Wine club retention should be about making your experience feel like an extension of your tasting room.
The best wine clubs don’t operate like traditional ecommerce subscriptions, nor should they. For products like toothpaste, cleaning supplies, or pet food, it makes sense to ship a package at a regular cadence for a regular price.
Wine doesn’t behave like that.
Customers want to explore different varieties and vintages of wine depending on the season. Some months they’re celebrating and opening multiple bottles. Others they’re slowing down or stocking up their collection.
When a wine club is treated like an extension of the tasting room, customers want to be a part of it. When it feels like a commodity subscription, the experience falls apart.
Quick Wins to Improve Wine Club Retention
Wine club cancellations often come down to a few controllable factors. Customers end up with too much wine, don’t have flexibility to manage shipments, or don’t feel like they’re getting anything beyond the product.
Start with the basics:
Let members skip or delay shipments without friction
Add a pre-shipment selection window so they can update selections
Offer multiple shipment cadences, not just one default schedule
Reduce default shipment size to avoid overloading customers
Introduce simple loyalty milestones like early access or anniversary perks
These are table stakes. Without them, retention will always be a challenge.
Wine clubs that people don’t cancel are built around three pillars: flexibility to manage the experience, retention economics that prioritize lifetime value, and a sense of experience and belonging that goes beyond the bottle.
How to Build a Flexible Wine Club That Reduces Cancellations
How to let members control wine club shipments
The fastest way to improve wine club retention is to give customers control over timing and frequency. Give members the ability to:
Skip, pause, or delay shipments
Choose when wine arrives
Removing this friction eliminates one of the biggest drivers of churn.
How to match your wine club to customer drinking behavior
All customers don’t drink the same way. Some want wine for casual weeknights while others are buying for dinners or occasional events. Your wine club should reflect that.
Offer multiple cadences: monthly, quarterly, or flexible
Allow customers to slow down without cancelling
Additionally, the way people drink changes over time. If your cadence doesn’t match how people actually drink, they’ll eventually cancel their subscription.
How to offer customizable wine club shipments
Before shipments go out, give customers a window to:
Swap individual bottles (merlot for cabernet)
Select different packages entirely (red for white)
Bonus added value: find ways to guide choices based on preferences or occasions. This shifts the experience from “fulfillment” to “curation.”
How to avoid over-shipping in your wine club
Too much product is the most preventable churn driver. Make it easy for customers to manage volume:
Offer smaller shipment options
Make downgrade paths simple
Clearly communicate what’s coming next
Avoid the common scenario where a customer signs up for a larger shipment, builds up inventory, and cancels instead of adjusting down.
If you ship faster than they drink, you’re creating your own churn.
How to balance flexibility with participation
With all the focus on flexibility, there’s still a balance between giving customers control and removing structure entirely.
For example, wineries can allow members to pause shipments while temporarily limiting certain perks, like complimentary tastings or event access, until shipments resume.
The goal is to create flexibility without disconnecting membership benefits from active participation.
The most effective way to improve wine club retention is to give customers control over shipments, match their drinking behavior, and avoid over-shipping.
How to Structure Your Wine Club for Long-Term Retention
How to increase wine club lifetime value
To improve wine club retention, don’t optimize for bigger boxes, optimize for longer relationships, repeat engagement, and steady participation.
Think about how you’d handle this in the tasting room. If a customer is deciding between 4 bottles and 6, you wouldn’t push them into 6 if it risks a bad experience.
You’d rather they buy 4, love the wine, and come back again. Your wine club should work the same way.
How to reduce wine club churn with flexible membership tiers
As long as it’s not an outright cancellation, a downgrade is not a failure. Most wineries see a downgrade as lost revenue, when in reality it still extends lifetime value.
A smaller membership that lasts 3 years is more valuable than a larger one that cancels in 6 months.
Give customers a way to stay in your wine club membership, even if they spend less.
How to improve wine club retention with loyalty incentives
Instead of focusing on sign-up perks, reward tenure and consistency. This might look like shipping anniversary bottles, providing access to limited releases before the general public, or offering perks that unlock over time.
Retention isn’t about preventing cancellation entirely, it’s about giving people reasons to stay.
Wine club retention improves when you prioritize long-term relationships over short-term revenue.
How to Turn Your Wine Club Into an Experience Customers Won’t Want to Cancel
This is where the biggest opportunity is for wine club retention.
How to create experiences beyond the bottle
Wine has a built-in advantage because there’s a story behind it.
Use it everywhere. Bring customers behind the scenes of harvest, production, and sourcing. Show how decisions are made. Let them experience the wine alongside you through virtual tastings or guided sessions with the winemakers.
These moments bring customers closer to the product and the people behind it. Each time you offer something they can’t get elsewhere, you strengthen the relationship and increase retention.
How to build a sense of belonging in your wine club
People don’t stay because of products, they stay because of identity.
Make members feel like insiders. They should feel recognized, valued, and part of something bigger than just a subscription.
This can be simple. Acknowledge long-term members. Personalize communication so it feels like a relationship, not a transaction. Create moments where members are brought together, whether that’s through events, invites, or shared experiences.
How to turn shipments into moments
Your shipment is your most important touchpoint. That box shouldn’t feel like a transaction, it should feel like the most intentional part of the whole process.
Explain why each wine was selected. Share when to drink it and what it pairs with. Give customers context that extends beyond the bottle.
That turns a routine delivery into an experience that lasts beyond the unboxing.
How to prioritize access over discounts
Discounts can help, but they’re easy to copy. Access creates differentiation.
For most wineries, early access to new releases is already table stakes. The bigger opportunity is creating access customers can’t easily get elsewhere.
Library wines, limited experimental batches, harvest experiences, private tastings, or direct interaction with the winemaking team all deepen the relationship beyond the transaction.
The more your club feels like exclusive access, the less it feels like something customers can cancel.
Create an Experience, Increase Wine Club Retention
Wine club retention isn’t solved with better wine or bigger discounts, it’s solved by how the club is built.
The wineries that get this right intentionally build something to allow for maximum engagement between the customer and the winery.
They give customers flexibility, create paths to stay over time, and make the club feel like access to the winery, not just another subscription.
Schedule a demo from Awtomic and we’ll source ways to supercharge your wine club today.
Wineries have always operated differently from traditional ecommerce, and for good reason.
The business model isn’t the same, wine clubs aren’t standard subscriptions. The tools wineries relied on weren’t built for wine, they were adapted from broader DTC models and retrofitted to fit a completely different type of business.
Because of that, wineries have had a natural hesitation to adopt AI.
The relationship is the core of the winery. That’s not something you want to automate away or reduce to a system.
However, AI has matured to a point where it’s no longer experimental. Used correctly, it’s a net benefit across the winery. Not as a replacement for the experience, but as support for it. It can make your team more effective, your content more consistent, and your customer interactions more thoughtful.
To break down where AI actually creates value, Awtomic Founder and CEO Emily Yuhas spoke with Shem Swerkes, Senior Director of Global Digital Innovation at Treasury Wine Estates, about how wineries should be using AI today.
Whether you’re just starting to explore AI or already using it in parts of your workflow, this guide is about where AI actually creates leverage for wineries in practical ways you can start using tomorrow.
How Wineries Should Actually Use AI
How to use AI
Turn one asset into multiple pieces of content
Start with a strong first draft in minutes
Build consistent posting systems
Train AI on your brand and reuse context
Systematize follow-ups and personalization
Build repeatable workflows that compound
Show up across reviews, content, and mentions
Scale output without losing your voice
How NOT to use AI
Create each piece of content from scratch
Spend hours getting past the blank page
Post inconsistently when there’s time
Re-explain your brand every time
Handle customer details manually
Redo the same work over and over
Rely only on your website for discovery
Trade quality for volume or vice versa
“A lot of people are going to approach AI as how they can save time or scale. And yeah, that’s where it’s strongest. But the reality is mediocre strategy with strong execution will beat big ideas with poor execution every time. AI just makes it easier to actually execute.”
— Shem Swerkes
AI Rewards Execution, Not Ideas
AI doesn’t replace strategy or creative thinking. It accelerates execution once you already know what you’re trying to accomplish. Use it to generate ideas, structure workflows, and remove friction so your team can spend more time refining the things that make your winery unique.
Turn one asset into ten pieces of content
“When you think about a winery, your history, your vineyard, your winemaking, that stuff doesn’t really change. That content is basically immortal. So instead of constantly trying to come up with something new, it’s how do you refresh it, cut it up differently, and use it across different channels without starting from scratch every time.”
— Shem Swerkes
Most wineries are sitting on years of content they’ve already paid for, the challenge becomes effective distribution over new content creation.
Take one asset and turn it into multiple outputs. A blog becomes a video, that video becomes social posts, those posts become an email. The goal is to create more output in less time from what already exists.
Use AI to get past the blank page
“The hardest part for most teams is just getting started. You’re staring at a blank page every day. AI takes you from that blank page to something you can actually work with, and that’s where it becomes really powerful.”
— Emily Yuhas
AI is a starting point, not an endpoint. Use it to brainstorm 50 ways to drive more tasting room visits, launch a digital campaign for a new wine release, or convert email subscribers into wine club members.
Not every idea will be great, but that’s not the point. The goal is to move from staring at a blank page to refining and iterating on ideas that actually fit your winery.
Build a repeatable posting system
“We talk a lot about creativity, but if you really look at it, most campaigns aren’t that unique. It’s the same ideas done slightly differently. The difference is who actually executes consistently.”
— Shem Swerkes
Consistency across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and even YouTube will outperform a single high-production post every few weeks. Spend more time identifying repeatable content pillars for your winery like your values, vineyard history, tasting notes, food pairings, harvest updates, and the people behind the brand. Then use AI to turn one piece of content into 5-10 different assets so you can distribute consistently without constantly starting from scratch.
AI Works Best Behind the Scenes
The best use of AI in wine is rarely customer-facing. Treat it like a new member of your team by training it on your brand voice, customer experience, and operational workflows. The more context and direction you provide, the more useful and differentiated the output becomes.
Train AI on your brand like you would a new hire
“If you think about AI like a tool, you’re going to use it wrong. It’s more like a team member. If you hire someone, they don’t come in on day one knowing everything. You have to teach them your systems, your processes, how you think. AI is the same way. The more context you give it, the better it gets.”
— Emily Yuhas
If you feed AI generic input, you’ll get generic output. If you want differentiated results, give AI context. Constantly provide examples of your content, your tone, and your audience.
Tell it stories of what happened in the tasting room that day so it can learn and start to think like the most senior operator of your winery. Treat it like constant onboarding and mentoring, not a one-time interaction.
Use AI to upgrade your tasting room, not replace it
“The opportunity isn’t to replace the human experience. It’s to remove friction from your team’s job so they can focus on that human experience. How do you give them better information so they can create stronger interactions with the customer?”
— Shem Swerkes
Wine is still sold through relationships, hospitality, and experience. Customers still want recommendations from real people, conversations in the tasting room, and a sense of connection to the winery. The opportunity is letting AI handle the backend operational work so your team can spend more time focused on customers.
Use it to summarize customer preferences before visits, organize wine club notes, draft follow-up emails, or prepare staff with talking points before an event.
Systematize small personal touches that drive loyalty
“It doesn’t take much to create a meaningful experience. Remembering a birthday, something from a past visit, those small details go a really long way. That’s what people remember, and that’s what drives loyalty and retention.”
— Emily Yuhas
Retention isn’t built on big moments, it’s built on consistency. Small details, applied consistently, create loyalty over time.
AI Only Works After You Invest In It
AI is most effective when it becomes part of a repeatable system. Like onboarding a new employee, it improves through iteration, feedback, and structure over time. The wineries seeing the best results are using multiple tools, refining outputs, and building workflows that compound instead of restarting from zero every time.
Use AI for the first 90%, then finish the last 10%
“A lot of people expect to just open a tool and have it do everything. But you have to put the work in upfront. You’re building something that makes future work faster. If you try it once, don’t like the output, and quit, you’re missing the point.”
— Shem Swerkes
The real value of AI comes from building repeatable systems around the work your winery already does every year. Harvest updates, wine releases, allocation emails, club announcements, tasting event promotions, holiday campaigns, and food pairings all follow similar patterns.
Use AI to create the first 90% quickly, then step in to refine the final details, voice, and storytelling that make your winery unique. Over time, those workflows become faster, more consistent, and easier for your entire team to execute without starting from scratch every season.
Run outputs through a second AI to improve quality
“What I’ll do a lot of times is take the output from one model and have another one critique it. They’re actually better at evaluating each other’s work than doing their own.”
— Shem Swerkes
One of the easiest ways to improve output quality is to have different AI tools evaluate each other’s work instead of relying on a single result. Generate a wine club email in ChatGPT, then ask Claude to critique what feels generic, unclear, or off-brand. Have Gemini review a tasting room campaign and identify what’s missing or repetitive.
AI models are often better at spotting weaknesses in existing work than creating perfect output from scratch. This simple feedback loop leads to stronger ideas, sharper messaging, and fewer generic results.
Build workflows once so you don’t repeat work
“You’re building something that makes future work faster. It might take longer upfront, but that’s what creates efficiency later.”
— Emily Yuhas
Build prompts for tasting notes, templates for release emails, systems for social posts, and repeatable campaign structures for events and club pushes. The upfront setup takes more time initially, but it creates a system your winery can reuse every season instead of constantly reinventing the process.
Discovery and Brand are Changing at the Same Time
Search behavior is shifting quickly from traditional SEO toward conversational discovery through AI-powered search engines and assistants. That means clarity, usefulness, and authentic content matter more than volume or keyword stuffing. The wineries that win will be the ones creating content that genuinely connects with customers across websites, reviews, video, and social channels.
Write like someone is asking a question
“People don’t search the same way anymore. They’re talking to AI like it’s a person. And that AI might be looking at 20, 40, 60 different sources to generate an answer, and you have zero visibility into what those sources are.”
— Shem Swerkes
Search is becoming more conversational, which changes how wineries should create content. Instead of writing for keywords like “best Napa cabernet” or stuffing pages with SEO, GEO, or AEO phrases, write content that answers the actual questions customers are asking.
Show up beyond your website
“It’s not just your website anymore. It’s reviews, mentions, threads, content across the internet. AI is pulling from all of it.”
— Shem Swerkes
AI-powered search tools are pulling answers from reviews, blogs, videos, forums, and winery websites all at once. The wineries that win will be the ones creating clear, useful content that directly answers customer intent instead of trying to game search engines.
Focus on clarity and usefulness, not volume
“Everyone can generate content now. That’s not the advantage. The advantage is creating something that actually connects.”
— Emily Yuhas
More content isn’t always better. Focus on answering real questions, simplifying wine education, and helping customers feel more confident in what they’re buying. A straightforward article explaining the difference between two varietals or helping someone choose a wine for a dinner party will outperform dozens of pieces of generic AI-written content that say nothing meaningful.
Make the customer the hero, not the winery
“People aren’t buying because of structured data or even your brand story most of the time. They’re buying because of a connection or an experience. The shift is making the customer the hero.”
— Emily Yuhas
People buy wine emotionally, not logically. Talk about the moments, the people, the experience.
Most winery marketing focuses too heavily on the winery itself, but customers ultimately buy based on how the wine fits into their life and experiences. Talk about the dinner party it belongs at, the trip it reminds people of, or the kind of person who would enjoy it.
Start Here
AI is actually making the human side of wine even more important.
The wineries that benefit most from AI use it to remove operational friction, execute more consistently, and create more space for hospitality, storytelling, and customer relationships.
Start small. Pick one workflow, campaign, or piece of content.
From wine club management to AI-powered retention and customer experiences, Awtomic gives wineries the tools to grow while keeping the relationship at the center of the brand.
Wondering if Shopify or a Wine-focused platform is the best ecommerce solution for your winery? Learn why Shopify’s ecosystem, app support, and agency partnerships make it a powerhouse for wineries looking to grow online.
Shopify for Wineries: Addressing the "One-Stop Shop" Concern
When wineries consider ecommerce platforms, a common concern we hear is: “With Shopify, I have to work with multiple vendors, but verticalized ecommerce platforms for wine feel like a one-stop shop.”
We get it—running a winery is complex, and simplifying operations is always a priority. But let’s break this down because, in reality, no platform is truly a one-stop shop. Instead, it’s about choosing the right ecosystem that gives you flexibility, innovation, and the best possible tools for your business.
The Myth of the "One-Stop Shop"
Verticalized systems do a great job serving wineries, but even with their platforms, you’re still working with multiple vendors. Most wineries using them also work with:
- A website/CMS provider – Many don't provide a website builder, so you’ll need to integrate with a separate provider.
- Analytics tools – Advanced reporting and insights often require third-party solutions.
- Email marketing platforms – While some systems have built-in email functionality, most wineries use dedicated tools like Mailchimp or Klaviyo for more robust campaigns.
- Appointment booking software – Many wineries also rely on Tock or similar services for reservations and experiences.
So, while verticalized wine solutions provide some core ecommerce and club management features, you’re still assembling a tech stack with outside vendors. The real question is: which ecosystem sets you up for long-term success?
Shopify’s Strength: A Powerful, Innovative Ecosystem
What makes Shopify different is its vibrant app marketplace and the passionate developers behind it.
- Shopify has thousands of apps, many built by experts specializing in ecommerce solutions.
- App developers in the Shopify ecosystem are constantly innovating, often learning from the best practices of top ecommerce brands worldwide.
- Because these developers compete to provide the best solutions, support is often faster and more personalized than what you’d get from a single vendor.
For wineries, this means you’re not locked into a single platform’s roadmap. Instead, you can choose best-in-class solutions, whether that’s Awtomic for wine club management, a specialized booking tool, or cutting-edge marketing automation.
"But I Don't Want to Manage Multiple Vendors"
That’s a fair concern! This is why we strongly recommend working with a Shopify agency that understands the winery space. A great agency will act as your single point of contact and help manage your tech stack, troubleshoot issues, and optimize your online presence.
Some top-tier Shopify agencies that specialize in wineries include:
🍷 DRINKS Amplify – Experts in alcohol ecommerce and compliance.
🍷 WalkWest – A digital marketing and ecommerce powerhouse.
🍷 Seamonster Studios – Shopify specialists with deep experience in winery solutions.
By partnering with an agency, you get the best of both worlds: Shopify’s flexibility and innovation, with a dedicated team to help manage your ecommerce needs.
The Bottom Line
There’s no truly "one-stop shop" ecommerce platform—every solution requires integrations and third-party tools. But with Shopify, you gain access to a thriving ecosystem of experts, cutting-edge technology, and agencies that can simplify everything for you.
If you're looking for an ecommerce solution that’s scalable, innovative, and tailored for growth, Shopify (with the right partners) is a game-changer for wineries.
Why Wineries Are Leaning Into Technology for Growth
Wine Has Finally Caught Up to Ecommerce
Wine has always operated differently from the rest of ecommerce.
Most industries follow similar patterns. They invest in digital acquisition, optimize conversion, and build systems that scale. Wineries never really did. Between compliance, wine clubs, tasting rooms, and long-standing industry habits, wineries built their businesses around in-person relationships, not online performance.
Because of that, wine has historically been underserved by modern ecommerce tools. Platforms weren’t designed for how wineries actually operate, so wineries adapted by working around those limitations instead of solving them.
That’s starting to change.
Shopify has quickly become a leading ecommerce platform for wineries looking to modernize how they sell wine online.
Checkout is faster thanks to Shop Pay
Building and updating curated customer experiences is easier
The platform integrates with tools that handle specific parts of the business well
At the same time, platforms like Awtomic are finally solving the subscription layer specifically for wineries. Wine clubs can now be flexible, customer-friendly, and built for retention.
All of this is happening while the pressure to grow is increasing. Gen Z are drinking 20% less than millennials, competition is expanding beyond traditional wine into food and other verticals, and relying on tasting room traffic or static wine clubs is no longer enough to drive meaningful growth.
Wineries are adapting because the old way isn’t working anymore.
How Wine Commerce Has Traditionally Operated
Wine has never been built like a traditional ecommerce category. It’s been built as a sales organization.
Most wineries are designed to convert in-person traffic. Tasting rooms, events, and hospitality drive the initial relationship, and wine clubs are the primary way to turn that relationship into recurring revenue. Ecommerce exists, but it’s rarely the primary growth engine. This is why many wineries have struggled to build an ecommerce strategy that drives consistent growth.
At the same time, the systems behind the experience are disconnected. Subscriptions, ecommerce, and marketing often live in separate platforms, which makes it difficult to create a cohesive customer journey or even understand how customers interact with the brand across touchpoints.
On one end of the spectrum, wine-specific systems like Commerce7 are stable, but rigid in their customization options. On the other end, ultra-customizable platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud require developers to make even the simplest changes, which slows down marketing and limits the ability to test or iterate.
To make things work, wineries have historically stitched together tools and manual processes. Campaigns are harder to launch, changes take longer to implement, and growth requires more effort than it should.
Why Shopify Plus Awtomic Works for Wine
Wineries didn’t suddenly adopt new technology, so why the shift now?
Younger customers are drinking less, growth requires more than foot traffic in a tasting room, and the technology finally caught up.
Subscription Finally Works
Wine club software has historically been built for payment processing and fulfillment, not customer experience. Awtomic changes that.
Wineries can design wine clubs that fit their brand and are built around retention. Subscribers can customize their experience, interact with the product, and stay because they want to, not because they’re locked in. This is what a modern wine subscription platform should look like.
And because 40-60% of winery revenue is tied to subscriptions, a reliable subscription platform makes all the difference.
Self-Service Without Losing the Experience
Modern customers expect control. They want to manage their own subscription, swap bottles from shipment to shipment, and interact with the brand without friction. At the same time, wineries still rely on high-touch relationships.
This stack supports both. Customers can self-serve when they want to, and wineries can focus their efforts on delivering a high-touch experience where it matters.
Speed is an Advantage
With Shopify, wineries can launch pages, update offers, and test campaigns without relying on developers. What used to take weeks now happens in days.
This turns marketing into a real growth lever. Instead of static product pages, wineries can build dedicated experiences for wine clubs, dynamic seasonal offers, and featured pages for new product launches.
The ability to test messaging, adjust offers, and iterate based on performance is now part of day-to-day execution.
The Technology Actually Works Together
Shopify handles the front-end experience as the ecommerce platform for wineries. Awtomic manages subscriptions. Tools like Klaviyo power lifecycle marketing. Shop Pay reduces friction at the most critical point in the customer journey.
Wineries can finally operate like a cohesive ecommerce business without abandoning what makes them unique.
What This Means for the Future of Wine Commerce
There are so many things that make wineries special. The history behind each vineyard, the people building the brand, and the connection customers have to the product.
Technology shouldn’t change that. But it should modernize everything around it.
Customers have changed their shopping habits, and the wineries that adapt will be the best suited to continue their growth.
Tradition isn’t going anywhere. But growth in wine is now driven by how well you can meet customers where they already are.
And right now, that’s online. Schedule a demo from Awtomic.
After years of giving special gifts with each club shipment, the Firestone team tried Awtomic’s new feature that allows you to give subscribers the option between multiple gift choices as a reward with the Moments feature. Micaela set up a moment that lets each member pick between a trucker hat and a bucket hat. Within a few hours, more than 70% of the members had jumped in and chosen their gifts. “Adding in that layer of customization for the customer is such a huge win and it’s amazing to do it without complicating operations,” Micaela says. “You don't find that balance very often - usually you’re sacrificing one or the other.”
Firestone Walker Brewing Company has been an iconic Brewery and Merchandise brand on the Central Coast of California for almost 30 years, but it wasn’t until the global pandemic hit that they started exploring direct-to-consumer sales online for their beer products. It’s not surprising given how many hurdles and regulations there are around selling and shipping beer that honing their ecommerce strategy was a journey.
Today they have an incredibly engaged beer club that enables members to get beer and merchandise shipped to them directly in addition to access to special brews and onsite events. As fans of a legacy brand that played a big part in the early days of craft beer, Firestone members appreciate the brand’s persistent pursuit of the perfect beer and are enthusiastic and engaged in their club. Amazingly, over 60% of their club members have been customers of Firestone Walker for over 10 years. Most of their members attended their big beer festival this year in June.
With Awtomic they’ve been able to strike a great balance between operational efficiency and personal club benefits that make their club scalable but still reflective of the uniqueness of their beer and culture.
“We're not just there to sell large volumes of beer to the everyday consumer. We're really focusing on what we're doing - doing it right and continuously trying to improve upon that. I think that's really the key thing both in our beer and our culture both internally and externally - our customers are a part of that.” - Micaela Yeo
From Recharge to a custom build with no luck
When Firestone Walker launched the beer club online in February 2021, the team had recently decided to make the club a more curated selection and add in member exclusive products - like a special glassware that paired with those beers specifically. They used Recharge initially and felt like it didn’t meet their customization needs and ended up having a lot of issues with the automated charging itself with orders coming through with incorrect charges. It resulted in having to manually check and correct every order that was placed. “It always felt like it was a square peg going into a round hole,” Micaela remembers.
From there, the team decided their needs were so unique that they created a custom app so they could design everything from the ground up based on their requirements. That turned out to cause even more headaches as they learned over time how things needed to be different and many years of patching and adjusting made the system so fragile it required a lot of manual work as well. “It kind of just got to the point where it kept tripping over itself and it was causing more problems than it was solving. It was sucking up an insane amount of time of manual work to keep things going,” Micaela says.
Automating and Optimizing with Awtomic
The Firestone team was initially surprised to find that Awtomic supported all the needs they previously thought required a custom build, but enjoyed even more benefits after joining the platform, including a huge reduction in operation costs, time savings and great support and partnership.
A Round Peg for a Round Hole
Knowing they had complicated needs, it initially seemed too good to be true that an app could support them all out of the box. “The fact that Awtomic has everything in the platform to answer our personalized needs and complicated program was a revelation for me.” Micaela remarks. In addition to the complexities of managing the club and automatic billing, Awtomic integrates with all of the functionality Firestone already had in place to impose volume limits and other important requirements seamlessly.
Reducing Operational Costs
Along with moving their club over, the Firestone team also launched build-a-boxes both for members with exclusive beers, and non members for one-time purchases. Where they previously had to support multiple box sizes and packing requirements for any number of beers, they were able to greatly simplify their processes and packing materials because of the build-a-boxes. It’s a very significant reduction in costs and labor - just the other day, our leadership team was talking about how positive this transformation has been.” Micaela noted.
Loyalty engagement with Moments
After years of giving special gifts with each club shipment, the Firestone team tried Awtomic’s new feature that allows you to give subscribers the option between multiple gift choices as a reward with the Moments feature. Micaela set up a moment that lets each member pick between a trucker hat and a bucket hat. Within a few hours, more than 70% of the members had jumped in and chosen their gifts. “Adding in that layer of customization for the customer is such a huge win and it’s amazing to do it without complicating operations,” Micaela says. “You don't find that balance very often - usually you’re sacrificing one or the other.”
Stellar Support
The support and partnership from the Awtomic team is something that Micaela called out multiple times as a night and day difference in her experience. “The customer service that we get from you guys is unmatched,” she says. “I ask about something that feels like a crazy idea, thinking you would just laugh me off but you guys have had answers for everything. Even just the small day-to-day stuff - the fact that you guys are so responsive. It is an absolute game-changer. It is amazing.”
Conclusion
Firestone has done an incredible job of cultivating a meaningful relationship with its members and building community around their products. We’re thrilled that their beer club has found a technology solution in Awtomic that not only fits the bill but can help it scale and continue to delight members for years to come.
“Seeing the community that has come out of our Beer Club is absolutely astounding to me. it's one of those things that almost gets me teary-eyed. There are relationships between these people that have been formed throughout the last couple of years and formed new friendships. I have members who literally travel together now. At the end of the day, that's really what beer has always been about - bringing people together through experiences and bonding with others. I think that speaks more to who the customer is. The fact that they're doing this with us - that journey together - which I think is one of my favorite parts.” - Micaela Yeo
Metrics:
50% reduction in operational costs
70% subscriber engagement with moments
Five years ago, running a winery on Shopify meant duct-taping a lot of things together. Great for e-commerce. Okay for DTC. Difficult for wine clubs. Not really designed for tasting rooms.
That's changed.
The combination of Shopify's platform investments and a handful of wine-specific apps has created something genuinely new: a single operational stack that connects your tasting room, your wine club, your online store, and your loyalty program under one customer record. That convergence has real operational consequences — and it's why an increasing number of wineries are consolidating everything onto Shopify.
Here's what's actually different.
Your Card on File, Finally Done Right
One very frustrating limitation of running a winery business on Shopify used to be simple: Shopify didn't let you vault a customer's payment card and charge it later for anything other than a subscription — not from your POS or your back office or sales team for one-time purchases.
Awtomic's card-on-file capability fixes this. When a customer's card is captured — through your Shopify checkout, your Awtomic admin or customer portal, or directly through Shopify POS during a tasting room visit — Awtomic vaults it and makes it available for future billing for one-off purchases as well as club shipments.
This sounds like a small thing. It isn't. It means that valued members who are visiting don’t need to be asked to take out their card every time they want to order a bottle. When your team calls members to sell them wine outside of the club, they can place the order seamlessly without needing to invoice them. It removes the friction from ALL repeat purchases.
The Tasting Room Is Actually Great Now
Shopify POS has become legitimately good for winery tasting rooms. Recent updates — tap-to-pay, multi-location inventory, smart receipts — close most of the gap that used to push wineries toward a dedicated hospitality POS.
But hardware is table stakes. What matters for wineries is what happens around the transaction: signing people up for the club, managing their loyalty, and connecting the tasting room visit to the ongoing relationship.
A few apps have built specifically for this:
Awtomic handles wine club enrollment at POS. A customer who has a great experience at your tasting room can be signed up for your club before they leave — their card is vaulted, their preferences are captured, and they receive a confirmation email within minutes. No paper forms. No follow-up entry work.
Simmer fills in the restaurant and hospitality side — food menus, ticketing, coursing, easy splitting of orders between bar and food KDS or printers. For wineries with event spaces, caves, or food programs, it handles the complexity that a pure retail POS doesn't.
Angle brings loyalty and membership intelligence into the physical visit. Customers can check in at the tasting room using a wallet pass — their phone, their Apple Wallet, no app required. Angle surfaces their purchase history, their loyalty status, their tier, and their preferences to your tasting room staff before the conversation starts. Your team knows they're a premium club member before they've said a word.
What makes this combination work is that Shopify serves as the customer record underneath all of it. When someone checks in at your tasting room through Angle, spends $200 at your restaurant, and gets enrolled in your club through Awtomic — that's one customer record. One purchase history. One loyalty balance. One card on file.
That used to require a custom integration project. Now it's four apps and an afternoon of setup.
Reporting That Actually Tells You Something
Shopify's native analytics got dramatically better when they rolled out AI-assisted reporting. For wineries with mixed revenue streams — tasting room, direct shipping, club shipments, allocation releases — the ability to ask a natural-language question and get a properly segmented answer is a legitimate upgrade.
"Show me the top 10 zip codes by wine club revenue this quarter" or "Which products had the highest reorder rate among club members who joined at POS" — these queries used to require an export, a pivot table, and someone who knew what they were doing in Excel. Now they're a few seconds in Shopify's admin.
For wine-specific analytics — vintage performance, varietal trends across channels, correlation between wine club tenure and DTC basket size — Enolytics remains the standard. The Awtomic-Enolytics integration means your subscription data flows directly into the platform: tenure, billing status, cancellation reasons, offer acceptance. Enolytics layers on the industry benchmarks that make your own data meaningful — you're not just looking at your churn rate, you're comparing it to comparable-size wineries in your region.
The reporting picture for a Shopify winery now looks like this:
Shopify native analytics: Revenue by channel, product performance, customer acquisition — AI-assisted queries for day-to-day operational questions
Enolytics: Wine club health, member behavior, industry benchmarking — the analysis that informs strategy
Awtomic admin: Subscription metrics, dunning performance, cancellation reasons, retention analytics — the real-time pulse of your club
Between these three tools, you have meaningful visibility into every layer of the business without building anything custom.
The Real Unlock: One Customer
Shopify's fundamental value in this stack isn't any single feature. It's the customer record.
Before Shopify became the consolidation point, most wineries ran:
A tasting room and/or restaurant POS
A wine club subscription platform
A DTC e-commerce store
A loyalty program
Appointment booking and/or table management software
A corporate gifting system
Compliance software
Each of these systems had its own customer record. Syncing them — to the extent anyone bothered — was a quarterly data cleanup project.
With a Shopify-native stack, the customer who books a cave tour through your appointment tool, buys two bottles in the tasting room through Shopify POS, earns loyalty points through Angle, and then joins your wine club through Awtomic is one record. Their full journey is visible, their card is stored once, their communications come from one place, and their loyalty follows them across every channel.
The practical consequence: your tasting room staff can see that the person in front of them has been a wine club member for three years before they say a word. Your DTC team can see that a member who just cancelled had a failed payment six weeks ago and two unreturned shipment emails. Your marketing team can segment "members who visited the tasting room in the last 90 days" and "members who've never visited" and send different campaigns — without pulling from three separate lists.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's what's available right now, with apps that are designed to work together on a platform that was built for it.
Is This for Every Winery?
Yes - it can be! The best thing about Shopify is that it can grow with you. You can start off on a basic tier with a smaller set of apps and then adjust as you grow without having to do multiple platform migrations.
But it's especially valuable if you're growing, if you're managing a multi-tier club with hundreds of members, if you're running tasting room events and also doing DTC shipping and also thinking about loyalty — the fragmentation cost compounds quickly. Every time you add a channel without consolidating the customer record, you're adding reconciliation work and losing insight.
The wineries moving to Shopify at scale are doing it because the consolidation payoff is real. One stack, one customer, one view. The tech is finally good enough to deliver on that promise.
Awtomic is a wine club subscription management platform for Shopify — recurring billing, customer portal, card-on-file, Awtomic Moments, and built-in analytics. Learn more or book a demo. Reach out to us for a downloadable guide to the best wine partners in the ecosystem.
Looking for innovative ways to keep your wine club members engaged? Awtomic Moments lets you visualize and gamify retention—helping wineries build long-term loyalty, increase average order value, and create personalized rewards program
When it comes to wine club retention, wineries often focus on the basics: great wine, exclusive perks, and occasional discounts. But what if you could gamify retention, making every shipment feel like a milestone and every year of membership feel like an achievement?
That’s exactly what Awtomic Moments is designed to do. 🍷✨
What Makes Awtomic Moments So Unique?
Awtomic Moments is an industry-first tool that visualizes a customer’s membership journey, making it easy to see:
✅ What rewards they’ve earned
✅ What’s coming next
✅ Why it’s worth staying in the club
By gamifying retention, wineries can create excitement, anticipation, and long-term loyalty—turning passive subscribers into engaged advocates who stick around for years.
But that’s just the beginning. Let’s dive into some innovative ways to use Moments to maximize retention and revenue.
1️⃣ Reward Loyalty Over Time
💡 Give members something to look forward to with milestone-based rewards.
Awtomic Moments allows wineries to reward members based on tenure—whether it’s their:
3rd shipment – A free tasting experience
1-year anniversary – A special bottle or exclusive discount
5 years+ – VIP access to limited-edition releases
Instead of offering one-size-fits-all discounts, this approach creates excitement and strengthens brand loyalty. The longer they stay, the more valuable their membership becomes.
2️⃣ Create Location-Based Rewards
💡 Not all members can visit your tasting room—so why not tailor perks based on location?
With Awtomic’s segmentation tools, wineries can offer:
Local members – Exclusive tasting events, early access to new releases, or VIP invitations to winery dinners.
Out-of-town members – Free shipping on certain orders, bonus bottles in select shipments, or virtual tastings with the winemaker.
This ensures every member feels valued, regardless of their ability to visit in person.
3️⃣ Encourage Engagement Beyond Purchases
💡 Your best members aren’t just the ones who buy—they’re the ones who engage.
Awtomic Moments can reward club members for actions that strengthen your community and brand, like:
✅ Referring a friend – Earn a bonus bottle or club discount.
✅ Leaving a review – Get a credit toward their next shipment.
✅ Updating their preferences – Unlock a surprise reward.
This creates an interactive experience, encouraging customers to stay connected even between shipments.
4️⃣ Use Rewards to Guide Members to Higher Club Tiers
Expand revenue by introducing customers to premium wines & experiences over time.
With tiered rewards, you can incentivize members to:
🔺 Try higher-end wines – Offer premium samples after a set number of shipments.
🔺 Move up a club level – Reward members who upgrade with exclusive perks.
🔺 Spend more per order – Offer bonuses for larger purchases or add-ons.
By strategically introducing members to your best wines, you increase average order value (AOV) while deepening their connection to your brand.
Why Awtomic Moments is a Game-Changer for Wine Clubs
With the right rewards and gamification, wineries can:
✅ Keep members engaged for years—not just months.
✅ Increase member lifetime value through gradual upselling.
✅ Segment rewards to create a truly personalized experience.
And the best part? Awtomic Moments makes it easy to implement, track, and adjust—so your winery can focus on crafting amazing wine while we help you build long-term customer loyalty.
Ready to Revolutionize Your Wine Club?
If you’re looking for a smarter way to retain members and grow your wine club, it’s time to explore Awtomic Moments. 🚀
Let’s turn your wine club into an experience members never want to leave. 🍷💡
Check out how Intercept Wines leaned into the opportunity to use Moments to deliver rewards specific to their customers' interest in Charles Woodson.
For a long time, the standard wine club model was simple: you pick the wines, you set the price, members sign up and receive what you ship them. Curated. Chef's kiss. Non-negotiable.
That model still works — for the right clubs and the right member base. But the world has shifted. Members who joined in the past few years have been shaped by Amazon, Stitch Fix, and a dozen other subscription experiences that gave them control. They've come to expect customization as the default, not a premium.
And the data backs this up. Wine clubs that offer member customization see measurably lower churn, higher average order values, and stronger long-term engagement. Not because flexibility is inherently better — but because it removes one of the most common reasons members leave.
The Cancellation You Could Have Prevented
When you look at why wine club members actually cancel, a consistent pattern appears:
"I already have too much wine."
"I don't drink red wine and I keep getting red."
"We're trying to cut back on spending."
"We travel a lot — this just isn't working right now."
Notice what's not on that list: "I don't like your wine" or "I had a bad experience."
The majority of cancellations aren't rejection. They're friction. Members who liked you enough to sign up are leaving because the rigid structure stopped working for their life.
Build-a-box directly addresses this. When members can adjust quantities, swap varietals, or build their own selection from your available inventory — the "too much wine" complaint becomes a "let me dial this down to two bottles" adjustment. The "I only drink white" complaint becomes a white-only configuration. A problem that would have been a cancellation becomes a customization.
How It Works in Practice
A well-implemented build-a-box experience gives members a defined window before their shipment date to modify what's coming. In most implementations, you set the parameters:
Which SKUs are available for swapping. You can restrict this to current club-eligible inventory — no one's raiding your single-bottle allocation.
The quantity range. Members can add or remove bottles within limits you define. Someone overwhelmed can drop to two. An enthusiast can add a few extras.
Whether modifications affect pricing. You can offer flat-rate boxes (swap within the tier price) or dynamic pricing (add bottles, pay more).
The customization window. Typically 7-14 days before processing. Members get an email notification, make their selections, and the shipment goes out as configured.
The key is that this happens inside your existing club infrastructure — it's not a separate product or a manual process. Awtomic's build-a-box is integrated into the customer portal that members already use to manage their membership. No new login, no extra step.
The "Too Much Wine" Problem Is Specifically Yours to Solve
Wine clubs have a unique challenge that other subscription categories don't: the product is perishable, accumulates, and takes up physical space. Your member can't just let their skincare subscription pile up in a drawer. Wine takes over counters, closets, and eventually the relationship with the club.
A member who's fallen behind — who has 8 bottles from last quarter they haven't opened — is not going to be excited about the next shipment arriving. If they have no way to skip or reduce, their options are limited: drink faster, cancel, or do nothing and cancel later.
Build-a-box (or a simpler skip/reduce option) breaks this cycle. The member who can say "actually, just send me two bottles this time — I'm trying to catch up" is the member who stays for another year.
What Wineries Get in Return
Member flexibility isn't just a churn-prevention tool. There are some less obvious benefits:
Higher average order values. When members can add bottles, a meaningful percentage do. A flat club tier that would have processed at $90 becomes a $120 order because the member decided to grab an extra bottle of the white they've been enjoying. That's incremental revenue at near-zero cost.
Better inventory management. When you know what members actually want before you process their shipment, you can plan your picking and fulfillment more accurately. Less guessing about how much of each SKU to pull.
Stronger engagement signals. A member who logs into the portal to configure their box every quarter is more engaged than one who just receives what ships. Engagement correlates strongly with long-term retention. The act of choosing creates ownership.
A meaningful differentiator. Not every wine club offers this. If yours does — and the experience is smooth — it becomes part of why members stay and part of how they describe your club to friends.
Getting Started Without Overhauling Your Operation
The hesitation most winery teams have is operational: "If we let members customize everything, won't fulfillment become a nightmare?"
In practice, it doesn't have to. The key is setting clear parameters: a defined SKU set, a defined quantity range, a defined customization window. Members who engage with it do so in ways that are predictable and manageable. Members who don't want to engage don't have to — the default shipment still goes out if they do nothing.
Awtomic's build-a-box configuration takes about 20-30 minutes to set up per club tier. You define what's available, set the window, and it runs. The portal handles member communication, modifications, and inventory allocation automatically.
The wineries that have moved to a flexible model aren't doing it because it's trendy. They're doing it because it works — and because the math on retaining one more member per quarter easily justifies the setup.
If your club is seeing higher-than-expected churn and you haven't given members a way to customize, that's worth looking at.
Awtomic is a wine club subscription platform built for Shopify. Build-a-box, the customer portal, and Awtomic Moments are all included. Learn more or book a demo.
For years, wineries evaluating new technology have asked the same question: “Can it handle my clubs and tasting room?” While that’s still important, the bigger question today is: “Can this platform help me grow into the future?”
For years, wineries evaluating new technology have asked the same question: “Can it handle my clubs and tasting room?” While that’s still important, the bigger question today is: “Can this platform help me grow into the future?”
The truth is, covering today’s needs is table stakes. The real opportunity lies in embracing tools that unlock growth and connect wineries to the same ecosystem powering the world’s most innovative ecommerce brands. That’s why more wineries are moving to Shopify, and choosing Awtomic as the engine behind their clubs.
Built for the Wine Industry
With Awtomic and Shopify, wineries don’t have to choose between tradition and innovation. Our platform was designed to cover the full range of wine industry models and sales channels, including:
- Traditional clubs with curated shipments and member management
- Allocation models with the ability to bill card on file for orders and wishlist
- In-house sales teams that need easy, vaulted card order capture and customer management tools
- Tasting room experiences powered by Awtomic’s Shopify POS extensions that unify inventory, loyalty, and club management
- Best in class compliance integrations whether you use DRINKS, Sovos ShipCompliant, Avalara or VinoShipper, Awtomic has seamless integrations
This means wineries can modernize without sacrificing the tried-and-true models that drive their business today.
The Power of the Shopify Ecosystem
Shopify isn’t just another ecommerce platform—it’s an ecosystem. It gives wineries access to thousands of apps and integrations for marketing, loyalty, analytics, shipping, and more. When your wine club lives on Shopify, you’re no longer limited to what’s built into one closed system. Instead, you’re plugging into a network of best-in-class tools that evolve with consumer expectations.
But not all apps are created equal. Many providers in the wine industry “obfuscate” Shopify’s capabilities, forcing wineries into rigid systems that don’t fully leverage the platform. Awtomic is different. We were built specifically to unlock the power of Shopify—designed to work with the ecosystem, not against it.
Meeting the Needs of a Changing Consumer
The wine industry is navigating real headwinds: shifting demographics, declining consumption, and rising acquisition costs. Traditional, rigid wine club models don’t resonate with younger consumers who expect flexibility, transparency, and engagement.
That’s where Awtomic comes in. With flexible subscription options, intuitive customer interfaces, and gamified loyalty programs, wineries can create club experiences that feel modern and exciting. These are the kinds of experiences that help wineries retain existing members while attracting the next generation of wine lovers.
Building for Today and Tomorrow
The right question isn’t just “Can this technology handle what I do now?” It’s “Can it help me thrive in the years ahead?” With Shopify and Awtomic, wineries can confidently answer yes. You get the functionality needed to run clubs, allocations, sales teams, and tasting rooms—while opening the door to scalable growth, better customer experiences, and future-proof technology.
The wineries that embrace these opportunities today will be the ones still leading tomorrow.
Wine clubs are the heartbeat of most wineries. For many, they represent the majority of DTC revenue and a vital channel for building lasting relationships with customers. No one in the industry doubts their importance.
But here’s where marketing teams have a huge opportunity: wine clubs don’t have to be viewed only through an operational lens — managing allocations, shipments, and logistics. When approached strategically, they can become your most powerful marketing engine.
Why?
- Lower acquisition costs. Once a customer joins, every future order reduces the cost of acquisition.
- Higher lifetime value. Club members purchase more often, spend more per order, and remain loyal longer than casual buyers.
- Stronger brand belonging. Clubs are about more than shipments — they create a sense of identity and community that keeps members engaged.
That shift in mindset changes how wineries structure and market their clubs. Instead of “how do we fulfill this shipment?” the questions become:
• How do we personalize offers to different types of members?
• How do we make it easy for members to pause, skip, or swap without canceling?
• How do we turn tasting room visits into lasting digital memberships?This is where technology matters.
Legacy platforms often focus heavily on the operational side. But modern solutions like Shopify + Awtomic give wineries the same tools top DTC brands use to build loyalty, personalize marketing, and grow revenue — while still handling traditional models like allocations and case shipments.For marketing teams, the takeaway is clear: your wine club isn’t just about revenue predictability. It’s the center of your long-term growth strategy.