Wine Clubs Handle Blocked States in a Variety of Ways

July 18, 2006 - Napa, CA - All wineries do not ship to all States. The question that continually arises is "how does a winery handle people who want to register for a wine club or make a purchase when the wines would be sent to a State that the specific winery has chosen to block?"

Many of the consultants and supporting software providers recommended eliminating the States from the on-line shopping cart and club registration pages. In fact, the software providers even touted their features for blocking sales as a special feature that was exclusive to their software. Their solutions would block all sales and club registrations in those States which would provide the ultimate in regulatory compliance.

The problem with this is that the wineries would not be able to monitor the requests and demand to know when it would be profitable to unblock the State(s). Active Club Management and WineWeb both recommended allowing the requests to come in, monitoring the requests and then handling them respectfully.

We are recommending that wineries comply with all regulations and laws, stated Theresa Dorr, Active Club Management. We understand that supporting specific States requires additional work and if a winery does not generate enough business out a specific State to warrant the support, they can at minimum monitor the request(s) and keep those people on a waiting list for when the demand is sufficient to add the State to their list. Active Club Management can monitor club member registrations and can notify the club administrator when a new member is from one or more of the blocked States. This makes it easy to comply with the rules and gather important information.

Blocking people from making sales or joining a club also can mean that they are blocked from joining a mailing list. We recommend that the mailing lists have different rules than sales lists said Dorr. By allowing people in "blocked" States to register for the mailing list, the possible market demand in the blocked States may grow and businesses can know when they can justifying the costs of supporting those States.

All the wineries we spoke to agreed with complying to all regulations but they also said they would not to blindly block States from registering for clubs or from making purchase request. They felt that the extra effort was worth the potential sale.

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