Joval Wine Group uncorks Digital Transformation with Aligent and Bigcommerce
Joval Wine Group: A rewarding blend of intuitive user experience, exclusive product availability, and crafted customer pricing!
CLIENT Joval Wine Group
SERVICES Development, B2B commerce, Bigcommerce
INDUSTRIES Food & Beverage, B2B
The Brief:
The latest vintage of the Winesource website has delivered outstanding results for Joval Wine Group, delighting customers with its ease of use, speed and functionality. The collaboration between Aligent, Bigcommerce and Joval Wine Group has overcome significant complexities in the wine distribution business at scale, to bring a carefully designed user experience to life, driven in real-time by sophisticated integration.
Utilising Bigcommerce's B2B Edition as a framework, with a React-based PWA frontend, and powered by a modern integration to Microsoft D365, the Winesource website sets a new standard for B2B ecommerce & portal functionality.
Joval Wines won the Mid-Market B2B eCommerce Association Industry Awards in 2024. It was noted the Joval Wines Wine Source portal has set the standard for wine distribution in Australia, earning well-deserved recognition as a world-leading platform. It offers time-poor customers a fully self-service online experience available 24/7 that is super fast, along with unique industry-specific functionality on a SAAS platform made possible through a headless architecture.
The Solution:
- Bespoke, UX-led design underscoring the unlimited flexibility of the headless user interface
- Rich product content including tasting notes, winery profiles, expert reviews, vintage and varietal - underscoring BigCommerce’s flexible data model
- Stunning performance thanks to BigCommerce, Aligent’s TakeFlight and AWS, delivering cost-effective, highly available, and scalable peace of mind for Joval and rapid experiences for their customers.
- Sophisticated B2B capabilities, including:
- Capped purchasing for in-demand products;
- Omnichannel order and invoice history & payment;
- Complex customer-specific pricing driven by ERP;
- Multiple UOM (bottle, 6 pack, dozen, etc);
- Reserved quantity for selected Products (“allocations”) ensuring a guaranteed minimum quantity available for preferred customers;
- Visibility of order status including dispatch date & ETA
The combination of complex B2B scenarios along with wine industry specific nuances presented major technical challenges to overcome. This included multi-location inventory, sales channel limits, and customer specific reservations. Pricing complexity included over 400,000 discount lines factoring in individual SKU, customer, brand and customer group levels
Andrew Stoneham
,Chief Information Officer
-at Joval Wine Group
"My pricing and inventory is always up to date so I don’t have to call for discounts and stock like your competitors."
"It’s great being able to quickly re-order a product via the mobile app when I notice stock is low in the store room."
"In the hospitality trade we often place orders and manage invoices late at night – we can trade with you 24/7 now."
Customers can access comprehensive, industry specific attributes for ease of discovery, not to mention reviews from wine industry experts such as Halliday, James Suckling and more. Downloadable tasting notes and images make it easier to incorporate the products into their own businesses.
For in-demand products, Joval Wine Group implemented customer-specific quotas and reservations, ensuring that no-one customer could exceed their allowance, and providing assurances for VIP customers that their requirements would always be met.
The Value Delivered:
Customers particularly appreciated the ability to navigate by Brand, Vintage, Varietal, Price, Country and Region, and more, navigating the complex word of wine in a manner that suits their needs, ranging from a sommelier at a hatted restaurant to a cafe owner through to boutique wine stores. Listening to the needs of the customer was the starting point for this project.
Similarly, the convenience of 24/7 access to an omnichannel view of their account standing, ultimately enabling the payment of invoices and hassle-free transactions was a relief for customers. Rather than manually requesting statements by phone or email, customers can download whenever it suits, while also checking on delivery timings for upcoming orders for extra peace of mind.
50%
Customers now placing Orders via website
400,000
Unique Price Points
24/7
Accounts Availability
Winesource is a differentiator for Joval in the B2B fine wine space – all key competitors are reliant on email/phone call based ordering or basic D2C style websites that don’t offer a compelling solution
Andrew Stoneham, CIO
