Beyond the cellar door
We wrote recently about what your wine farm website needs if you're focused on visitors - the tasting room, the booking flow, the mobile experience. That covers the consumer-facing side well.
But many of the wine farms we work with across Robertson, Riebeek Valley, Tulbagh, and the broader Western Cape don't just sell to people who walk through the door. They sell to restaurants, retailers, hotels, and importers. Some export to the UK, Europe, Asia, or the US. The tasting room website isn't enough for that side of the business.
If you're a wine farm that sells wholesale, supplies retail, or exports, here's what your website needs to support that.
A proper product catalogue
Importers and retailers don't browse your site the way a tourist does. They want specifics: varietals, vintages, bottle sizes, case quantities, tasting notes, alcohol percentages, and certifications. They want to see your full range at a glance, not scroll through a lifestyle gallery to find it.
Your product pages need to be functional, not just beautiful. Clean product cards with the details a buyer actually needs, filterable by varietal or range if you have a large portfolio.
This doesn't mean your site needs to look like a spreadsheet. It means the B2B information needs to exist alongside the consumer experience, not buried in a PDF somewhere.
Certification and compliance display
If you export, your certifications matter to buyers. WOSA membership, IPW sustainability, Fair Trade, organic certification, BRC food safety, kosher, halaal - whatever applies to your operation.
These should be visible on the site, ideally on a dedicated page or a clearly marked section. Not just logos in a footer - actual detail about what each certification means and how it applies to your products.
International importers often need to verify these before they can list your wines. Making it easy for them to find this information on your website saves time for both of you.
Logistics and export information
A page that tells importers what they need to know about working with you:
- Minimum order quantities for wholesale and export
- Shipping regions you currently service
- Lead times from order to dispatch
- Cold chain and packaging standards you meet
- Incoterms you work with (FOB, CIF, etc.)
- Contact for trade enquiries - a separate form or email from your general enquiry
This information is often missing from wine farm websites entirely. Importers have to email or call to find out the basics, which slows down the process and loses some prospects altogether.
A separate B2B section or enquiry flow
Your retail customer and your trade buyer have different needs. A tourist looking to book a tasting and a UK importer looking to list your Chenin Blanc shouldn't land on the same contact form.
Options range from simple to involved:
- Simple: A dedicated "Trade" or "Wholesale" page with relevant information and a trade-specific enquiry form
- Moderate: A trade login area where approved buyers can see wholesale pricing and place orders
- Full B2B platform: Tiered pricing, net-30 terms, automated invoicing, courier integration - the kind of system we built for Doughboys
Most wine farms doing moderate export volumes do well with the simple or moderate approach. A full B2B platform makes sense when you're processing a high volume of wholesale orders and the manual admin is becoming a bottleneck.
Multi-currency and international SEO
If you export, some of your prospects are searching in English from London, Sydney, or New York. They're searching for "South African wine supplier" or "Chenin Blanc importer South Africa" - and your website needs to appear in those results.
This means:
- Pricing context - you don't need to show USD/EUR/GBP pricing, but mentioning that you export and work with international buyers signals relevance
- Schema markup for your business that includes your export regions
- Content that answers international buyer questions - not just "visit our farm" content aimed at tourists
- Fast loading globally - a site hosted on a South African server with no CDN will be slow for a buyer in Hamburg
What this doesn't need to be
A full e-commerce platform is overkill for most wine farm export operations. You don't need Shopify or WooCommerce processing international wine orders with temperature-controlled shipping calculated at checkout.
What you need is a professional website that:
- Shows your full product range with the details buyers need
- Displays your certifications and compliance credentials
- Makes it easy for trade buyers to get in touch
- Ranks for the searches importers and retailers actually make
- Loads quickly regardless of where in the world the buyer is
We build sites for wine farms across the Western Cape, and we understand the difference between a consumer-facing tasting room page and a trade-facing export section. If your current site only does one of those, get in touch and we'll talk through what the other side would look like.