By James Atkinson
It's little wonder that consumers are flocking to 'daily deal' online wine retailers given the "hopeless" state of many Australian wineries' websites, says a leading academic.
Dr Roberta Veale, of the University of Adelaide's Wine 2030 Research Network, recently studied the websites of 200 Australian wineries of all sizes and across all states.
At this week's Winemakers' Federation of Australia (WFA) conference in Melbourne, she told the winemakers present that they needed to lift their game.
"It was very very revealing because we found that many of the websites were shockingly out of date. No current contact details, even things like phone numbers, email addresses, the product lines were not up to date," she said.
"In many ways it's a little bit hopeless, and so it's no wonder consumers are going to third party operators." "If they don't get satisfaction from your brand site, then they'll go where they can find it," Veale warned.
She said that even if wineries are not interested in selling wine themselves online, it's crucial for their websites to at least advise consumers were they can get it.
"A lot of websites don't list their distributors or anything like this," she said.
But Veale stressed that it's not important for wineries to have a "really fancy" website. "People are looking for simplicity on the web now – they want things to be easy to use and functional."
Unfortunately Dr Veale doesn’t understand that distributors don’t want consumers ringing them for a sale. They’re wholesalers, not retailers.