Now: California Sales Tax Change for Marketplaces

You may have heard of a recent change to the California state statute for 3rd Party Marketers and wineries using their services. Essentially, the obligation to collect and remit sales tax for sales to consumers using 3rd Party Marketers will now shift from the winery “seller” to the marketplace.  This means our marketplace partners will start remitting California sales tax for orders originating from their platform. Vivino will be starting that remittance effective May 1st, so we are outlining a couple of simple steps for orders to ensure tax collection continues to run smoothly

Tax Disbursement

As part of our monthly disbursement process, WineDirect will be disbursing the sales tax amounts to our partners (ie. Vivino) and no longer passing those onto the winery, specifically only for California destination orders. You will see this in the form of a debit as a part of your statements, so that the tax amount is deducted from our total disbursement amount.

Tax Reporting with ShipCompliant Integration

Since our partners will remit California taxes on sales to consumers made through their platforms, you will need to ensure that these California destination orders are not included within your California reports. 

For wineries integrated with ShipCompliant this will require changing the status of the orders in ShipCompliant, from ‘Shipped’ to ‘In Process’, and the removal of the tracking number on those same orders. We have confirmed this with ShipCompliant's support as the best way to exclude those orders from your tax forms. This can be done either one by one in the ShipCompliant portal, or in bulk. The bulk option is by downloading the orders in ShipCompliant, changing their status & removing tracking numbers, and then reuploading the file. This update would need to occur the first of the month to effect prior month.

We will be working to automate this step, so you will not have to take these actions in the future.  We will keep everyone updated once timing for this automation has been determined.

Tax Reporting for those WITHOUT ShipCompliant Integration

Since our partners will remit California taxes on sales to consumers made through their platforms, you will need to ensure that these California destination orders are not included within your California reports.

For wineries that use one of the reports or obtain the data via an integration for your compliance filing, your compliance expert will have all the data that they need to determine how to deal with those orders.  While not exclusive, some possibilities are simply to delete the California orders, or bulk upload all the orders and then modify California orders so they do not count towards the tax calculation.  This process would need to be completed by the first of each month to effect prior month.

We would recommend that you talk to your compliance expert prior to taking any action in order to cover additional details that may be required. 

Fix: SiteAdmin Backend Permission Checks

As part of our ongoing commitment to security and PCI Compliance standards, we have recently identified a deficiency in the enforcement of our admin roles that temporarily allowed a Basic Admin User to edit or delete the profiles of Domain and Master Admins. We quickly worked to implement a patch and added an additional layer of security to prevent this in the future.

No action is needed from you, we have rolled this update out across the platform successfully on May 24th. Thank you for your understanding.
 

Fix: Database Index for POS

We have recently deployed a database index that fixed an inefficiency within Loyalty Points. On May 8th, this caused POS users to be unable to log in for a couple of hours. Those who were able to log in experienced a very slow response.

This permanent fix has patched the inefficiency and POS users will be able to interact with the app as usual. We apologize for the impact to your business and will continue to monitor POS as we move into busy tasting season.

 

Fix: Masked Credit Card Numbers

At WineDirect we take security very seriously and adhere to PCI compliance standards for the storing, processing, and transmission of credit card data and cardholder information. With our most recent security upgrade, we have now deployed a new layer of security to ensure masked credit cards remain private, with only the last four digits visible for order verification purposes. 

No action is needed from you - we are continuing our security upgrades to ensure the most secure platform for you and your consumers. Thank you.

 

Fix: Credit Card Updater Tool

If your winery uses WineDirect Payments Credit Card Updater Tool, you may have noticed your cards weren't getting updated. Our team has now implemented a fix to ensure your club members cards continue to update every 40 days.

There was a little backlog catching up on processing updates to cards between Feb 11 and April 28. We have now  updated all cards previously in the queue.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to monitor this process to ensure you're back on track for your next club run.

Deactivation: Customer Capture Feature

We are deactivating the beta feature 'Auto Digital Receipts', also known as 'Customer Capture'. This was rolled out to in beta to a few tasting rooms as a way to streamline the digital receipt process during a Point of Sale transaction.

While this was a successful trial of the concept, due to a low rate of matches found in our system our product team will discontinue it at this time and will be further assessing where to take this feature in the future to provide maximum benefit to you.

We will deactivate this feature on your Point of Sale on Thursday April 8th.

No action is required, and you may notice you will no longer have Guest Customers automatically presented with matches based on prior credit card scan in the WineDirect system. You and your staff can continue asking fist-time customers to either provide their email or enter it into the system on their behalf to send digital receipts.

Fix: Product SKUs Within A Product Bundle

If you use Product Bundles, you may have noticed intermittent cases of duplicated items within a bundle. We have now implemented a fix to prevent the specific scenario of multiple presses of the ‘Save Changes’ button unintentionally creating duplicate entries when adding items to the bundle. 

We appreciate your patience as we worked through this complex and intermittent issue.

 

Fix: Missing Order Information for Web Service Orders

After vigorous investigation and monitoring, our team has confirmed that orders upserted into the WineDirect system using a web service integration, including RMS users, are no longer missing data.

Please note that affected orders (starting March 9th) will need to be resent from the integrated application to correct for the previously missing payment and order item information.

Thank you for your patience as we worked to solve this issue with our 3rd party web services partners.

 

Fix: Easy Ship UPS Shipping Status Updates

We recently implemented a fix for an intermittent issue causing some orders using Easy Ship UPS setup to remain with a "Pending Carrier Pickup" shipping status, resulting in the “Order Has Shipped” tracking notification email failing to trigger.

We apologize for any confusion and inconvenience caused to wine club members and customers who received this delayed and in some cases duplicate notification. We are continuing to monitor while implementing additional performance improvements with UPS.

Fix: Loyalty Points in Australia

If your winery is in Australia, you may have noticed the Loyalty Points feature was unavailable over the past couple of weeks to both you and your end consumer.

Our team has now implemented a smart fix for this error and going forward the service will automatically reboot in the case of any disruption. We apologize for the inconvenience and are committed to enhancing the platform with updated technology.