Transforms DTC Winery Management, Saving Wineries Thousands Each Year
Healdsburg, CA, April 14, 2021 — Captina LLC today announces the general availability of CompleteDTC, a genuine breakthrough in direct-to-consumer winery management that levels the playing field for smaller DTC wineries. Founded by Ridgely Evers, the driving force behind QuickBooks® and a lifelong small-business advocate, the impetus for CompleteDTC was his experience growing his own thriving DTC business, DaVero Farms & Winery in Healdsburg, California.
Now, after several years serving a select, invitation-only group of peers, CompleteDTC is making its game changing capabilities generally available to wineries producing fewer than 10,000 cases per year. That’s over 90% of the market, and as businesses they have one key thing in common: every employee wears multiple hats.
“To be successful, they need a comprehensive, fully integrated solution,” said Evers, “because they have neither the time nor the expertise to manage multiple software and service vendors, much less keep disparate sets of data in sync. And history shows that if data is in two places, at least one of them is wrong.” That understanding has driven the development of CompleteDTC. It incorporates the full spectrum of functionality a DTC winery needs — web store, point-of-sale, club manager, customer segmentation and email marketing, reservations and events, outbound sales, club member portal, and comprehensive, useful reporting, to name just a few.
Every feature shares a common interface and database, eliminating the challenges of trying to tie third-party pieces together while greatly improving ease of learning and use. And the entire system is backed by a single place to turn for support and training.
But CompleteDTC is far more than a collection of features: it is a transformative reimagining of small winery management.
“The more you know about running a DTC business, the more impressed you will be with CompleteDTC,” said Paul Leary, a wine industry consultant in the Napa Valley with decades of experience helping wineries build direct-to-consumer capabilities. “It stands alone in terms of its conceptualization as well as its capabilities. I am pleased to offer it to our small and medium sized clients, and only wish it were available for my larger, enterprise businesses.”
Recruitment • Revenue • Retention
CompleteDTC is unique in being organized around helping smaller wineries with every stage of the customer lifecycle — with particular emphasis on tools that improve customer retention, a critical success factor typically not addressed by other solutions.
The Member Portal and Cellar Status features are examples of how CompleteDTC has rethought the role of software in customer retention, allowing wineries to reach members (and former members) with relevant messages that are about the customer, not the business.
While it would have been easier to outsource email marketing to a third party, CompleteDTC elected to embed a state-of-the-art email composer tied directly into the CRM system, along with a Marketing Wizard that provides powerful, easy to use segmentation capabilities. “The Marketing Wizard is one of my favorite features. The system is continuously capturing customer behavior, so we can easily develop perfectly-targeted lists. The composer lets us send beautiful, highly personalized, mobile-friendly emails, or we can use the built-in Outbound Calling system. Either way, the responses are right in the system, making it simple to measure response and ROI,” said Kasandra Brooks of Testa Vineyards.
An Expertise Ecosystem
The company’s 10+ years of working with DTC wineries — as well as operating one every day — has made it clear that these businesses need ancillary services as well as technology. Yet choosing the right provider isn’t easy, and a wrong decision can make things harder and more expensive.
For that reason, the company has assembled a remarkably broad set of optional service providers, each one of whom has been carefully vetted based on the twin metrics of service quality and affordability, and then only after real-world use by DaVero.
Tracey Welch, the company’s president and a licensed CPA, points to compliance as an example. “Just because a winery is small doesn’t change its regulatory obligations. While solving compliance isn’t part of other winery management systems, our architecture puts us in a unique position to do so.” The system handles sales and excise tax, age verification, and alcohol license monitoring, all seamlessly integrated into the software and supported by partners who can completely offload reporting at nominal cost. Relative to other approaches, Welch continues, “CompleteDTC all but eliminates compliance headaches, while also saving typical clients thousands of dollars each year.”
Credit cards presented another opportunity to reduce costs while providing superior performance. After careful research, CompleteDTC has forged a deep partnership with Preferred Payments, one of the most forward-thinking providers in the country. “Partnering with CompleteDTC made perfect sense for us because their architecture actively minimizes the potential for fraud, thereby allowing us to offer exceptionally low rates and fees,” said Katie Orkin, General Manager of Preferred Payments. Again, typical CompleteDTC clients will see fee savings of thousands of dollars every year.
The system includes native support for UPS, FedEx, GSO, and most third-party fulfillment companies, along with built-in nationwide weather monitoring so clients know when it’s safe to ship. And, of course, CompleteDTC also provides an intelligent integration with QuickBooks – at no charge.
“Saving our clients time and money is just as important as helping them attract and retain customers,” says Welch. “We take pride in the fact that most clients will find these savings more than offset the cost of CompleteDTC.”
Transparently Affordable
CompleteDTC comes with a “No Surprises” guarantee. The monthly cost is easily calculated on the website, and there are no hidden fees or long-term contracts. Unlimited support and training are included at no additional cost, as is onboarding and data migration.
The company is now accepting new clients. More information is available at https://CompleteDTC.com.
