Gary’s moved to their own independent website in January of 2009. From those first 100 orders in January of 2009, we have grown to processing over 25,000 orders a year. We have utilized ShopSite as our ecommerce software, and LexiConn as our host from day 1. Our ShopSite developer, Mike Masin of @stuff LLC, has provided us with customizations to the basic ShopSite software to meet the unique needs of a wine retailer.

We have used both in house talent and outside consultants to construct our site, but daily maintenance and upkeep is strictly in house. We make extensive use of custom ShopSite templates to vary the look and feel of our website. We have incorporated a third party search engine from Nextopia, which provides highly customized, wine specific search capabilities to our site, thereby improving the customer experience.

We make heavy use of email marketing, sending our customer base daily email specials offering special wines, free shipping offers, and invitations to events. We also use CRM software to mine the data of our customers’ past purchases to create targeted email campaigns, which bring a much higher return.”

Advice / Tips: Geoffrey finished, “My advice to retailers is to be patient, but persistent. High volume does not come quickly or easily on the web. A good website is a living, evolving process. You must maintain the content on your website, keeping product information current and helpful. You must constantly test and revise your site to improve the customer experience. You must engage your customers through email, creating a dialogue that invites them back to your site again and again.”

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