How Much Liquor Store Owners Make From Online Sales?

Liquor Profits Store Revenue Optimization

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How Much Liquor Store Owners Make Online?

Alex Flasinski, Store owner + online expert

www.LiquorStoreProfits.com

HOW MUCH LIQUOR STORE OWNERS MAKE ONLINE (WEBSITE SALES 2019)?

WRITTEN BY: ALEX FLASINSKI

How much money did our liquor store made from our website sales this year in 2019? We're about to head into 2020 so I figured this is a great time to talk about what happened with our online site in 2019. So, a little bit of recap. We just got online about last year.

We've been in business for many years, but we just got a website last year. We've been doing it. We made many mistakes and lost a bunch of money at the beginning with broken bottles and fraudulent cards and all that. But we learned, we moved on, and now we're making some money.

We made $200,000 in sales, two zero, zero in sales in our first year of being online. I think that's great. Now I personally know people who are doing over a million dollars in sales with their websites and they're not even large stores. And it's just because over time you get more repeat customers and you get to know what you're doing a little bit better.

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Now, another thing, the thing is, of the $200,000 in sales, a very minimal amount of that was delivery. The large portion of that was shipping and in-store pickup orders.

So, it's basically this high-end stuff that people are going further than they normally would to drive to your store to pick these items up there. They're top-shelf stuff. We didn't do a lot of bottom shelf stuff. We're not selling Tito's online as much as we are like higher-end Macallan. We did $200,000 in sales, it was about an 18% margin. So that's $36,000 in profit.

That's definitely gross, because the people we use, City Hive, actually take a 2.5% cut and they also force us to use their credit card processor, a 2.9% fee on that. So, that's 5.4%. So, we're losing about $11,000 or one-third of our profit goes back to processing fees and stuff like that. But we're still left with $25,000. To be honest, we did spend a lot of money on advertising, because we are just getting into this. We made a lot of mistakes, so we probably didn't make any profit this year off of our online sales. But a few key benefits are that we have so many new customers, we moved a lot of top-shelf products, and we're starting to get into the realm of top-shelf products. These high-end whiskeys, which we never used to sell in the past, and high-end tequilas, high-end cognacs, high-end wines.

All this stuff is starting to sell. We're learning a lot more about the industry where we're starting to meet the more important people within the distributors because we are starting to carry these products. So, that's all great. And we have huge plans for this year coming up. So, we want to do a million dollars in delivery, a million dollars in shipping, and a million dollars in store pickup this year.

Now, are we going to do that? I hope so. Probably not, but I do hope so. We're going to try and get that done. I know a couple of guys personally, who do about those numbers and their stores aren't huge. They're just a little bit bigger than us, so I think that we can hack our way to it. This is basically what City Hive looks like from my point of view. So you got our total sales from December to December, about $200,000, 818 orders.

This is interesting. The average price per order is $241, in-store it's about 20 bucks.

This is $240. That's crazy. That's 10 times larger, because people are buying higher-end stuff because what's the point of going out of your way to go pick up a bottle or get a bottle of Tito's shipped to the end of Long Island when you can just go and get it even if it is a couple of dollars cheaper.

The average number of products per order, three. And we sold about 2,700 items.

So, those are 2,700 items that otherwise would have been in our store. And here's just a quick look at the fees. You got the 2.9%, went back to the credit card processor, and about 2.5% went back to City Hive for doing what they do.

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Now, what are we doing? We are doing a lot of shipping. We are doing a lot of in-store pickups. So, there's a lot of states that you can't ship to. So we just ship to New York.

It's kind of tricky that the laws and everything is always changing. The FedEx regulations like that. You got to stay in touch with that stuff. You want to stay on top of that. And then the biggest driver of sales for us this year was our WineFetch sponsorship. Now, unfortunately, that is very expensive. That's another $900 a month. They really charge an arm and a leg, but it gets you a lot of sales, no doubt about it. They definitely do drive traffic, but they charge a lot because they can, and they're non-negotiable on their prices, unfortunately.

So, it's expensive and the guys who are going to make this reality for you, aren't really going to work with you, as much as I would like.

What it does for your store is, it increases your sales. It gets you in front of customers you otherwise would not have had the opportunity to be in front of. It increases your Google ranking as well. It increases the way that Google trusts your brand and your business online so that when people are just searching for liquor store, you're more likely to come up. It sets you up for success in the future because as time goes on, delivery and shipping are going to be more and more important. If you want to stay in business, especially if you're in New York, Total Wine just opened up. You're going to be screwed if you don't have a website, sooner than later, unless you're doing something totally different. I don't know, focusing like crazy on customer service, but I would suggest just getting on with it and doing it.

I'm doing it. I didn't know what I was doing in the beginning. I had no idea what I was doing. I still basically don't know what I'm doing. So, I suggest that you just go bite the bullet, be a man or a woman. And go and sign up. Start with City Hive, whatever.

Just go for it, get a website. If you don't like it, you could always just say no. There's nothing to lose and you don't have to spend money with WineFetch and you don't have to pay fees. If you don't want to pay fees, don't sell any products, but this is a 4

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win-win-win. You're winning, your customers are winning, and the processors are also winning.

So, nobody's really losing here. They're just enabling your site to go up. So, I suggest that you go for it.

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