Year One of Our Tock Integration

On this day last year, we proudly announced our partnership with Tock, a premier reservation and guest management platform tailored to the wine and restaurant industries.

Since then, more than 100 wineries have signed on with WineDirect to leverage Tock's reservation, table management and CRM system offering guests convenient ways to book tours, tastings, and special events.

Together, WineDirect and Tock provide deep customer insights, reduce no-shows, improve your team's efficiency and increase sales. Here are a few ways you can take advantage of our integration to offer the world-class hospitality your customers expect:

• Real-Time Sync between Tock and WineDirect ensures that bookings and club memberships will update across platforms instantaneously.
• Smart Groups pull from WineDirect contact types to allow you to automatically apply special access and pricing to your club members and VIPs, making it easier to run club member events and comp or discount tastings.
• Social integrations with Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps encourage discovery, with prominent "Book Now" buttons giving your winery a leg up in attracting guests. They'll love the option to book their visit in one simple click.
• Event management tools include everything you need to run a successful event, from a guest directory with notes and tags to waitlists to ticket add-ons. 
• Collect guest data and feedback through pre- and post-visit surveys:

  “Tock is like having a receptionist 24 hours a day. We’re now able to book guests around the clock, and in the process, collect important guest details (first-time visitors, celebrations, member referrals, etc). This wasn’t possible when we were manually taking reservations over the phone.”

  - Nicole Roberts, Epoch Estate Wines

We'll continue to collaborate on new and innovative features with Tock to enhance our integrated offering as we strive to create the ultimate reservations management and CRM tool for wineries.

Stay tuned for future updates!

> Learn more about our integration with Tock and request a demo.

New: Updates to New Checkout Tools

We've been working hard on upgrading our New Checkout options to entice you to switch over from our legacy checkout. Starting today, you can further customize your checkout experience because:

All Google Fonts Now Supported

When we first launched our new checkout, we offered a limited amount of Google fonts, however we are now offering the ability to choose from over 900 Google fonts. This allows you to seamlessly match your branding thorughout your entire website.

>Learn More

Ability to Customize Headers in New Checkout

A designer can now add custom HTML and CSS to style your online store's header when using our new checkout tools, offering you more control of your website's look and feel.

>Learn More

 

New: Updated Design for Send Mass Email

Today, under the contacts tab you will see that there is no longer a “Send Mass Email” section and now everything you need to manage and send your email documents lives under “Email Documents”. Besides the button placement (now on the top right of the screen), and an updated design, there are a lot of time-saving benefits that come along with this change that will make your email marketing more streamlined, including:

1. Crafting your email and then sending right from that document, without navigating away from the email.

2. When you send from the current email document, you only need to select your contact list. This reduces sifting through multiple categories and email documents to find your email, a significant reduction in the steps required to send an email.

 

3. Send an email to multiple people in the contacts section without having to leave the contact list.

Read more about these changes on our documentation site.

 

New: Shipping Address Error Notifications

If you're a ShipCompliant user, you now have access to shipping address error notifications on the point of sale.

This feature gives you the opportunity to identify and correct shipping address related errors before a customer leaves the tasting room, helping ensure more orders pass compliance and are not quarantined. This workflow change will significantly improve the customer purchasing experience.

With this feature, the compliance check is executed before the payment is completed, displaying any error codes for your tasting room staff to handle. This allows them to double-check the customer's shipping address, in order to resolve the error before the customer leaves. 

> Learn more by reading the documentation. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch! 

New: VinDashboard Partnership

Through our partnership with VinDashboard, WineDirect clients now have a new way to access and analyze your data.

VinDashboard is a reporting service gives you a snapshot view of key business metrics and allows you to drill deeper into your WineDirect data to uncover actionable insights.

Providing access to 50+ industry standard reports and KPIs, VinDashboard enables wineries to easily track and interpret your DTC data through a highly visual and flexible interface. It pulls your WineDirect data automatically and refreshes every day. 

Dashboards and Reports include:

• DTC Sales and Trends by Channel
• Sales Associate Performance
• Wine Club Monthly Overview and Analytics
• Tasting Room Daily, Monthly, and Yearly Key Performance Indicators
• Sales and Quantity by SKU

An ideal reporting tool for DTC Managers, Wine Club Managers and Finance Executives, VinDashboard saves you time by compiling the most important data into one easy-to-use, customizable tool. Reports can be set up to be emailed automatically and are easily exported to Excel, PowerPoint, and more.

Services start at $179/month with a one-time setup fee. Pricing is based on annual DTC sales and a 10% discount is offered for annual subscriptions.

> Visit our FAQ page to learn more about VinDashboard and request a demo.

New: WGits for QuickBooks Integration

Now WineDirect clients can transfer transactions directly to your QuickBooks desktop application -- automatically!

Our partner, WineGlass Integration Technology Solutions (WGits), has developed an automated solution that eliminates the need to manually download reports or use Transaction Pro Importer (TPI) each time you want to upload transactions.

Benefits of WGits for QuickBooks include:

• Scheduled automatic transfers: Upload new orders every night, week or month.
• Detailed error reporting: Research and make corrections when you have time instead of needing to fix orders on the spot.
• SKU Assist: Automatically checks that SKUs are matching in both systems.
• Handles split tenders and refunds: No longer requires users to manually adjust orders that have been refunded or paid for with multiple tender types.
• Field synchronization: Tax, inventory and class fields mapped from WineDirect.
• Easy setup and ongoing support: The WGits team configures everything for you and can be reached over the phone, email and chat for help.

WGits for QuickBooks offers WineDirect clients an easier way to reconcile your transactional data with your accounting needs, eliminating tedious administrative work and headaches for your team. 

> To learn more about WGits for QuickBooks, please contact WGits for a demo.

Now: Admin Notifications Show Changes to Customer Profiles

You can now view exactly which details have changed within a customer's record when they make edits to their account. Our improved admin email notifications are designed to instantly alert you of updates to a customers' shipping address, credit card, club information and more. This takes extra guesswork off your plate, saving you valuable time and helping you stay organized.

Another helpful aspect of these enhancements is that the notification will now specify important details of members' club information when they make edits to their accounts: 

• The Club Memberships line item lists all active and on-hold memberships for a customer.
• The Memberships Updated line item lists each of the active and on-hold memberships associated with a customer's edits to their account.

Here are some examples of what the email notifications look like. Any new information will be clearly highlighted in green, while old information appears behind a strikethrough line.

Example 1 | Edits to Club Information:

Example 2 | Edits to Saved Credit Card:

Please Note: If you'd like to update the list of team members who receive these notifications at your winery, you can reach out to our support team at support@winedirect.com or ask a user who has developer access to your winery's website settings.

> Read the full documentation on admin notifications here.

New: Improved Bottle Deposit Features

You can use our bottle deposit feature to help manage the monetary deposits collected on beverage containers, which are required in most Canadian provinces. We've been working hard to improve this tool for you and new updates are now live. Key benefits of the changes include:

• Variable Deposit Amounts: Deposits are now configured based on bottle size and your winery's location.
• Bolstered Compliance: You can be sure your winery is charging the right deposits according to your province or state.
• Works With Bundles: Any bottles added to a bundle will automatically have the correct bottle deposit charged.
• Customizable Shipping Deposits: You can configure which provinces you want to charge bottle deposits to via the state profile setup when shipping wines.
• No Manual Adjustments: Bottle deposits will be automatically removed from $0 bottles when the bottle cost is $0 following a promo or a price override.

To turn bottle deposit functionality on, someone at your winery with developer permissions or a domain admin can navigate to Settings > Website Settings > Store > State Profile > and check the box marked Bottle Deposit. This will activate bottle deposits for pickup orders, and allow you to turn on bottle deposits for shipping orders by following the next step.

Once you've activated bottle deposit functionality, anyone with State Profile access (including basic admins) can turn on bottle deposits for shipping orders by navigating to Store > State Profile > Select the State/Province > Edit Wines. Check the box marked "Charge on Shipped Wine," like this:

You can work more smoothly and efficiently thanks to these enhancements. We hope you love the updates! 

> Read the documentation on Bottle Deposits here.

 

Now: Edit & Capture Information in Corporate Order Imports

You can now easily edit corporate order information and import more order fields using our Corporate Order Importer. This tool is designed to simplify order processing for large corporate orders shipping to different addresses. Your client will only billed once for the sum total of all the orders, even if their orders include different products and are shipping to different destinations.

By popular demand, you can now import and batch edit a number of new fields using the Corporate Order Importer, including:

• Order Type
• Sale Type
• Campaign
• Sales Associate
• Sales Attribute
• Source Code

Here's what the fields look like: 

These new import fields increase the visibility of important information such as who rung in corporate orders. You can also save a great deal of time and work through the new batch editing functionality, which eliminates the need to edit orders one by one after uploading a corporate order spreadsheet. 

> Read the documentation on our Corporate Order Importer

 

New: Updates to Your Promo Tools

A few of our New Year's gifts to you are designed to make your Promos more effective. We've heard from you through WineDirect Ideas and in our conversations that being able to duplicate Promos and more easily couple active Promos would help you work more efficiently. You can now accomplish both!

Duplicate a Promo

You must configure a number of settings when creating a Promo, which is why the ability to clone a Promo that's already set up is so helpful.

To duplicate a promo, navigate to the Promos section in the Store and select the Promo you want to clone. Clicking the Duplicate button will generate a copy of the Promo:

All of the original Promo's information will be copied over to the new one, including:

• General Information
• Excluded Products
• Included Products
• Discount
• Categories
• Order Types
• Shipping Types
• Coupling

Note that when the new Promo is created, a random code will be generated so that it can't be used until you're ready. You can edit or remove the code as desired in the General Information section of the Promo.

> Read the documentation on duplicating promos here.

Couple Promos More Easily

You can apply multiple promotions at the same time if a customer meets qualifications for both, by coupling Promos. Our latest Promo enhancements make this process easier, allowing you to see exactly which Promos are active and upcoming, so you know which Promos to choose from when coupling. Previously, all promos - regardless of active versus expired status - would display in your menu.

Now, you'll see all active promos by default, as well as any promos with a future start date. You can view expired promos as needed with a single click:

Note: If you have existing coupled Promos that include any expired Promos, no need to worry about them becoming uncoupled with this update. 

Check out the documentation on coupling here.