Most winery websites treat bookings and wine sales as two completely separate things. The result: guests book a tasting, show up, have a great experience — and then drive home without buying a single bottle. Here's how to fix that with Shopify and Sesami.
If your winery offers tasting room experiences, you're sitting on one of the most valuable revenue moments in the direct-to-consumer wine business. A guest who visits your tasting room is already warm — they like your wine, they like your story, and they're physically standing in your world. The question is whether your technology lets you convert that moment into a lasting customer relationship.
The problem for most wineries is a fragmented tech stack. Bookings live in one system (Tock, Eventbrite, or a paper calendar), online wine sales live in another (a legacy wine platform or a basic Shopify store), and email marketing is either absent or running as a third disconnected tool. This fragmentation creates gaps that cost wineries real money every week.
Why the Booking-to-Sale Gap Exists
The gap exists because most booking tools weren't built with commerce in mind. They were built to manage reservations — nothing more. They don't know what your guests tasted, what they liked, or whether they bought anything. And because your ecommerce store doesn't know who visited your tasting room, your follow-up emails are generic at best.
The result is a missed opportunity at every stage of the customer journey: before the visit, during the visit, and after it.
"Most winery websites treat bookings and wine sales as two separate things. We connect them — so a guest who books a tasting can buy what they tried before they even leave the parking lot."
The Shopify + Sesami Stack Explained
Sesami is a booking platform built natively inside Shopify. Unlike third-party reservation tools that bolt onto your website as an iframe, Sesami lives within your Shopify storefront — meaning every booking is a Shopify transaction, every guest is a Shopify customer, and every experience can be connected to your product catalog.
This is the fundamental shift: when a guest books a tasting through Sesami, they become a Shopify customer. That means you can immediately connect their booking to Klaviyo, send them a pre-visit email with what to expect, follow up with the specific wines they tasted, invite them to join your wine club — all automatically, without manual effort from your team.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Guest Books a Tasting Online
A visitor finds your winery on Google, clicks through to your Shopify site, and books a tasting directly — no redirect to a third-party tool. The booking is handled by Sesami inside your Shopify storefront. The guest is created as a Shopify customer and tagged automatically (e.g., "tasting-room-visitor," "booked-reserve-flight").
Pre-Visit Klaviyo Flow Fires Automatically
Because the booking exists in Shopify and Sesami integrates natively with Klaviyo, a pre-visit email sequence goes out the moment the booking is confirmed. This can include a welcome note, directions, what to wear, what to expect — and a subtle prompt to browse your online shop before they arrive.
During the Visit — Shopify POS Ties It Together
At the tasting room, your staff uses Shopify POS. If a guest decides to buy bottles they just tried, the sale is processed under the same customer profile. The system now knows they visited, what they purchased, and what price point they responded to. No clipboard. No manual CRM entry.
Post-Visit Sequence Converts Browsers Into Buyers
Within 24 hours, a personalized post-visit Klaviyo email goes out: "Thanks for visiting — here's what you tasted." It includes direct links to purchase those specific bottles online. A second email three days later promotes your wine club with a first-shipment discount. A third, two weeks out, highlights the upcoming seasonal release based on their tasting preferences.
Lapsed Visitor Win-Back
Guests who visited but haven't purchased in 60 days enter a win-back flow. Guests who joined the wine club but haven't engaged in 90 days get a retention sequence. All of this is automated. None of it requires your team to do anything manually.
Why Wineries Are Moving to Shopify
For years, wineries relied on vertical-specific platforms like Commerce7 or WineDirect. These tools were purpose-built for wine, which made them appealing early on. But they've struggled to keep pace with the rapid innovation happening in the broader ecommerce ecosystem.
Shopify, by contrast, operates at a different scale. Its app ecosystem evolves constantly, and tools like Sesami, Klaviyo, and Shopify POS are continuously improving. Major players in the wine industry have already made the move — and for smaller and mid-size wineries, the economics of Shopify are increasingly compelling compared to the licensing fees of legacy wine platforms.
The other advantage is flexibility. Wine-specific platforms lock you into their ecosystem. Shopify lets you build the exact stack your winery needs, without paying for features you'll never use.
The Role of a Specialized Agency
The challenge with a stack like Shopify + Sesami + Klaviyo is that there's real configuration work involved to make it perform well for a winery specifically. Out of the box, Sesami is a powerful tool — but it won't automatically segment your tasting guests, tag them by experience type, or connect those tags to the right Klaviyo flows. That logic needs to be built deliberately.
This is where a commerce agency with winery-specific experience makes a meaningful difference. The integrations aren't complicated for an experienced team, but they take time to design correctly — and the decisions made at the configuration stage determine how much revenue the system generates long-term.
What to look for in an agency
When evaluating agencies for this kind of project, look for ones that specialize in Shopify for service-based businesses (not just product retail), have direct experience with Sesami's SDK — not just the basic app install — and understand the winery DTC model, including wine clubs, compliance considerations, and seasonal selling patterns.
Is This Right for Your Winery?
This approach works best for wineries that offer recurring tasting experiences, have an existing customer base they're not fully leveraging, want to grow wine club memberships, and are ready to replace a legacy booking tool or disconnected tech stack with something unified.
If you're currently managing reservations in Tock or Eventbrite, processing tasting room sales on a separate POS, and sending generic email blasts with no segmentation — the Shopify + Sesami + Klaviyo stack will be a significant upgrade. Not just operationally, but in terms of revenue generated per tasting room visitor.
The wineries getting the most out of this model aren't necessarily the largest. They're the ones that have made the deliberate decision to treat every tasting room guest as a long-term customer, not a one-time visitor.