Wine Club Release Tips and Tricks
Tips for Preparing for your Club Release
When you are getting ready for your wine club release here are some things you can do in advance to ensure you have a smooth club release.
- Review the Wine Club documentation for the type of club you are running. If you are unsure about what types of clubs you have, please navigate to the wine club module. Under the Wine Clubs tab, you will see a list of all your clubs. Each club has a club type listed on this page.
- Winemaker Select and Customer Choice
- Tiered Case Club (Scroll about halfway down the documents to the Tiered Case Club Release Process section)
- Subscription Club (Scroll about halfway down the documents to the Processing a Subscription Club section)
- Allocation Clubs
- If you use the OrderPorts Inventory system, make sure that you have decided on the bottles that will be included and verify that you have the inventory for them.
- If you are using ShipCompliant or Vinoshipper integrations with OrderPort make sure your products are mapped correctly.
- If you use or think you might use the Real Time Inventory Tracking feature this must be turned off for all wines included in the club release. The reason for this is that this feature will remove the product from the cart 15 minutes after it has been added if the cart has not been checked out of step 6 has been completed. To verify this search for one of your wines in the catalog manager. If you see a box labeled Real Time Inv Track, then you use this feature and you will want to ensure it is unchecked for all wine club products.
- In the Wine Club module, there is a reports tab. We suggest running the Wine Club Credit Card Expirations and Member Report On Hold. This way you can contact your customers before the club to let them know they will need to update their card or will not be included in the release.
- If you plan on sending out a campaign in step 4 of the wine club, we highly suggest creating the design before the release. Creating a Wine Club design.
Tips for Step 3 of the Club release
Step 3 is where shipping is calculated. Any errors you may come across will be displayed under the red Errors tab. Hovering over the Shipping option will show you each individual customer's error.
You now have two options, attempt to solve the error now or mark the customer as a Problem Order and solve the error later and proceed with your customers who do not have errors.
If you want to mark them as a problem order, click the check box next to their name and choose Add to problem orders. For more information on how to deal with problem orders, please see the Wine Clubs FAQs document.
Tips for Step 4 of the Club release
Step 4 is straightforward one quick note is the "Mailing List Members" only loads the first 25 members, however if you have more then 25 it will send to everyone in a build. It's a quick snapshot of the first 25 emails. Don't be alarmed, everyone in the build will be sent an email.
Tips for Step 5 of the Club release
Step 5 has a "Search Term" to look up customers but it only accepts First Name, Customer Number, and Email.
If you are still struggling to find the account (maybe you are in the wrong build) click on "Customers" then find your customer's account, and finally click "Pending Orders" to look for one customer's club order.
Tips for Step 6 of the Club release
Step 6 is when you have completed the build and authorized your customers cards. Once you click Finish on step 6 no more editing can be done online or in the Wine Club module to these Orders.
After clicking Finish all wine club members with declined cards will be notified via email that their card was declined. Give your customers time to update their cards. After a while, you can follow this guide on the different ways to reauthorize these Orders.
Do not forget that the cards have not been fully charged after step 6 and you will need to proceed to fulfilment to finish this process. you do not have to charge the cards immediately. You have up to 30 days to actually charge the customer's cards before it will issue a second authorization. This does not mean you cannot charge the cards after this period it just means that the initial authorization would have expired.