Preparing Your Products¶

Before creating your wine club, check how your Shopify products are set up. The app works with your existing products, but a few things are worth getting right first.

Individual bottle products¶

Each product you add to a club should represent an individual bottle, not a whole case or multi-pack. The app builds cases from individual bottle products based on the case size the customer selects.

For example, if you offer a 6-pack club, you add individual wine products and the app combines them into a 6-bottle case — you don't need to create a separate "6-pack" product.

Shopify product status¶

Shopify products can be set to Active or Unlisted. Both work with the wine club app:

Active — the product is typically visible on your online store. Customers can find it in collections, search results, and browse to it directly.
Unlisted — the product is not typically visible in your online store, but can still be accessed via a direct link. Unlisted products will still appear on the wine club signup page and the Change Items screen in the customer portal.

Tip

Unlisted is a great option for wines you want to reserve exclusively for club subscribers.

Products with a status of Draft or Archived will not be shown to customers on the signup page or Change Items screen.

When setting up or editing clubs, the product picker filters products by status depending on the club type:

Choose Your Own clubs — Active, Unlisted, and Draft products can be selected. Draft products won't appear to customers until published, making this useful for pre-staging wines in the available pool before release.
Curated clubs — only Active and Unlisted products can be selected, since curated selections push directly to live subscriptions.
Archived products can never be selected when adding or replacing products.

Learn more about Shopify product statuses

Inventory tracking¶

Shopify products can have inventory tracking turned on or off. Both options work with the wine club app, but the setting affects how subscription renewals are processed.

Inventory tracking off — renewals will always go through regardless of stock levels. This is the simplest option if you don't need to track inventory for your club wines.
Inventory tracking on — stock levels are checked when processing a renewal. If a product is out of stock, the renewal may fail. See Billing & Payments for details. Out-of-stock wines also show as Out of stock in the Change Items picker so customers can see the gap without losing the wine from their selection.

Learn more about Shopify inventory tracking

Multiple inventory locations¶

If you stock wines across more than one location (for example, a separate location for each country or region), the app does not pick a location or manage stock itself. It relies entirely on the inventory and order routing rules already set up in your Shopify admin — a wine club renewal is treated the same as any other order on your store.

This means a renewal succeeds or fails based on stock at the location Shopify routes that customer's order to, not your total stock across all locations. A wine that is sold out at one location can still cause a renewal to fail for customers routed to it, even when stock is available elsewhere.

If a renewal fails for this reason, you receive a billing failure alert with the affected wine, SKU, and a link to the product so you can rebalance stock or adjust your routing rules. See Billing & Payments for more on how failed renewals are handled.

Learn more about Shopify locations and order routing.

Vintages¶

Most wineries create a separate Shopify product for each vintage (e.g., "2023 Shiraz" and "2024 Shiraz") rather than updating the same product in place. This approach gives you full control over pricing, descriptions, and images for each vintage while keeping a clear history.

When a new vintage arrives, the app makes it easy to swap it into your club and update all existing subscriptions at once. See Vintage Rolls for a step-by-step workflow.