Sovos ShipCompliant helped Wente Vineyards streamline its compliance process, allowing it to expand its tasting room sales.
Wente Vineyards is the oldest continuously producing family-owned winery in the U.S. It was established in 1883 and is currently being run by the fourth and fifth generations. Wente Vineyards distributes in all 50 states, ships to consumers in 41 states and Washington, D.C., and exports its wines to more than 75 countries all over the world.
After the 2005 Granholm decision, direct-to-consumer options changed quickly. More states required licenses and shipment reports. Wente Vineyards only had two part-time team members working on DtC shipping, while Accounts Receivable was responsible for three-tier distribution.
Wente Vineyards tried to replicate state reporting forms in spreadsheets, manually transferring data from hard copies and submitting them at the end of each month. This process was time-consuming, repetitive and relied heavily on staff members to know each state’s individual rules.
Complex and changing individual state shipping regulations made manual reporting tedious.
Wente Vineyards had limited resources and and relied heavily on time-consuming and errorprone data entry.
Wente Vineyards started using ShipCompliant Direct for its DtC state reporting in 2008, adding the 3-Tier Reporting solution in 2010. It has eliminated manual state reporting at each step. For DtC shipping, Wente Vineyards has the support of the regulatory database to reduce, if not eliminate, noncompliant shipments. The vineyard uses AutoFile to handle its zero-dollar state reports and Market Ready to process state brand label registrations.
I don’t know how we could have succeeded and increased our tasting room sales without the use of ShipCompliant. If any winery is still doing it manually or not happy with what they’re using, there are so many things that are available here.
ShipCompliant offered a comprehensive resource for state regulatory information. When a new state becomes available for DtC shipping, the forms or URLs are immediately available to allow Wente Vineyards to start the registration process.
Prior to AutoFile, it took the Wente Vineyards team an entire day to process three-tier state reports each month. Most of the time was spent on zero-dollar reports: Printing, obtaining signatures, copying and mailing the paper forms. Now, once the data is uploaded from Wente Vineyards’ accounting system, the team can finish the reports in fewer than three hours, as most of the reporting is done by AutoFile.
Wente Vineyards also enjoys the exceptional customer service, which enables them to solve problems both small — like resolving an uncommon or odd issue — and large, like advising the team on how to handle a POS software transition. Wente Vineyards has since been able to increase its tasting room sales as a result of its investment in ShipCompliant.
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