For independent wine shops and fine wine retailers
A CRM for wine shops remembers what each collector drinks, what they paid and which allocations they asked for, and tells your staff every morning whom to call about the bottles that just arrived. Clientele reads your POS sales, ranks clients by the value of the next sale and drafts the message for you to send.
Try it with the sample shop or upload a CSV of up to 200 clients from your wine store POS.
Where wine shops lose the second case
A serious wine buyer has three or four stores they like, plus every winery list and online retailer in their inbox. When six bottles of a Barolo they love come in, the store that texts them that afternoon makes the sale. The store that puts it in Friday's newsletter usually does not.
Most owners know exactly who should get that text. The problem is that the knowledge lives in one head. On a Saturday with a tasting running and a line at the register, nobody has time to scroll the POS to find the twelve people who bought Piedmont last year. A general CRM built for sales pipelines does not fix it either, because a wine shop has no pipeline. It has a few hundred regulars who each buy on their own clock.
One collector, one year, five reasons to get in touch
January
Mixed case
Twelve bottles of Rhone and Loire. $640.
March
Allocation
The Brunello she asked about arrives. Two bottles held.
June
Thank you
A note after the rose case for her summer party.
September
New vintage
The grower Champagne she reordered twice is back.
November
Holidays
Last year she bought three gift bottles on December 18.
The Money Feed in a wine shop
Each morning everyone who sells in your store opens Clientele and sees a short list: who to contact, why today, what the sale could be worth and a drafted message in their own voice. You read it, change a word if you like, and send it from the shop number. Ten minutes with a coffee, before the first delivery.
The list is ranked by value. The collector who buys two cases of Burgundy a year comes before the customer who picked up a bottle of Prosecco once. You set the rules: how many days after a big order to say thank you, how many quiet months turn a regular into someone worth a call.
Money Feed for Maria, wine shop
Thursday, 4 clients to contact
David Chen
Platinum client
David, it's Maria at the shop. The new Barolo landed this morning, same producer as the two vintages in your cellar. We got 18 bottles total. I can hold six for you until Saturday if you want them.
Laura Simmons
Gold client
Laura, I put together three bottles for the lamb on the 24th, a Rioja, a Northern Rhone and one wildcard from Sicily. All under $50. Want me to box them up for Friday pickup?
Tom Becker
Gold client
Rachel Ortiz
Silver client
Tag an incoming wine by producer, region or grape. Clients who bought the same producer or asked to be told appear in the feed, ranked by what they usually spend.
A customer asks you to call when the Chablis is back. Note it on the profile in five seconds and the feed reminds you the day it lands.
Anniversaries, a daughter's wedding, the corporate gift order every December. Dates go on the profile with lead time so you call before the rush.
A few days after a large order, a short personal thank you. It is also when they tell you which bottle they liked best, which goes straight onto the profile.
A customer buying $25 Cotes du Rhone every week is a natural fit for a mixed case of Northern Rhone. The feed suggests the step that fits their history.
Someone who bought every month and has not been in for nine months gets a reason to come back that is a bottle, not a discount code.
A POS receipt says a client spent $640 on a mixed case. It does not say she prefers old world reds, dislikes heavy oak, is building a vertical of one Napa producer, cooks lamb when her in-laws visit and asked last month whether you could find a 2016 Brunello. That is the information that sells the next case, and in most stores it lives with the owner.
Clientele keeps it on one client profile: every purchase from your POS export, favorite regions, grapes and producers as tags, budget per bottle, notes anyone on staff can add in a few seconds, important dates, household members and the full message history. Inventory and stock counts stay in your POS. See how client profiles for retail teams are laid out.
Setup
There is no consultant and no implementation fee. Most stores import their customers after closing and open their first Money Feed the next morning.
Download customers and line items as a CSV from your wine store POS. If you also sell online through Shopify, connect it directly.
Tell Clientele which column is the customer, the wine, the price and the date. The mapping is saved for the weekly import.
Days after a big order for a thank you, months before a regular counts as quiet, weeks of lead time before the holidays. Defaults are filled in.
Each person on the floor gets a feed on the phone. The owner sees every feed and which messages turned into sales.
Wine retailers usually look at four kinds of tools. They solve different problems, and most good shops run two of them.
Kinds of customer software independent wine shops use
Main job
Knows who bought what
Daily list of whom to contact
Allocations matched to collectors
Personal texts from the shop number
Best for
| Wine store POS | Email newsletter tool | Winery club CRM | Clienteling platform such as Clientele | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main job | Checkout, inventory, age checks, tax | One message to the whole list | Wine club shipments for a winery | Personal outreach to the regulars who drive revenue |
| Knows who bought what | Yes, as receipts | Opens and clicks only | Yes, for one winery's own wines | Yes, with taste tags and notes on top |
| Daily list of whom to contact | No | No | Club processing dates | Yes, ranked by sale value for each person |
| Allocations matched to collectors | Manual search | Segment by hand | Built for the winery's releases | Tag the arrival, the feed finds the clients |
| Personal texts from the shop number | Rarely | Bulk SMS add on | Bulk club notices | WhatsApp, SMS and email in one inbox |
| Best for | Every store, it runs the register | Weekly specials and events | Wineries and tasting rooms | Stores where 20 percent of clients bring most of the revenue |
If your inventory is a mess, fix the POS first. If you are a winery selling your own bottles, a winery club platform is the better fit. Clientele is for retail stores whose margin comes from regulars and collectors. A high volume liquor store where most sales are a single bottle of spirits on the way home will get less out of it than a shop where the average good customer spends a few thousand dollars a year.
Clientele suits wine businesses where a regular is worth many cases over the years: independent fine wine shops, wine and spirits boutiques with a collector base, stores that run tastings and a monthly club, and shops that source allocated bottles for private clients. Stores that also sell cheese, glassware or gifts use it the same way as a boutique CRM, and multi store groups run it as retail CRM software across locations.
One note on messaging. Every client record carries consent per channel with date and source, and your team only messages people who opted in. Keep your list to customers you have already age verified at the register, as you do today.
Boutique is $99 a month billed yearly, or $199 month to month, for up to 3 people in one store and 2,500 client profiles. Brand is $299 a month billed yearly for up to 15 people across 3 stores and 15,000 profiles, with manager views and sales attribution per associate. Every plan includes the Money Feed, client profiles, the shared inbox and CSV import. The full breakdown is on the clienteling software pricing page, and you can run the demo above on your own export first.
FAQ
The best CRM for a wine shop is one built around collectors, not pipelines. It should keep each client's taste, budget and past bottles on one profile, match new arrivals and allocations to the people who will want them, and give staff a short list each morning of whom to call. Clientele does that from $99 a month billed yearly.
Most independent wine stores run a point of sale system for checkout and inventory, an email tool for the weekly newsletter, and the owner's phone for the clients who matter. A clienteling CRM is the piece that connects them. It reads the sales history from the POS and decides which collectors to contact personally about which bottles.
Many wine stores keep preferences in the owner's memory, on index cards or in POS notes nobody reads at the register. In Clientele every purchase from your POS export lands on the client profile, and staff add taste tags such as Northern Rhone, grower Champagne or no oak, plus budget and notes, so anyone on the floor can sell like the owner.
Clientele's Boutique plan is $99 a month billed yearly, or $199 month to month, for up to 3 people in one store and 2,500 client profiles. Brand is $299 a month billed yearly for up to 15 people across 3 stores. For a shop that sells cases of $60 bottles, one extra case a month covers the plan.
Wine shops get repeat customers by being the first to tell a regular about a bottle that fits their taste. A personal text that says a producer they bought last spring has a new vintage, with two bottles on hold, sells far better than a newsletter to the whole list. The work is remembering who likes what, which is what a CRM is for.
No. Keep your POS for checkout, inventory, age checks and tax. Clientele does not ring sales or track stock. It imports the sales your POS records and works on what happens after the purchase: who to tell about allocations and new arrivals, who has gone quiet, and which messages turned into sales.
Upload a client and sales export from your wine store POS, or start with our sample shop. In under a minute you see who to contact first, the reason, what the sale could be worth and a message written for each client.
Plans from $99 a month billed yearly. Subscriptions only, cancel at the end of any period.