Data-driven businesses have one key advantage: the ability to accurately measure costs and profitability.
When Liquor Store Owner/Managers can quickly and easily see opportunities to reduce waste in their operations, they enable themselves to run more profitable Liquor Stores in the long run. And in an industry where as many as 20% of Liquor Stores & Wine Shops fail within five years,1 Liquor Store owners can’t afford to pass on easy opportunities to run their establishment more efficiently.
One essential metric for a successful Liquor Store is your average Retail vs Bottle cost—it directly relates to a Liquor Store ’s ability to control costs and price for profitability. By accurately calculating bottle costs and comparing them to industry benchmarks, a Liquor Store manager can easily find out how much their business can improve.
At Bevly, we provide Liquor Store owners and managers with the tools and data they need to streamline their operations, including their true margin, markup & bottle costs. And to ensure their beverage programs succeed, our
Customer Success team is eager to work with them to implement operational improvements with that data.
So, how much can we help your Liquor Store ? For the answer, you could ask a few of our customers. Or, as we like to do, we could show you the data. We looked at the Retail vs Bottle costs of all Bevly Liquor Stores to see how the numbers change as they begin to use our software. See the results on the following pages.
Savings Breakdown
Among our Bevly customers, the median Liquor Store starts with a Retail vs Bottle cost of 23.5%; after 6 months of working with us, that Retail vs Bottle cost is 16.5%. For a business with $500,000 in annual revenue, that 7% reduction amounts to $35,000 in savings every year. For a business with $1 million, that’s $70,000.
And these dollar savings don’t even include all the time and staff labor saved by not using pen and paper.
Why do these Liquor Stores reduce their Retail vs Bottle costs so much more in the second quarter? Our software is both an operational tool and an analytics platform. From the beginning, we save you hours by streamlining the inventory and ordering process. But those order invoices and inventory logs contain crucial data, so
when we later integrate them with your POS system, you can compare revenue and costs for every product.
So, the earliest Retail vs Bottle cost improvements come by reducing shrinkage (lost or wasted product). And as managers become immersed in their Liquor Store data, they can use our drink pricing tool and other advanced features to fundamentally change their business’ operations.
Of course, your specific product offering could affect your Liquor Store ’s Retail vs Bottle costs and potential savings. So, we’ve broken down the data to see total how Bevly
customers’ Retail vs Bottle costs changed in total and within each of their product categories: beer, wine and spirits.
The Key
In this report, you’ll see graphs showing the average Retail vs Bottle costs of Bevly Liquor Stores. We’ve grouped these Liquor Stores by how long we’ve been working with them.
The blocks represent the ranges of Retail vs Bottle costs over time, separated
by the middle 50% (colored blocks) and the top and bottom 25% (grey blocks). The white line represents the median (middle) Retail vs Bottle cost within each group.
Total Average Retail VS Bottle Cost
When first implementing Bevly, the middle 50% of Liquor Stores have average Retail vs Bottle costs of around 21–26%. The median (middle) Liquor Store has a total Retail vs Bottle cost of 23.5%.
After three months of use, Bevly Liquor Stores have the skills and data they need to begin improving. The middle 50%, in the 3–6 month phase, have reduced their Retail vs Bottle costs to 19.5–24%. After 6 months, these Liquor Stores are fully using analytics so well that the middle 50% lower their Retail vs Bottle costs to 14.5–18%. Of these, the middle Liquor Store has a Retail vs Bottle cost of 16.5%.
Average Beer Retail VS Bottle Cost
The middle 50% of Bevly Liquor Stores’ beer sales begin with Retail vs Bottle costs of 24–29.5%. Just 3–6 months after using the software, the middle 50% have reduced these to 21.5–27%.
After 6 months, these have been further reduced to 20–21.5%.
Average Wine Retail VS Bottle Cost
As for wine, we see the middle 50% of Liquor Stores start with Retail vs Bottle costs of 25–33.5%. Wine programs can be more difficult to improve on, but with Bevly’s help, they see their wine category Retail vs Bottle cost improve first to 23.5–28% after 3 months and then to 19.5–24% after 6 months.
Average Spirit Retail VS Bottle Cost
Bevly Liquor Stores take longer to see reductions in their spirit and cocktail Retail vs Bottle costs than wine and beer, but those eventual savings are huge.
When they begin, the middle 50% have Retail vs Bottle costs of 16.5–18.5%. After 3 months, when product variance is declining, those Retail vs Bottle costs have gone down to 15.5–18%.
After 6 months, Liquor Stores are now fully using our product tracking tools & BEV Assistant to better manage product prices, COGS & Purchase Orders. As a result, their Retail vs Bottle costs go down significantly—all the way to 12–13.5%.
Conclusion
While Bevly Liquor Stores typically see savings on beer and wine within the first 3 months, it takes longer for many of them to see substantial improvements on spirit and cocktail Retail vs Bottle costs. Reduced product variance impacts beer and wine’s margins early on, but managers need time to identify and reprice high- cost products. This task becomes easier once clean sales and cost data is available.
After using Bevly for inventory and ordering for a period of time, Liquor Stores enable our analytics platform and customer success managers to identify these high-cost products for them. This gives managers the ability to modify their retail prices & COGS, in addition to their beer and wine ones. These are the significant Retail vs Bottle cost savings seen in the 3–6 month phase.
