HALL Wines Just Moved Four Brands onto Shopify and Awtomic

HALL Wines went live on August 7 with a rebuilt ecommerce and wine club experience across four brands, HALL, WALT, BACA, and Michel Foch, plus six tasting rooms. Shopify at the core, Awtomic running the clubs, built by CQL.

I paid attention to that one for a selfish reason. That is the stack we build on. Shopify for the store with their POS for the tasting room, and Awtomic for the club has become a fave. We have been recommending it to wineries here for at least five years, back when the standard response was that Shopify couldn't handle wine. Apparently it can handle four Napa brands and six tasting rooms. 

Same tools, different size project 

HALL's old setup had grown across multiple platforms and years of custom development. Flexible, sure, but I am also sure it was a lot to keep alive. What they have now still has real custom work in it, a redesigned club experience, member self-service, compliance and fulfillment automation, loyalty. The difference is that all of it sits on top of a platform somebody else maintains instead of one they had to maintain themselves. 

Apparently, theirs was a seven-month build, because four brands and six tasting rooms and years of member history is what seven months looks like. One brand with one tasting room and a few hundred club members is a different animal entirely. 

But it's the same Shopify and the same Awtomic underneath. Shopify has tiers, and a build like that is running at the upper end of them. A tier isn't a different product though. Same admin, same checkout, same point of sale, same app ecosystem. And Awtomic is Awtomic whether your club has 400 members or 40,000. You grow into the tier when the volume earns it. You don't start over to get there. 

That is genuinely new. Five years ago you either paid for a closed wine suite or you built something custom and prayed. Now the good tools are just available. 

The club members are the part people worry about 

Nobody loses sleep over the website. They lose sleep over the club. And fairly so, because nobody wants to send an email asking 800 members to re-enter a credit card. A real percentage of them just won't, and now you've paid for a technology upgrade with a chunk of your club. 

HALL apparently came through it with 100% of their customer payment tokens preserved, so members didn't have to touch anything. That's the number in the whole announcement I'd pay the most attention to. I'd caution you on assuming it's automatic though. Whether your tokens can move depends on a lot and that's a call you make before you sign anything, not after. And if somebody quotes you a migration without answering that question first, that's your signal right there. 

Why I'm writing about this one 

We've been putting wineries on Shopify for at least five years now, and on Shopify POS in the tasting room for the last several. Awtomic is my go to club layer we use. So none of this is news around here so much as it's a bigger name doing the same thing at a much scale. 

What it does give you is cover. If you've been the one at your winery arguing that Shopify is a real option and getting told it can't handle wine, HALL is your reference now. So is Duckhorn, which went live in July on a different Shopify setup, and that's a whole other post. 

I don't believe there is one technology solution that fits every business. The business still has to come first, and occasionally another platform or combination of systems will make more sense. If what you have is working, stay put. If your club is simple, your platform is paid up, and your staff knows it cold, there is no prize for migrating. I will tell people that if it is true and best for them. But if you're staring at a renewal date and wondering what the other side actually looks like, let me know. 

Overall, Shopify is generally where I start when ecommerce, POS and the customer experience are central to the operation. And I've believed for several years that Shopify has a much bigger role to play in winery DTC than a lot of wineries probably realize.

HALL is another pretty compelling example of where that is headed. 

Cheers,

Jim 

Read more our Shopify POS transition page here.