Blog – Wine Foundry

WeShip Express + Lightspeed C-Series

Shipping Simplified for Wine and Spirits

Shipping wine and spirits is anything but simple. From complex state regulations to product-specific restrictions, every order can quickly become a compliance headache — especially when most shipping solutions aren’t built with the needs of beverage retailers in mind.

That’s why we’re excited to announce a new custom integration between WeShip Express and Lightspeed C-Series — designed specifically for wine and liquor retailers who need a smarter, more flexible shipping solution.

Why Build It?

WeShip Express offers specialized services for alcohol fulfillment, but until now, their integrations have been limited. Their native connections — like to Shopify — are helpful, but inflexible, and don’t support many of the discounting, validation, and custom quoting needs that real-world wine and spirits businesses require.

Lightspeed C-Series users, in particular, had no direct way to integrate WeShip for real-time quoting, order management, or tracking updates — creating operational gaps and manual work.

We decided to fix that.

What Our Integration Delivers

Our WeShip Express integration for Lightspeed C-Series includes:

Real-Time Rate Quotes: Customers see accurate shipping rates based on WeShip Express data — including full support for custom discounting rules.
Zip Code and State Validation: Only eligible shipping options are shown, based on current regulations for wine and/or spirits shipments to the customer’s location.
Automated Order & Label Creation: When an order is placed, the system automatically creates the shipment and generates the label inside WeShip Express — no manual entry required.
Tracking Number Sync: As soon as WeShip generates a tracking number, it’s automatically pulled back into Lightspeed C-Series and updated in the eCommerce system.
Azure Function Hosting: The entire system runs serverlessly on Azure Functions, ensuring high reliability, low latency, and automatic scalability.

Not Just for Lightspeed

While this project started with Lightspeed C-Series, we designed the integration platform-agnostic.
Any eCommerce platform that supports webhooks can use our WeShip integration — opening up flexible WeShip shipping to a much broader range of online stores.

The Bottom Line

At Wine Foundry, we believe in practical technology that solves real problems for wine and spirits retailers.
Our WeShip Express integration gives stores greater control over shipping compliance, reduces manual work, and helps create a smoother checkout experience — all without being locked into specific eCommerce platforms or losing the flexibility you need to grow.

If you’re interested in integrating WeShip Express into your store — whether you’re on Lightspeed, Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform — contact us to learn how we can help.

Blog

Add 25% to Your Store Sales with eCommerce

There are still a lot of wine retailers who don’t have an eCommerce channel. It takes a lot of investment in work, know how, and money to set one up and get it going. It’s like opening a new store that you have to build and staff from scratch.

But it is worth it. eCommerce can easily add an extra 15-25% to a small wine retailer’s business. eCommerce not only helps you generate net new business, it gives your existing customers another way to interact with your store. Your customer’s want to shop you, but without a website it is too easy to just shop the other guy.

Here is some real data from one of our clients – a vary small independent wine retailer. This chart (below) is pulled from Wine Foundry’s reporting service using PowerBI. You can see their normal results trending along consistently with a nice spike in December for the holidays. We turned eCommerce on for them in February and ran some low volume testing, and then went live fully in March. You can see the jump in business – a 30% jump that is growing and sustaining from April on.

A 30% jump in revenue after eCommerce is live.

Now I admit, eCommerce wasn’t the only thing going on here – we were running promotions, email campaigns, and advertising on Facebook and Google. However, eCommerce is the backbone that allows all this business to happen. It drives your ability to get the customer to buy when they have the urge – not when they remember to stop by.

The ability to have the customer click a link and just buy is a gamechanger for your marketing.

How Can We Help?

Wine Foundry can help run your eCommerce with no upfront costs. We will take your existing POS data, set it up on an eCommerce platform, and teach you what you need to know to fulfill orders. We will maintain all the data, load the wines and images, populate everything, and launch you to your market. We take a sales commission on what we sell online – no upfront costs, no risk on your part.

Think of it like opening a new store and hiring a manager to run it. We are your store manager – we open the store, we run it, you pay us on sales commission.

Questions? Contact us at info@winefoundry.com and let’s talk.

Blog

Facebook Lookalike Audience are Wine Retail’s Friend

Finding new potential customers is a big challenge for wine retailers. It can take a lot of labor and money to attract new visitors to your store and website. However, there is a free resource that can substantially help you find people to target with Facebook Ads – Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

Lookalike Audiences helps you find people on Facebook that are like your current customers. This can be especially impactful if most of your online traffic comes from local audience or if you are selling things like Virtual Tastings, Case Deals, Gift Baskets, or Bundled Items.

How does it work?

Lookalike Audiences start with data you probably (or should) already have – your customer data from your POS system or email lists – and creating a Customer Audience. Facebook lets you create Custom Audiences by uploading your customer lists with data like name, email address, and zip. You can even tag them with their Lifetime Value (LTV) by including their total sales amounts. Custom Audiences are great if you are looking to advertise to your existing customers – which you should also do – but if you are looking for new customers you need to take it another step.

Once you have created your Custom Audience, you can now create a Lookalike Audience that takes your existing customers and looks across Facebook for people with similar likes, interests, and browsing habits as your customers and bundles them in to a new audience.

With your new Lookalike, you can build campaigns that specifically target these new, unaffiliated prospects. In our experience, a well built campaign on a Lookalike audience converts 10-25% better than a Core Audience that is built just with distance, demographics, etc.

Need some help?

Shoot us an email. Wine Foundry can do the heavy lifting of building your Custom and Lookalike audiences and created impactful campaigns. Like always, for many of our services there is no upfront cost – you pay us a commission on the sales that actually happen.

Services

Point of Sale Implementation

Wine retailers need to start with a good foundation in the point of sale. Traditionally, wine and liquor point of sale systems have been expensive and difficult to implement. They often require the retailer to provide and maintain hardware in the store. And older systems can make it very difficult to extend the business to eCommerce. However, there are increasingly better options in the cloud-based Point of Sale space that provide you with a fully functional platform that is web and mobile accessible, and that integrates seamlessly with payment providers and eCommerce systems.

Wine Foundry can help you understand the current POS landscape and what POS systems work best for wine retailers. We implement and modernize wine POS, convert data, set up payment providers, and provide coaching on using your new system.

We work primarily with cloud vendors we know work with the business needs of wine retail. Due to the extensive data needs, large SKU count, and frequency of inventory changes, we recommend systems that are used primarily from a desktop computer in the back office, from a desktop computer with touchscreen at the cash wrap, and with the option of a tablet/phone for mobile check out.

Currently, systems like Lightspeed Retail, Vend, and Shopkeep offer the best mix of features, price, and extensibility for wine retailers.

Services

eCommerce

eCommerce is becoming a mandatory part of any brick and mortar wine retailer. While many wine shops have gotten by without, many that we work with have seen store traffic and sales fall because shoppers tend to want to engage online before visiting the store.

As the Covid pandemic hit, it has become even more important to offer an online view in to your inventory, as well as a way for people to buy online and pick up in store or access delivery.

Most of our clients who are primarily brick and mortar quickly see an increase in sales through online of 15-25% of store sales. This is additional business that comes with very low overhead – it’s like having a second store.

The big barrier most wine shops face is the amount of work and upfront cost required to get in the game – plus the amount of learning required not to make mistakes.

Wine Foundry gets you in the game for no upfront cost.

For most clients, we will implement and run your eCommerce entirely on contingent fees – a sales commission if you like. We will implement, load data, establish shipping and delivery relationships, and market your eCommerce site with no up front costs and no money out of pocket. We manage the “store” and you fulfill the orders (we will teach you everything you need to know). We take a sales commission off of what we sell through your eCommerce site. The total cost ends up being about the same as hiring a person to run it, except without the overhead of employee payroll, and without the risk.

Wine Retail Insights