Make Your Winery's UX Stand Out

Creating a good user experience involves more than just developing a beautiful website. Consider the amount of thought and consideration you put into designing your tasting room experience. From the decor to the lighting to how your display your wines, every detail has a purpose. When designing your website, there are several things you can do to delight your customers.

Let Users Buy From Any Device

Visitors should clearly understand where and how to shop products on your website from both mobile and desktop devices. Make it easy for users to browse and buy on their mobile device. As comScore recently shared, mobile devices now account for nearly two out of every three minutes spent online and four out of five consumers use smartphones to shop.

This means that what used to be acceptable for your mobile site is no longer the case. The design and language of your site should be clear and your website should be easy to navigate regardless of device.

Imagine this scenario: You send out an email promoting a new and exclusive release to your wine club. An excited member clicks the link in the email on their phone. They are ready to buy your wine, but when they land on your site, the page takes a long time to load and when it does, the page displays poorly on their mobile device—they have to scroll left to right, up and down, zoom in and zoom out, trying to find the link to your online store. Then, a call comes into their phone and they answer it, deciding that they will log on later when they are at their desk. But, they probably don’t log on and they probably don’t buy that wine.

Eighty percent of consumers shop online. To limit their ability to buy your wine using a mobile device or tablet is like inviting someone over for dinner and then hiding the food in your attic.

Make buying wine simple

If a customer is coming to your website to purchase wine, chances are they had a great tasting room experience or heard about your wine from a friend. Don’t let their fabulous experience stop there. Making the online purchase process easy is crucial to keeping customers happy.

MAKE THE CHECKOUT PROCESS A BREEZE

A smooth checkout process is critical. As a winery, your job is to make the wine, tell your customers the story behind the wine, and then get out of the way. Creating a simple checkout process and removing as many steps as possible will sell more wine.

According to Kissmetrics, problems in payment and checkout processes have forced two-thirds of shoppers to abandon their purchase. To avoid the dreaded abandoned shopping cart, here are a few best practices:

Avoid requiring a username and password. Allocated wineries should always auto-login customers by embedding a token in the email links, and non-allocated wineries should make the open storefront easy to use.

Accept all major credit cards. A high percentage of your customers use American Express. If you can, take AmEx.

Be mobile-checkout ready. More people are spending time shopping and buying from their phones. Businesses that don’t have smooth checkouts from their mobile site lose customers.

Don’t Ever Stop Delighting Your Customers

The journey toward a great user experience never ends. There are over 9,000 wineries in the United States—the experience you create for your customers is critical to set yourself apart. Customer acquisition is only the beginning. It’s important to nurture and charm your customers to encourage their satisfaction and loyalty.

The benefits of good UX seem pretty straightforward—if your website is easy to use, then customers come back to buy more from you. But it’s so much deeper than that. It's about creating a nurturing environment where your customers feel comfortable and at home. A place where they can get excited about their experience with your winery—both online and in person.