Opening a wine shop is a dream for a lot of people: the passion for the product, the growers you visit, the pleasure of introducing someone to a new cuvée. Then the accounting reality arrives. The customer walks in, looks at a label, takes out their phone, compares it with the price of the same estate in the wine aisle of the supermarket next door, and leaves. If your model rests on having the lowest price, you have already lost. The good news: that is not where the game is decided.
My name is Léo, and I run Pépite Pass. We operate Apple Wallet and Google Wallet loyalty cards, prize wheels and digital menus for food shops all over France, wine merchants included. I spend my days watching what makes a customer come back, or not. And when it comes to the wine trade, the picture is so clear that I can sum up this article in one sentence: you do not sell wine more cheaply than the supermarkets, you sell the certainty of not getting it wrong, and that sells at full price.
This article is not a guide to choosing your suppliers or negotiating your allocations with growers: there are wine merchants and sommeliers far better placed than me for that. My subject is the commercial mechanics: how to build a customer base that comes back for you, not for the discount, and that keeps the shop alive twelve months a year.
1. The price war is lost before it starts, and that is a good thing
Let us lay out the numbers coldly. Your gross margin as a wine merchant is generally between 30 and 50% depending on the range and how you buy. That is fine. But a supermarket wine aisle plays in another league: huge volumes, buying by the pallet, entry-level prices used as loss leaders sometimes sold at close to zero margin just to get the customer into the store. You cannot, and you must not, play that game.
The classic trap for a wine merchant starting out is to believe they have to "stay competitive". So they match a few well-known wines to the supermarket price, shave their margin, and attract exactly the wrong customer: the one who comes once, takes the bottle on offer, and never comes back. That customer costs you margin and builds nothing. Meanwhile, the customer who could have become a high-basket regular is not served properly, because you are busy discounting.
The truth is that the customer who pushes open a wine merchant's door rather than going to the supermarket is not looking for the lowest price. If they wanted the lowest price, they would already be at the supermarket. They come because they want something else: to be guided, to discover, not to mess it up in front of their guests on Saturday night. That need has no reference price displayed on a shelf. That is your playing field, and it is extremely profitable.
2. What you really sell: the end of the anxiety of choosing
Put yourself in the head of an ordinary customer facing a shelf of 300 bottles at the supermarket. They do not know the estates, their budget is vague, they are afraid of paying too much for something mediocre or, worse, of looking cheap with a disappointing bottle. They are alone, paralysed, and they end up picking the brand they have already seen on television. It is a default choice, never a happy one.
In your shop, that same customer asks a simple question: "I have friends coming over on Saturday, we are having a rib of beef, I have €15 a bottle, what do you recommend?" And in thirty seconds you pull out two options, you explain why, and they leave reassured. You have just turned an anxiety-inducing chore into a pleasant moment. That is what you sell. The wine is only the medium.
In concrete terms, here is the difference in value between the two approaches for the same customer over a year:
| Type of customer | Behaviour | Value over 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Passing customer (on offer) | 1 bottle at €6, drawn by a price, does not come back | Derisory margin, no connection |
| Occasional advised customer | Comes back for special occasions, basket of €25 to €40 | Decent, but unpredictable |
| "Club" regular | Comes back every fortnight, trades up, follows your advice and your new deliveries | By far the highest, and the most stable |
Your entire commercial strategy comes down to a single idea: move as many customers as possible from the top row down to the bottom row. Not to chase more passing customers. To turn the ones you already have into supported regulars.
3. The core of regulars: your real asset
A healthy wine shop does not live on street footfall. It lives on a core of regular customers who account for most of the revenue. They are the ones who drop in for the Sunday bottle, who build their cellar with you, who order their magnums for the holidays, and who bring you their friends. That core is your most valuable asset, and yet it is almost always the least equipped.
The problem is that most wine merchants know these customers in their heads, but nowhere else. You know that Mr Dubois loves the reds from the Rhône, but the day the delivery that is perfect for him arrives, you have no way to let him know. He might drop by in three weeks, by which point the allocation will be gone, and you will have missed the easiest sale of the month. Customer knowledge kept in your head does not scale, and it walks out the door the day your salesperson resigns.
Formalising that connection is exactly the job of a digital loyalty card. The principle for a wine merchant: the customer adds your card to their phone by scanning a QR code at the till (no app to download, it is a file in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, like a boarding pass). On every purchase, they build up a cashback pot. And you get back two things worth their weight in gold in this trade: a channel to tell them for free when something that suits them arrives, and a memory of who your best customers are.
4. Cashback rather than stamps: why it is the right choice for a wine merchant
There are three main loyalty mechanics: stamps (the "buy 10, get the 11th free" card), points, and cashback (a percentage of each purchase that comes back to the customer as credit). For a baker or a coffee shop, stamps are perfect: small ticket, high frequency. For a wine merchant, cashback is almost always the right choice. Here is why.
- Your baskets are high and variable. A stamp system treats an €8 bottle the same as a €60 magnum: it is absurd. Cashback, proportional to the amount spent, rewards the big baskets fairly and encourages trading up.
- Your visits are spread out. Nobody buys wine every day. A cashback pot that visibly grows on the customer's phone gives them a concrete reason to come back to you rather than elsewhere next time.
- Cashback lifts the basket. A customer with €15 of cashback to spend almost never leaves with a single bottle. They add to it, they explore, they treat themselves. The reward becomes an excuse to buy more, not a cost for you.
I laid out all these mechanics and how to choose between them for your trade in this article: the loyalty programme mechanics that actually work. And if the idea of a "card" still makes you think of the scrap of cardboard you lose, read instead how a loyalty card without an app works : that is exactly what makes the whole thing viable today.
5. Tastings and new deliveries: your loyalty weapon
The supermarkets will never pour you a Meursault at 11am on a Saturday while explaining the grower's work. You will. The tasting is the most powerful differentiation tool in the trade, provided you see it not as a cost but as an investment in the relationship.
The mistake I often see: filling the shop with strangers drawn by the free glass, going through bottles, and getting no relationship out of it afterwards. In the evening the takings are average, and three months later nothing is left. The winning instinct is the opposite: reserve your best tastings and your early access to new deliveries for your regulars. You create a sense of privilege, you strengthen the core, and you get people who genuinely buy to taste the wine.
This is where the contact channel becomes decisive. When a rare delivery arrives, or you organise a tasting around a region, you send a short, free message to the relevant customers, straight onto their phone's lock screen through their card added to Wallet. No email campaign that ends up in spam, no paid SMS at 8 cents a send: a push notification, free and unlimited, that says "Jean, we have just received three cases of the estate you were after, tasting Saturday at 11am, shall I set one aside for you?".
A specific wine shop in mind? Try Pépite Pass for free
And the gesture works both ways. The customer feels recognised, privileged, told before the others. That is exactly what builds belonging to a club, without needing a plastic membership card or complicated subscription software. The club is a state of mind supported by two tools: a cashback pot that rewards, and a channel that reaches people at the right moment.
6. The informal club beats the subscription box
A lot of new owners ask me whether they should launch a monthly box, something like "three surprise bottles a month". My practitioner's view: be wary. A pure subscription box has two flaws for a neighbourhood wine merchant. First, it puts you in head-on competition with national players who do this at scale. Second, it gets cancelled at the first disappointing month, like a streaming subscription, because it takes away from the customer what makes you strong: the advised choice and the pleasure of coming in.
The model that works better for a neighbourhood wine shop is the informal but strong club. Your best customers are part of a circle: they get early access to new deliveries, invitations to tastings, priority advice, and their purchases feed a cashback pot. They have nothing to "cancel": they are simply your privileged customers. The sense of belonging is stronger, and it does not ask you to set up monthly shipping logistics.
To keep that circle going, all you need is what you already have: the digital cashback pot that rewards repeat purchases, and the push channel that lets you speak to the right people at the right moment. The built-in CRM shows you who your real regulars are, which ones are slowing down, which ones are trading up. You steer your core instead of being at its mercy.
7. Staying in touch without becoming the wine merchant who spams
A word of warning, because this is the mistake that kills the most good programmes. Having a free, unlimited contact channel is not permission to send everything to everyone all the time. The wine merchant who blasts the same offer to their whole base every week trains their best customers to ignore their messages, then to delete the card. You will have destroyed your most valuable channel for a few short-term sales.
The rule I give to every business I work with: only get in touch when you have a real reason that concerns that specific person. Three good reasons for a wine merchant:
- A delivery or a cuvée that matches the customer's known tastes precisely (the whites from the Jura for the one who has already bought them twice).
- A tasting or an event on a theme that interests them.
- Their cashback pot reaching a worthwhile threshold, or a strong calendar occasion (the holidays, when the wine basket explodes).
A targeted, rare and relevant message is worth a hundred generic sends. It is counter-intuitive when you have a free channel, but scarcity is what keeps your messages read. To dig into this logic of long-term customer relationships, I point you to this full guide to customer loyalty in 2026 : the principles transfer directly to a wine shop.
8. The mistakes that sink a wine shop that is opening
I see them come up fairly regularly across food shops in general. If you are in the middle of opening, keep this section to hand.
Mistake no. 1: trying to compete with the supermarket on price. We have said it, but it deserves hammering home because it is the most stubborn instinct. Every euro of margin you sacrifice to match a hypermarket's price is a euro lost for nothing, because the customer who came for that price will not come back, and the one who does come back was not looking at the price.
Mistake no. 2: putting nothing in place to capture the customer's contact. You serve 40 people a day, you talk with them, and by the evening you know nothing about them. That is an enormous waste in a trade where the customer comes back rarely and where every return is worth a lot. Setting up the loyalty card from opening day means building a file of qualified customers from day one, instead of scrambling to catch up in two years.
Mistake no. 3: tying up all your cash in stock and neglecting what makes it turn over. A wine shop is a lot of cash asleep in bottles. Your profitability depends on how fast that stock turns over, and therefore on how often your customers come back. Over-investing in the selection and the advice and under-investing in decorative extras is the right trade-off: it is loyalty that turns dormant stock into flow.
Mistake no. 4: treating tastings as immediate revenue. If you judge a tasting by the evening's takings, you will stop running them. Yet it is one of your best levers. Judge it on the relationship and on the three months that follow.
9. If I had to sum it up in one sentence
The independent wine merchant will never win the price war, and they are wrong to start it. Their profitability rests on two things the supermarkets will never be able to offer: the value of advice, and a core of regulars who buy at higher prices and more often because they are supported and feel privileged.
Building that core is not complicated. You have to give real advice, let your best customers taste first, and formalise the connection with a digital cashback pot that rewards repeat purchases and a free contact channel that reaches the right people at the right moment. Three ingredients, and you have a club that keeps the shop alive twelve months a year, without ever discounting a single bottle.
If you are opening a wine shop or want to strengthen your file of regulars, write to me on WhatsApp at 06 03 90 27 83. I will not sell you a miracle solution: I will tell you what I see working across the food shops we support, and how to adapt it to your shop. You can also see a demo of the loyalty card to get a concrete idea.
And if you are thinking about opening a food shop more broadly, these two sister articles should speak to you: opening a cheese shop and smoothing out seasonality and opening a butcher's shop against the supermarket. The fight is the same as yours: do not win on price, win on the relationship. Good luck with the opening, and above all: from day one, you capture the customer's contact.
