What is the best software for running a wine club subscription?

It was so interesting looking at all the ways that people try to set up their wine club software for their vineyards.

It should be relatively simple to run a wine subscription from your site but there are quite a few features that wineries want to have for their wine club member management:

• Integration with regular shopping cart
• Reports, reports, reports
• Customised shipping rates
• Recurring subscriptions but with the ability for someone to jump into a payment cycle rather than the standard pay now and get next month’s box of goodies. Most wine clubs want to have the amount charged just before shipping, at the start of each quarter
• Beautiful design (of course!)

If you have no time, the summary is that most options will cost you around $US200+ per month if you want shipping integration (aka orders are shown as ordered, then packed, then fulfilled then shipped). You can stitch together other options that will save you in the longer-term but you’ll need some tech knowledge.

Some of the options we saw include:

• Hosting your own WordPress website on hosting like Namecheap or WPEngine ($10 – $25 per month), buying a wine club WordPress theme ($75 once-off) and then adding software like Woocommerce ($199 once-off) or Subscribility ($40 per month + 1% of revenue – see a demo)
• Setting up a wine subscription box using Cratejoy for $39 + 1.25% on transactions + Stripe fees
• Vines OS is priced around $300 – $400 per month and the price is based on total revenue. Simple design but needs some more features for the price
• Xudle gets the award for most awkward name for wine club creation software. Once you hit $10,000 in sales, your monthly cost jumps to $449 per month + a $1,500 setup fee = ouch!
• Bloom does well in terms of wine club design but most clubs will end up paying $429 per month (although the price does include Shopify fees)
• Cru.io has beautiful design but has recently gone for more premium wine club pricing with $6,000 websites and ongoing costs starting at $300 per month.
• You could also looking to use Shopify with the ReCharge Recurring Billing & Subscription app for wine club subscription management. You’ll be paying Shopify costs for your site + around $20 per month for the billing, oh, plus 1.75% to 2.9% for Stripe fees. You could also try the Recurring Memberships App for wine clubs and pay between $10 and $50 per month.

I hope this gives you some more help in choosing the top wine club software for your vineyard. Feel free to reach out if you’d like help with implementation.