Selling online with Veuve
- Josh Mehlman
- 24 June 2009
- Page 1 of 2 : single page
Photo credit: Anthony Geernaert
, about how great content made his site an award
winner.A word of advice: if you’re in a bit of a rush or have an urgent appointment, do not ask David Donald about champagne. His encyclopaedic knowledge and effervescent enthusiasm for the stuff fizzes over at the slightest opportunity.
In 2006, the French government awarded him the Vin de Champagne medal, making him officially Australia’s number-one bubbly enthusiast.
“Even before that, when I was studying my Masters of Wine, the first question people always asked me was, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’. I was never able to answer, but I used to say I would love to work for a champagne house.”
Not quite a year later, a chance meeting in a Melbourne wine store led to Champagne Gallery, an online store devoted entirely to champagne.
“I was doing a champagne tasting for the City Wine Shop... it was about 10 in the morning and one of my former bosses from about 10–12 years ago came walking through the door,” he says.
The former boss was Clive Kitchen, managing director of the Drinx Group, which owns a range of hotels around Australia and around a dozen liquor retailers in Queensland.
“They had this idea, so they flew me up to Brisbane and asked if I wanted to come and work for them,” says Donald. “Originally, it was to be involved with staff training and overseeing various parts of the business, but then the idea of Champagne Gallery started to become a life of its own and the beast began.
“I think we would have spent nine months filling the content and design before the site launched in September 2007.”
Nine months seems like a long time to launch a website until you realise the secret to Champagne Gallery’s success – beyond design, usability, online marketing or search engine optimisation is vast reams of champagne-related content. When Champagne Gallery won Best Retail Website at the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) Awards in 2009, the judges commented: “This is more than just retail. This is shopping, education and knowledge combined. I could spend hours on this.”
A time to celebrate
Australians love champagne, even though the local product isn’t bad by comparison. According to Donald, Australia is in the top 10 champagne-drinking countries in the world.
“France consumes probably more champagne than the rest of the world combined, but they’re very much price driven and don’t really care what it is,” he says. “In Australia we’ve always bought the premium brands, so we’re a very important market not so much by volume but by value. In 2008, all of the top 10 markets [that buy champagne] went into decline except Australia. We actually went up another 12%.”
Perhaps more so than other countries, in Australia champagne is synonymous with celebration and almost obligatory at any special event, says Donald.
“Especially in troubled times, it’s a luxury item that people can afford.”
Battle of the brands
Content and expertise are important, because the story of the Australian liquor market in the last decade has been one of two giants squeezing out the independents and smaller players. Woolworths-owned Dan Murphy’s and BWS, and Coles subsidiaries Liquorland, Vintage Sellers and 1st Choice Liquor Superstore, control a large and growing share of the market. The buying power of these retail giants drives prices down. According to an ABC TV Four Corners report in September 2008, these chains often sell products at retail prices lower than independent retailers can buy them wholesale. To Donald, this means limited choices for consumers.
“Supermarkets deal in volume and they’d like to deal with the least number of suppliers and products; it’s not about choice,” he says. “If you’re after something obscure, it’s just not in their scheme of things.”
This concentration is also noticeable in the champagne market, where four or five large producers dominate the market and most bottle shops might only stock two or three labels.
“In actual fact there are over 3000 different producers in Champagne who bottle under their own names,” says Donald. “A lot of them are so small they only sell from the winery. But we are starting to see much more of them.
“The freedom I have with the Champagne Gallery is, I can deal with the big houses but also a lot of the very small growers that people may have heard of but never been able to try.”
“Find something you can specialise in and you’re really passionate about. There’s got to be heart and soul to it."
Selling to the world
Selling online broadens your market; instead of the people in your suburb, the whole world is full of potential customers. For many online retailers, this means dealing with the complexities of shipping locally made products to customers overseas. For Champagne Gallery, it doesn’t work quite that way.
“A major part of the business is people overseas buying a gift for people in Australia,” says Donald. “I’m not really sending champagne out of Australia. There’s not much point sending a gift to someone and then they have to go and fill out customs forms and pay duty and VAT. But a lot of orders come from the United Kingdom, Asia and the United States. It’s actually becoming an important part of the business.”
It has also become a major part of Champagne Gallery’s search marketing strategy – aiming to get good results when people search for ‘champagne’ and ‘Australia’ in markets such as the UK and US.
Limiting the market to Australia keeps deliveries prompt, which Donald believes is an important part of customer service for an online retailer.
“We want to get to the point where they’re actually shocked when it arrives so quickly,” he says. “I love buying off Amazon because it’s cheap, but sometimes it might come in a week or it might come in three months. If we can get it there the next day, I’ll endeavour to do that.
“Also, if you’re not in a major centre, your choices are going to be reduced to maybe one or two. Because we deliver nationwide, we can ship things that people can’t normally get in Mt Isa, Far North Queensland or remote areas of Western Australia.”
Content builds search results
The guiding principle behind the site was to become a one-stop shop for all things champagne.
“It’s not necessarily about selling the product, it’s also about finding out more,” says Donald. “Let’s say someone has given me a bottle of champagne as a present and it’s from a house I have never heard of. We have a page for each house with a history and a rundown of what the house is, what they’re good at, how they began. I wanted it to be all encompassing.”
