I recently published a page that helps to explain how I rate wine clubs…..in the coming days I’ll be writing about each of my rating elements and sharing how I came to believe that it was important.
First, mostly because I think it’s probably the easiest category: shipping timeframes.
Ok, so my shipping timeframe rating looks like this:
| 0-2 Days: 2 points | 3-5 Days: 1 Point | 6+ Days: 0 points |
To start, I’m using business days for these timeframes because no one can have a ground shipment picked up over the weekend, unless you’re Amazon and even if you did drop your wine club shipment off at say the UPS store, or a Fedex Access Point like I used to, it won’t move until Monday anyway.
I’m going to be a bit generous with some of these. As an example, if I place an order at 730pm on a Monday night that really shouldn’t count. Honestly, an order at 330pm shouldn’t either because the pickup time for their common carrier (that’s an easy way to include Fedex, UPS, GSO and others together) is probably earlier than that anyway. So, 0-2 days is the gold standard and from my practice running an online wine club, generally this is how long a consumer will give you, before they start to ask questions. So, 2 points there. Next 1 point if someone ships between three and five days. 1 point because this is ok, but not great. Lastly, if you’re taking 6 business days to ship something, especially because there is going to be a weekend included there, you’re really asking a consumer to wait over a week from order, to when their wine leaves your facility and that is simply too long. So, 0 points because that simply needs improvement.
I hope that’s enough of an explanation. Shipping timelines and time frames are really, really important when you’re an online wine club at least partially because shipping wine is expensive and always goes out ground, so there’s no way to make up for time without taking a major cost hit which most wine clubs simply aren’t going to be willing to do.