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Majestic Wine revamps website

By Retail Technology | Wednesday September 11 2013

Multichannel wine merchant embraces m-commerce and local merchandising capabilities with website relaunch

To build on its strong performance in online sales in its most recent financial year, Majestic Wine has launched its next generation e-commerce website to enhance the customer experience and drive further growth.

Its revamped online presence includes device-optimised sites, an improved stock system reflecting local availability, and personal recommendations provided by its team of over 800 wine experts.

Developed by e-commerce consultancy and systems integrator Javelin Group, the new Majestic Wine website runs on e-commerce platform Intershop 7 and uses SDL Fredhopper for search and navigation. Intershop and Javelin Group, who jointly offered both software and support, secured the project following a competitive tender process.

Harnessing the power of HTML5

The new Majestic Wine site uses HTML5 to optimise its site across all mobiles, tablets and desktops. As well as providing optimal reading, navigation and check-out processes for the customer’s specific device, with one central system the on-going process of managing site content is vastly simplified.

Majestic Wine is well known for its knowledgeable store staff, with the new website, this knowledge has been transferred online. In May and June Majestic Wine asked their team of wine experts from across the UK to make ‘If you like that, you’ll love....’ suggestions for products across the range. Gathering over 125,000 recommendations, the initiative successfully bringe the expert advice Majestic Wine customers receive in store to life on the web to engage customers and drive incremental sales.

Advanced mapping capabilities

The site also uses advanced geographic mapping techniques, enabling Majestic Wine to balance supply and demand, and ensure compliance with licensing laws. The customer can select the closest or preferred store and be presented with the available range using near real-time stock management.

Users can specify delivery options in advance, and results are returned depending on where the delivery is going; customers visiting the site are automatically shown one of a possible 200 local variations of the main product range.

Richard Weaver, e-commerce director at Majestic Wine, said: “When customers shop online with us, they are actually shopping with their local Majestic store, so they get all the benefits that this brings in terms of an expanded range and passionate customer service.”

Adding ratings and reviews

In addition to segmenting its product catalogue depending on locality, Majestic Wine employs a sophisticated ratings and recommendations system for wine; customers can review and rate wines, and can also limit searches to only show wines with a minimum rating from other customers. Staff recommendations can be used to filter a search, as can journalist write-ups.

Weaver added: "We can now offer our customers a broader and more exciting product range than ever before. Personal recommendations from our wine experts are available online for the first time, and we’ve improved convenience by strengthening our click & collect offering and introducing PayPal payments. We are thrilled that the new site makes our market-leading, unique wine retail proposition shine online and it has been a pleasure to work with such a professional team at Javelin Group.”

The specialist wine retailer will also access customer data and purchase history to send out a personalised autumn print promotion, which will be tailored according to the types of wine each customer tends to buy. For example, if their online purchase history suggests they enjoy wine from Spain, the promotion will feature predominantly Spanish wines. This promotion will be backed by landing pages powered by SDL Fredhopper's merchandising tools.

The SDL Fredhopper search, navigation and merchandising software tools replaced the now redundant Mercado technology and is delivered as a hosted service.

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