Wine Club Software - More than A Batch Process

May 11, 2007 - As more and more wineries launch wine clubs the realization that managing a wine club successfully takes more than just batch processing credit cards and shipping labels. If the world was perfect, credit cards would never expire and people would never change their addresses. But they do.

Once wineries process more than two shipments and the stack of unapproved credit cards and returned packages grows the awareness of preparing for the next shipment and how to handle exceptions increases tremendously.

Even in the case where a batch process can be used to preauthorize credit cards the need to take action on the information is key. Once the club members with invalid cards are identified the ability to take action, communicate with the club members and enable them to update their information can save a winery time and increase sales.

Depending on the frequency of the wine club shipments an average of 15 - 20 percent of the credit cards become unauthorized and 3-5 percent of the customers change shipping addresses. This results in unprocessed sales and packages being returned as undeliverable. Both situations reduce sales revenues and increase the staff expense as they search for the new shipping addresses, re-issue the shipping labels and send the packages for a second time. Beyond the expense of the staff time the shipping carriers charge a fee for the returned packages.

Take Action - Preparing for Wine Club releases can truly increase sales and decrease the cost of running a wine club. Checking the club member information and identifying credit cards that have become invalid and any other information that needs to be updated prior to the actual wine club release allows wineries to contact the club members and update the profiles.

Benefits go well beyond the immediate increase in sales and expense reductions. When wine club shipments are processed in a timely manner the club members also win. Wineries experience a reduction in the random calls from customers who are looking to track their packages or worse, search for missing shipments. When customers register for a program and receive exactly what they agreed to it helps to build the club member confidence in wine club and the winery and hopefully will increase loyalty to the wine club.

Credit card information is extremely sensitive and must be secured. Allowing customers to provide changes in their credit cards and profile in a secured manner is critical. Many wine club members need to make changes after standard business hours and providing a way to do so is important. Some people will email a new credit card number or even leave the number on a business answering machine. This should always be discouraged. This provides a high-risk for the winery and certainly does not meet with the Visa security standards. One solution is to provide the ability for club members to update their information through the winery website. The solution for online registration does not need to be cost prohibitive and there are affordable solutions for even the smallest of wineries.

About Active Club Management: Active Club Management offers an affordable and powerful solution for wine club management. Serving over 100 clubs in boutique operations and large, multi-locations organizations Active Club Management is customized to the needs of each business. The solution works like a personal club assistant and is specifically built to offer seamless integration with other accounting, POS, Inventory and shopping cart solutions. For more information, visit www.activeclubmanagement.com