In at the beginning of the DTC revolution, eCELLAR Celebrating Innovation
March 12th – (CALISTOGA, Calif)—The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of eCELLAR, the Napa Valley-based e-commerce and customer management platform that has delivered numerous innovations during the winery DtC revolution that occurred over the past quarter century. Founded by computer scientist Paul Thienes in 1999, eCELLAR early on took the All-in-One approach to e-commerce platform creation and has not looked back.
Over its 25-year history, eCELLAR has introduced numerous innovations to winery DtC technology including
- The first domain hosted online store
- The first 100% web-based Point of Sale system, rather than hard-drive located system
- The First internal reservations management system for tours and tastings
- The First PCI-Validated Security system for protecting winery credit card data
- The first platform allowing wineries to search across 100 data points for customer segmentation for reports and email.
“Wineries have always been particularly precise and careful in the way they communicate with their customers, which told me from the very beginning that winery data and access to that data would be paramount in their DtC efforts, “says Thienes. “Whether we were developing e-commerce systems, POS systems or allocation systems, I always knew that preservation and access to customer data had to undergird the eCELLAR platform so wineries could easily get to the business of delivering great customer experiences.”
ALL-IN-ONE AND NO-COMMISSION SYSTEM
Setting eCELLAR apart from other industry DtC platforms is its centralized architecture and no-commission revenue model. eCELLAR has always offered an all-in-one system that provides e-commerce, Point-of-sale management, customer data management, email campaign creation, wine club, allocations, reservations, and reporting all in one internet-based platform, without resorting to outside vender services while still allowing clients to choose to use outside services. Additionally, Thienes has kept eCELLAR as one of the few winery-serving e-commerce platforms that doesn’t charge clients commissions on sales that go through the system.
“I think we could charge commissions; frankly we don’t need to in order to hit our revenue targets. We know our winery clients, whether very large or very small, operate in an ever-increasing cost environment and appreciate predictability,” explains Thienes “If we can keep their operating costs down, they succeed and that means eCELLAR succeeds.”
Thienes expects eCELLAR’s and the wine industry’s next twenty-five years of DtC sales and marketing to be much like the first 25 years: adapting to change.
“Demographics, technology and consumer expectations will drive the evolution of DtC platforms like eCELLAR over the next quarter century, but we believe that this future will be intensely data driven, making winery access to their data and their ability to interrogate that data in diverse ways critically important,” Thienes predicts. “We don’t yet know for sure how the younger, digital-native consumers will interact with wineries and their tasting rooms, but we know they will include an affluent tranche of consumers that will interact with wineries. The job of winery e-commerce and CRM platforms like eCELLAR is to assure our clients are set to meet and serve up-and-coming customers exactly where they are—whether it’s at the tasting room, on websites, on phones or on the next device to come down the pike.”
eCELLAR will be celebrating its 25 years helping move forward DtC sales and winery CRM with client events throughout the year.
ABOUT eCELLAR
eCELLAR is an integrated e-commerce, POS and customer management platform dedicated to serving the wine industry’s unique challenges and opportunities. Its wine-country based customer service and programming teams are at the heart of the firm’s operations. With wineries located up and down California and in other wine-producing states, eCELLAR remains focused on client DtC success, customer service, technical support, and innovation. For more information see www.ecellar1.com.
