The Great Wine Co.
Engaging eCommerce website for the wine specialist
The Great Wine Co. is a leading supplier of high-quality wines. Cyber-Duck was engaged to deliver a new eCommerce website for The Great Wine Co. that could excite and engage consumers about purchasing distinctive wine, therefore raising conversions.
Key stats
262%
increase in revenue
388%
increase in transactions
77%
increase in overall traffic
Objectives
For over 30 years, Great Western Wine have supplied distinctive, hand-crafted, independent wines to consumers.
As part of the rebranding of its consumer-facing arm from the Great Western Wine to The Great Wine Co., Cyber-Duck was engaged to provide a user experience that could better reflect their brand image, entice customers, and guide them through to purchase, thereby raising conversions.
Cyber-Duck wanted to encourage users to purchase high-quality wines from The Great Wine Co. not only as gifts, but for week-to-week consumption. Our objectives were to:
- Research, understand and map the wine products against users’ purchase patterns.
- Develop an eCommerce website which integrated with their stock management system.
UX strategy
First, we facilitated a design strategy workshop and spoke at length with The Great Wine Co.’s stakeholders. We established that their USP was their passion for vineyards and winemakers, which carries through in the quality of their products.
We then conducted user research to understand the needs of customers that The Great Wine Co. wanted to attract. This led to the creation of four personas:
- The beginner – keen but needs help choosing wine for specific situations and people
- The enthusiast – enjoys learning about wine, favours traditional grapes, wants detailed information
- The pragmatist – price-conscious, likes trying new things, bulk buys for family events
- The connoisseur – wine is their passion. Deeply knowledgeable and understands the importance of terroir.
Our research had shown that several factors influenced a customer’s decision to purchase, including vineyard location; visibility of offers; ability to bulk-purchase; tasting notes and food pairings.
User-centred design
From this research, we identified three areas needed attention:
- The mega menu and product filters
- Product pages
- Product cards, search and categories
We analysed our user research to understand how customers narrowed down and decided what wines to buy. We then designed the mega menu so that they could quickly find the wines they liked, whether they were knowledgeable or casual purchasers.
It is designed intuitively to help customers through their decision-making process, from colour of wine, to grape or country, and to go to the granular level demanded by The Great Wine Co.’s most expert users.
This is backed up by easy, powerful product filtering. Meanwhile, to casual purchasers, the mega menu exposed options of what they may have heard of, gifts and promotions.
For the product pages, we needed to increase the information and context. We redesigned the product pages so that they clearly provided information like zoomable product images; location; vintage; producer; grape variety; ABV; grape variety; bottle size; and price. We also included dietary specifications. Product cards for category pages and search results also needed to hold similar, greater amounts of information.
eCommerce platform development
We chose BigCommerce as the enterprise eCommerce engine to power The Great Wine Co.’s site due to its power, flexibility and ease of use for both developers and CMS editors. It provided the best features out of the box and better ROI than Magento and other SaaS platforms. Support around the clock, PCI compliance and low total cost of ownership was also vital for Enotria&Coe.
Together, we used BigCommerce’s extensive API to create a live integration between their stock management system and BigCommerce. It included a custom integration with BigCommerce’s API to populate the BigCommerce system’s product and category data.
This allows Enotria&Coe to manage and forecast with real data about their wine stock, across The Great Wine Co. as well as their B2B sales platform in one single place.
This has removed a lot of manual hours from stock management, ensures that customers get the wines they’ve ordered, and enables efficient order fulfilment via Enotria&Coe’s warehouse and couriers.
We extended BigCommerce’s built-in recursive menu to provide a lot of detail in the mega menu without compromising on UX. Thanks to the functionality of the native menu, it’s complex and large, but still easy to use for all end users.
BigCommerce’s flexible theme engine for product pages and product cards allowed us to display a lot of information wherever customers found them. Icons, guidance, special offers, markers and filters can all be easily displayed, creating a more informative, helpful, engaging experience. Now customers can find what they’re seeking, swiftly and easily.
Lastly, their previous website often went down in times of significant demand. During COVID-19 lockdown, traffic and purchases spiked; the performant website we built and the robust BigCommerce architecture were able to handle this with no issues.
Results
We launched the new website in January 2020. Now, The Great Wine Co. has a website that’s hand-crafted for its brand, with a distinctive, high-quality feel that matches the prestige of its independent wine products.
The new website has already generated impressive results. When teamed with our joint Digital Optimisation efforts, the website has experienced a 77% increase in overall traffic, 12 months after launch.
Above all, the new website has already generated a 388% increase in transactions and a 166% increase in the conversion rate. This has generated an increase of 262% in revenue for The Great Wine Co. Our relationship was so successful that we were asked to produce a second website for their new business: Spirits Kiosk.
Key stats
262%
increase in revenue
388%
increase in transactions
77%
increase in overall traffic