Captina makes it incredibly easy to deploy and manage a rich, customer-friendly webstore that presents your products in the perfect light.
The basic engine is rock-solid, and allows you to customize the look-and-feel to match the rest of your website. And, since we host your website as well as your store (at no additional charge), your webstore will have the same address as the rest of your site — something that research shows is tremendously important to making your customers feel secure.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is great – if your team actually uses it.
Captina’s SimpleCRM has evolved over time to be incredibly easy to use, and genuinely useful. Every customer has a CRM tab that allows you to quickly record your interactions, and to see the history at a glance.
There are three basic event types:
- Notes record an interaction – the date, who entered it, and their notes.
- Sticky Notes do the same, but ‘stick’ to the top of the list so you see them first; you’ll use them to record key facts (“Loves the Rhone varietals; not a Sauvignon Blanc fan.”) that you’ll want your team to see right away.
- To-Dos are like Notes, but they have a due date and are assigned to someone to carry out. You can configure the system to send email reminders to your team about their open to-dos, too.
You’ll also see every marketing message you’ve sent to a customer, along with whether, when, and how often they’ve opened it. Plus their complete order history — all in one place, accessible throughout the system.
Easy, fast, simple. CRM you and your team will actually use!
Captina has a complete point-of-sale terminal built right in, so your tasting room is fully integrated into the system. You can have a custom catalog – with unique pricing and availability – just for your point-of-sale environment.
Any PC can be used (even laptops and iPads). Plus you can add as many as you need – to support an event, for example.
The point-of-sale interface can be used with an inexpensive USB magnetic stripe reader to speed the capturing of both credit card and drivers license information (note that not all states use magnetic stripes).
There’s a cool iPad POS system that lets you swipe credit cards and drivers licenses just as though you were using a regular computer — and that lets you use your existing merchant account.
While it’s simple to print receipts, the system automatically emails each customer a receipt, thereby adding their information to your marketing database.
Captina has a rich catalog system that accommodates a wide range of products, including food, wine, gift packs, and accessory items.
The catalog is very flexible, allowing you to:
- set up multiple pricing levels, associated with different types of customers
- specify special shipping requirements
- specify custom quantities (for example, a 3-bottle limit)
- build in discounts based on quantity purchased
- track inventory levels
- create assemblies, such as cases or gift packages
- attach downloadable tech sheets
Captina supports a wide variety of clubs – prepaid, pay-on-ship, different variants (red-only, for example), and more.
Plus with our integrated Club Shipment Wizard you can create and fulfill Club orders for one person, or thousands, with just a few clicks.
Best of all, with Captina your Club members can manage their own information, including change-of-address, credit card updates, and pause/resume, right from your website.
In addition, Captina offers an elegantly simple allocation system for your rare and high-demand wines.
Selling to restaurants and retailers is a key part of every wine and food business, and Captina makes it easy. Orders can be created in seconds, then shipped (or flagged for pickup or delivery). Invoices can be printed or emailed, and the system supports a variety of payment terms.
Collections are the bane of every small business; while we can’t make your customers pay you faster, we do make it simple for you to identify who owes you money, reach out to them via email or phone, and keep track of who promised what, when.
Captina allows you to manage your two- and three-tier distribution relationships quickly and easily.
We know that relationships evolve, so the Captina model puts the retailer at the center rather than the distributor so that, should you make a change, all of the history stays in place.
The Marketing Wizard is one of the most powerful features in Captina.
In seconds, you can pull together a list of customers matching key criteria, right down to what they’ve bought, what they’ve spent, and when they’ve spent it.
Want to reach out to people who haven’t bought anything from you in the last 18 months? How about sending an invitation to all of your customers in the Washington DC metro area? Or club members who have an expired credit card? Or maybe just a newsletter?
No problem!
You can develop the list, then export it to Excel. Or you can use the wizard to send emails to anywhere from one to 25,000 customers (or more), and track the responses.
It’s all part of Captina, and comes at no additional charge.
When you log in to Captina, you’re taken straight to your home page.
There, each user will find a Company Calendar, so they’ll know what’s happening, when. Plus they can punch in and out (yes, Captina tracks hours worked), and manage their personal profile.
Captina is designed to take an order from the point it’s entered all the way through fulfillment.
If you do your shipping via UPS or FedEx, whether in-house (the economics are compelling – feel free to ask us about it) or through a third-party, Captina ties everything together. It prints packing slips and picking tickets, outputs UPS/FedEx labels, notifies the carrier that the shipment is ready, emails the customer with tracking information, and puts all that information into the customer record so you have it if and when you need it.
If you use a third-party shipping solution, it’s quite likely that we can support them – again, just ask us!

Captina is proud to be a certified UPS Ready ® Program solution provider.

Captina is also ShipCompliant Compatible, offering full integration with their compliance-tracking and -reporting systems. Learn more about them and the services they offer here.
Captina has lots of great reports built in.
They’re lighting-fast, because the database has been optimized for fast response. No need to go get a cup of coffee while you wait for your report to generate.
All reports can easily be downloaded into Excel, too.
You’ll find multiple sales reports so you can see how your business is performing from different perspectives; bookkeeping, sales tax, and inventory reports that make it easy to handle the accounting issues; and even wine shipping compliance reports to streamline your reporting.
The list of reports grows constantly. Best of all, because the underlying engine is so strong, if there’s a report you’d like us to add for your business the odds are good that all you need to do is ask!
One of the advantages of our system is that you’ll always have the latest version, automatically.
That means when we add a new feature, you get it.
It also means that when we find a bug (yes, there are and will always be bugs; it’s software) we can fix it right away — no waiting for the next version.
While Captina has an incredibly robust and rich feature set today, one of the beauties of our Software-as-a-Service model is that it’s easy to add new features in reponse to customer feedback.
Some of the features on the roadmap today include
- Compliance tracking and reporting
- Self-service webstore for wholesale customers
- PayPal payments
- Built-in user-to-user and user-to-us chat
Is there something you’d like to see?
Just let us know!