A digital marketer’s approach to oversupply — and how to bring it to your GM
The numbers are not ambiguous. DtC wine shipments fell 15% by volume in 2025, the steepest decline since tracking began in 2010. Tasting room visitation dropped 6%. Bottle prices sit roughly 40% above 2019 against a 26% rise in CPI. Inventory is stacked across all three tiers, and nobody expects balance in the immediate future.
If you run ecommerce or digital for a winery, all of that arrives on your desk as one thing: a case goal you cannot hit with the demand you have.
The reflex is to reach for the discount lever, because it’s the only one most marketers can pull without asking anyone. Resist it — not because discounting is always wrong, but because “let’s run a sitewide promo” is the one proposal your GM has already seen, already knows the cost of, and can decline without a conversation. You want the conversation.
The better question isn’t “how do I sell more wine online.” It’s “what is the highest and best use of each SKU across every channel this business has.” Ecommerce is one outlet among several — club, tasting room, wholesale, on-premise, gifting, library — and the only one that leaves a permanent public record of what you were willing to charge. That asymmetry should shape what you do there.
Start with a diagnosis, not a campaign
Not all excess inventory is the same problem, and treating it as one is why most clearance efforts damage more than they move. Segment it:
- Wine that still sells, you just have too much. A forecasting problem. It needs velocity, not price.
- Wine approaching a vintage transition or the end of its window. A real deadline — the inventory that legitimately justifies a bounded, explained offer.
- A SKU that never found its audience. A positioning problem. Discounting teaches the market it was overpriced rather than misplaced.
- An allocated or reserve tier that under-subscribed. Never touch the public price. You’re protecting scarcity, and scarcity doesn’t survive a markdown.
Then attach a number to each: carrying cost. Warehousing, insurance, tied-up capital, opportunity cost of the space. Run that against the margin you’d surrender to move it now. Sometimes holding wins — and showing you ran that comparison is what makes everything after it credible.
Four levers that move cases without moving price
Change the unit. Mixed cases, verticals, cellar-builder sets, mystery packs. Value comes from curation and discovery rather than markdown, and no bottle carries a reduced number. The discipline: a mystery case becomes a landfill the moment you fill it with the same struggling SKU every time. Blend one problem wine with two the customer genuinely wants. The ratio is the game.
Change the terms. Shipping thresholds, deferred billing, split or seasonal-hold shipments. Waiving $30 on a $400 order is effectively 7.5% that never appears as a price — the most efficient lever you have. The trap is permanence: always-on shipping included stops being an incentive and becomes a fixed margin line you can’t get back.
Change the channel. Trade and on-premise placements, library releases, by-the-glass programs, corporate gifting, event pours. A case poured by the glass builds trial; a case discounted online builds a price expectation. Both move inventory, only one helps next year. Two cautions your GM will raise before you do: wholesale moves at a fraction of DtC revenue, so the margin math has to clear first — and if that wine surfaces on a retail shelf below your own website price, you’ve created the exact problem you were avoiding, somewhere you can’t control it.
Change the audience. Lapsed-buyer reactivation, former-member win-backs, targeted offers to your top revenue decile. Private, segmented, never touching list price — and they convert better than anything you can do publicly.
The club is your constraint, not your outlet
This is where marketers get themselves in trouble. Club is the most valuable asset in the business and already under pressure — retention runs 64–77% annually and average tenure has fallen from 36 months to 30. Most member benefits combine a standing discount with access. The moment a public offer matches or beats what a member gets, you’ve told your most loyal customers that loyalty is worse than waiting.
So make it a rule and state it in the proposal: every offer is stress-tested against club economics first. If a non-member can reach equivalent value, the offer is dead or the club gets a stacked benefit.
Better still, run it the other way. Use excess inventory as a member-only value-add — special offer, an upgraded tier, early access to a library wine nobody else can buy. An inventory problem becomes a retention asset. Be careful with this, since you don’t want to cannibalize future club shipments.
When explicit discounting is the right answer
It isn’t never. It’s bounded. A discount holds up when it meets four tests:
- There’s a stated reason the customer can understand and believe.
- It’s limited to specific SKUs, not the catalog.
- It has a visible end date.
- It does not repeat on a predictable calendar.
“We’re clearing the last 200 cases of the ’21 to make room for the ’23” preserves pricing power because it explains itself and obviously ends. “20% off sitewide this weekend,” run monthly, teaches your list to never buy at full price again. The difference isn’t the depth of the discount — it’s whether the customer can tell why it exists and trust that it’s finite.
Bring a plan, not a promo
How you package this determines whether it gets approved:
- Inventory segmented by problem type, with carrying cost attached to each
- A channel-by-channel recommendation — including the channels you don’t own
- An explicit statement of what you’re protecting: list price, club value, allocation integrity
- The bounded discount asks, named, justified, and dated
- A phased ask — the smallest version first, one segment, a defined read date
- What you need from whom: hospitality for tasting room programs, sales for trade, finance for margin approval, production for library releases
That last item changes the meeting. Arrive having already accounted for what your plan costs hospitality and wholesale and you’ve moved from “ecomm wants a discount” to “here is an inventory strategy.” That’s something leadership can own and defend upward — which is what you want, because this decision is bigger than your channel.
Commit to how you’ll be measured
Say it up front, before anyone asks:
- Blended discount rate as a percentage of gross revenue — should hold flat or fall
- Share of DtC revenue transacted at full list price
- Repeat rate and 12-month value of mixed-case buyers versus discount-code buyers
- Net club movement across the campaign window
- Cases moved per dollar of margin surrendered
That last one is the honest metric, and it’s what earns you approval for round two.
Oversupply isn’t resolving itself this year. What separates the wineries that come out with pricing power intact from the ones that don’t is whether their marketing teams treated this as a promotional calendar problem or a portfolio allocation problem. You have more influence over which one your winery is having than your title suggests.
Figures from the Sovos ShipCompliant DtC Wine Shipping Report and Silicon Valley Bank’s 2026 State of the Wine Industry Report.
Note About This Blog Post
This article was developed with assistance from OpenAI and Anthropic. A digital marketing professional edited the article for accuracy and relevance to winery teams. The ideas offer general guidance. Each winery should adapt them to its market, customers, systems, and legal requirements.