We found that many small to medium wineries had a good customer base but that the information was often distributed over several systems, some computerised some manual and nearly all with redundant data and no connection other than manual transcription. Inevitability data was mixed up, incomplete and there was ineffective quality assurance procedure to ensure that customers were being serviced properly.

We resolved to develop a system which could cope with many aspects of customer retention and added many other features our experience and research indicated would be of valuable.

• The system is online, you do need a reliable internet connection, but it does not have to be particularly fast
• Naturally customer details are recorded including the optional storage of credit card detail. Customers can logon to edit their details
• Order history viewable by customers as well as staff
• Recurrent orders optionally editable by customers, the recurrence period can be defined over a wide range of options and multiple recurrent orders can be defined per customer
• Flexible freight an insurance algorithms
• Order picking and shipping grouping
• We can assist with postal service integration
• Any number of customer groups can be defined, you may to have multiple wine clubs or special event groups
• Customers can be assigned to any number of groups
• The minimum price for an item for a customer is calculated but can be overridden by staff.
• Interactions with customers can be recorded
• Production notes (such as wine or brewers maker's notes) can be recorded (one thing we found time and time again is that this precious information was in one vulnerable place)
• Communicate with customers via personalised letter or emails (or even SMS if you like)
• Send personalised newsletters to subscribed customers. Customers can choose which categories constitute their copy of the newsletter
• There is a calendar system for important events that you can include in your web site
• Create web pages including order checkout and any other number of pages showcasing your products with pictures, ratings and descriptions (and that optimum price for the customer)
• You can make an order page into a point of sale system
• We can customise the payment receipt and verification process to use, for example, batch files, bank portals, Paypal, direct credit, encoded email
• We can build a complete web site or include our service in your existing site
• There is a fast production report facility, we can craft it quickly based on the information you have in the system, this is part of our service
• We can assist with importing your data into our system and exporting it out again and providing integration with other systems
• Our servers are attended 24/7 housed in a secure data centre with very fast internet access