Joval Wine Group: A rewarding blend of intuitive user experience, exclusive product availability, and crafted customer pricing!

Joval Wine Group uncorks Digital Transformation with Aligent and Bigcommerce

A rewarding blend of intuitive user experience, exclusive product availability, and crafted customer pricing!


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.

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

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.


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.

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

Jands: Rapid delivery of a seamlessly-integrated B2B experience is music to the ears!

Design and Development, Discovery, Integrations, B2B Commerce

As Australia's leading distributor of Audio Visual equipment for professional lighting, staging and audio, Jands knew they needed to wow their customers with the next generation of their B2B ecommerce offering.

A previous "plug and play" website framework proved their customers were keen for digital touchpoints but severely limited the ability to personalise and delight.

With an ERP modernisation program in-flight, Jands chose Aligent and Adobe to create a tailored and extensible platform, to be seamlessly integrated into the Dynamics365 backend. 

Jands undertook an ambitious position to build and implement our transition to Adobe at a time when we are also implementing a new ERP system ... The Aligent team have been exceptional partners, and the success of our project is directly attributable to them as a partner

Five months later, out in the world is a brand new PWA, with fresh designs by the Aligent team and an exciting approach to account management, it truly represents the modern online experience the B2B customer has come to expect!

Streamlined dashboard showing overview of users actions and key figures

Fully customisable user purchase permissions and a simple approvals process

Account Purchase Credit facilities available

Accounting statement breakdowns for easy account reconciliation

Quick order functionality for customers who have consistent orders

Combined with a careful communications plan to manage the change for customers and internal stakeholders, the functionality and ease of use has already delivered significant increase in usage by customers. 

TradeTools: Breaking new ground with business agility and online customer experience

TradeTools lays the digital foundation for success

Aligent and TradeTools break new ground with business agility and online customer experience

TradeTools is a leading Australian supplier of industrial tools and equipment. Since first opening doors back in 1987, TradeTools has provided Australia’s tradespeople and the trade industry with the widest range of top-quality industrial air, hand, power and cordless tools and industrial equipment. These same tools have been used to build roads, businesses, schools, hospitals, homes & many other projects. 

With such an important role to play in helping build Australia, TradeTools demanded an outstanding online experience to continue leading the industry. Aligent’s ongoing partnership with TradeTools (first established during the challenges of COVID) has delivered significant growth for the key channel to market.

In late 2023, TradeTools partnered with Aligent to transition their backend eCommerce technology to BigCommerce while preserving the existing front-end experience (previously built by Aligent as a Headless PWA), dramatically cutting down on development time compared to a full rebuild. This project truly embodies the essence of the MACH movement.

Website is tightly integrated to ERP (Pronto) so that customers can view live inventory, pricing, customer account information and loyalty program status.

Complex shipping calculations to fulfill products ranging from “Big and Bulky” (e.g. air compressors weighing up to 800kg) through to lightweight consumables, also dangerous goods and indent/pre-orders.

Website is built using Progressive Web App technology ensuring lightning fast user experience, future flexibility, SEO benefits and underpinned by Aligent TakeFlight's accelerator. 

Full visibility of order history online and in-store. 

Utilising BigCommerce hosting frees Aligent from regular security and maintenance tasks, allowing a focused delivery of enhancements.

Our B2B customers make up a considerable component of our total business. In a very competitive environment, we are often competing against significantly larger businesses so our service and knowledge of the customer can be a differentiating factor in our success. In this context, creating a seamless buying experience was essential for our B2B buyers. Our website sales are a substantial % of our overall business, continues to grow and works in parallel with our store success.

Ensuring the successful integration between our ERP and eCommerce platform was integral to the success of the overall project. Product pricing, stock levels, order information (online and offline) and customer data were all functionality which need to be integrated. Product pricing complexities stands out as an area of particular challenge. TradeTools have a number of rules that are affected by numerous variables. Aligent worked with us to create a customised rule set that works exactly how we need online, as it does through our ERP.

The microservice-based integration approach is highly scalable, cost-effective and extensible, providing a welcome alternative to vendor lock-in associated with the legacy "ERP plug-and play" ecommerce solution before Aligent's engagement, or to expensive iPaaS solutions. 

Rockwear: Innovative UX for highly competitive female athleisure brand

Aligent developed an innovative technology stack to showcase intuitive UX

Rockwear PWA shows outstanding performance

Development, Integrations, B2C Commerce, PWA, Marketplaces, Adobe Commerce

Addition of video elements throughout the experience

Modernise architecture to reduce technical debt, and improve future flexibility.

Rockwear set out to create a website that reinvigorated the customer experience. Understanding how customers shop and use the products in their lives drove the process, from navigation that provides multiple paths to suit the customer's need, Guides and Finders to inform the selection process, and complementing the information with engaging video.  The result has surpassed expectations, delivering commercial results and significantly increasing the operational efficiencies. 

A key capability for Rockwear to improve customer experience is dependent on seamless and scalable integration to backoffice systems including ERP and POS. This microservice-based connection enables real-time visibility of inventory across almost a hundred stores. The integration also supports confident selling of Rockwear products across numerous popular marketplaces, underpinned by powerful PIM content management. 

Leverages Aligent’s TakeFlight framework

Microservices for real-time integration with ERP/POS

With a significant proportion of Rockwear's customers browsing from the gym, chilling after a workout, or at the cafe with friends, ensuring the website was not only mobile-friendly, but mobile optimized was essential. Aligent's TakeFlight accelerator provided the ideal platform to create a Progressive Web Application that is extremely fast and interactive, "installable" without needing Apple App Store or Google Play Store hassles, and enables incremental addition on new functionality. 

The headless performance was resulted in significant SEO benefits, with outstanding Core Web Vitals, and the user conversion rate increase has realised the hoped-for benefits.

Significant performance improvements, including site speed and scalability.

Forever New: Flexibility and scalability to deliver on global expansion

Forever New has an ambition for global expansion and therefore required a solution that was both flexible and scalable

Give customers the option to pay online and pick up in store, and to reserve in store 

Provide the best possible online fitting experience

Support multi-national commerce across four distinct global regions

Launch a rewarding omnichannel Loyalty program

Power and ambition to lead the Australian charge in the global fashion industry

Complete digital transformation, involving new Commerce, PIM, OMS and middleware, all connected with real-time integration with existing ERP and POS;

Aligent’s team designed the architecture and created the industry-leading headless frontend, while empowering and up-skilling Forever New’s internal developers;

Aligent’s tailored PIM data structure and seamless integration enabled efficient product data enrichment, translation and internationalisation;.

A bespoke checkout UX design proven via usability testing was implemented with one of Australia’s first headless React SPAs 

Sophisticated Search and Merchandising complemented with AI-driven product recommendations

“This solution provides the flexibility and scalability to deliver on Forever New’s vision for global expansion and a best-in-class omnichannel customer experience.”

Reduced inventory update latency to 15 minutes

Inventory utilisation and visibility have improved across the whole network

Scalable solution has supported numerous additional geographies and new functionality since launch

Forever New’s internal development team empowered and enabled to be self-sufficient, with ongoing input from Aligent on an “as needs” basis from time to time, reducing TCO and ensuring independence

Bowens: A best-in-class solution for product enrichment

B2B Commerce, Product Inventory Management (PIM), Data Integration

Bowens is a leading provider of building products to the Trade industry. They have a wide-ranging product catalogue rich in technical details. Their digital team were manually piecing together complex data from multiple sources into CSV files as well as sending graphics to a third party for refinement.

They wanted Product Inventory Management (PIM) to accelerate their enrichment with intuitive user-centric workflows.

They needed a holistic end-to-end integration capability to automate the flow of data at multiple touch points.

It was critical to have robust validation mechanisms to prevent incorrect data from entering their eCommerce front-end.

They also wanted to empower suppliers as part of the process.

In-depth understanding of the client’s business.

Akeneo Serenity for its included hosting, support and automatic update cycle.

Akeneo Supplier Data Manager to support the supplier enrichments.

Custom integration and validation logic to update ecommerce and other data consumers.

Fully automated integration to third-party service (via FTP).

Innovative approach to seamlessly incorporate validation results into the Akeneo experience.

Elimination of many time-consuming manual processes, reducing the enrichment journey for a new product from days to hours.

Products automatically move between “buckets” to reflect their enrichment status.

Greatly improved quality of product content.

The business achieved their goal to grow the catalogue from 30,000 products to 45,000, and now planning for more than 110,000 products.

Immediate strategic advantage over competitors.

Winner of the Akeneo Unlock 2023 Ambassador Award.

Coopers DIY Beer: Growing the online presence of an iconic SA business

An iconic South Australian family brewing company growing their online presence

International sales required a flexible architecture per region

Launch an entire new business initiative to target new demographic (millennials, digital natives) to become brewers through the Beerdroid internet-connected brewing machine 

Education and support is essential for new brewers to get started with homebrew

Passionate community of brewers contribute content for Coopers to feature.

Multi-store Adobe Commerce environment to serve AU, US and Sweden regions for the main DIY Beer brand, and separate instance for Brewart

Elegant augmentation of core codebase to display seamlessly integrated recipes and dynamically integrate with brewer’s own internet connected Beerdroid devices

Single Sign-on integration with Brewing Community Forums and Competitions

39% increase in conversion rate since launching on Magento 2

Flawlessly handled massive increases in traffic during COVID due to interest in home brewing during lockdowns

Successfully transitioned to new warehousing and logistics partner to support continued growth of online sales

Close collaboration with in-house technical team delivered ownership and low TCO

Confidence for ongoing strategic business growth plans

Eroma: Creating a more transparent digital experience in the premium candle-making industry

Eroma is an Australian leading premium candle and fragrance manufacturer and distributor. They have also been recognised as a market leader in high-quality Australia-made fragrance oils for candles, which is unique in the industry.

Eroma operates in a highly competitive lifestyle market, so the website needed to be unique from its competitors. As part of the brand’s positioning, it was critical to convey its premium and quality nature in the digital marketplace.

Eroma had a vision to put an emphasis on information transparency for its customers which can be easily used by both small and larger businesses. This included a UX journey and customer mapping for ordering: customers have visibility on fulfillment location, delivery cost and price reductions available for bulk quantity orders.


Aligent’s involvement extended across design,  architecture, development and quality assurance, collaboratively contributing to the creation of Eroma’s digital upgrade.


The website is now equipped with customised features, including:

An optimised quick-order page to fast-track orders for customers who already know what they want

The checkout displays dynamic shipping information, giving users the capability to directly adjust stock. This includes the option to choose a specific warehouse for shipping or switch to a specific pick up location

Both the product page and cart provide clear visibility into inventory quantities and fulfilment options (delivery or Click and Collect), presenting information specific to each warehouse and pack size

Unit pricing transparency is achieved through clear visibility and tiering, ensuring an informed understanding of prices


Urban Brew: Industry-leading subscription service for coffee lovers.

B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, Development, BAU, Consulting, Performance

Guide consumers step-by-step through the coffee buying process to eliminate confusion and complexity;

Allow incremental changes and additions as the range expanded with new product;

Provide full control for consumers to pause, edit and redirect subscriptions;

Support extensive social and paid media campaigns with targeted landing pages;

Guided shopping journey enables acquisition of customers more efficiently

Scaled seamlessly to absorb spike in demand during pandemic that yielded over 110% overall gain in customers

Personalised customer experiences increase satisfaction and loyalty


The Aligent team’s familiarity with Adobe Commerce, technical expertise, proactive mindset and responsiveness have all helped contribute to … our overall growth and success.

Bed Bath N' Table: A polished and intuitive user experience for styling the perfect bedroom and bathroom

Bed Bath N’ Table’s brand is built on modern and contemporary products which lift a household’s aesthetic while providing comfort and quality for the customer.

They needed a highly usable website to help visitors navigate a surprisingly complex data model and to pair the perfect combination of linens, towels and accessories.

Aligent’s UX team was tasked to collaborate with BBNT’s in-house designers to bring together the best of UX and UI.

Weaving of lifestyle content from the blog and social media to provide inspiration into the site experience

Rewards members needed clarity of their loyalty benefits including discounts and VIP offers.

Beautiful and Clean layouts that showcase desirable products

“Grouped” products for easy selection

Multi-national (Australia, NZ, Singapore) store fronts

Templated design with tailored enhancements

Scalable architecture for new country and brand additions.

Consistent, strong growth in online sales Year-on-Year over multiple years

Top SEO rankings including #1 for target keywords including Flannel Sheets, Throws, Homewares Online

Outstanding UX for customers to navigate matching sets and related products to “Complete the Look”

High scores on Google PageSpeed & Core Web Vitals 

Showcase for beautiful imagery and interactive “flippable” catalogs

Multi-currency and multi-region extensibility (with varied functionality per region)

Loyalty Program and other pricing complexities

Kathmandu: Industry-leading composable commerce for a personalised Omnichannel experience.

Development, B2C Commerce, BAU support, Loyalty, Omnichannel, Performance

Kathmandu were undergoing a full re-branding and digital transformation.

They wanted a solution that reflected and enhanced the new branding to provide the best possible customer experience.

They had a skilled in-house team, but wanted to ensure they were delivering an industry-leading solution led by an award winning partner.

The solution needed to connect and enhance the online-offline business capabilities for an Omnichannel customer experience.

Multi-national (AU, NZ, US, UK, FR & DE) store fronts.

Full PWA using leading development principles.

AAA accessibility focussed design and implementation.

46% increase in online sales Year-on-Year

World-leading combination of features and technology

Headless CMS for flexible, rich content creation

Multi-currency and multi-region (with varied ‘feature flags’ per region)

Click and Collect (in checkout and PDP) and Find In Store

The Fruit Box Group: Delivering happiness, nutrition and customer satisfaction via an industry-leading web portal

Development, Design, B2B commerce, Adobe Commerce

The Fruit Box Group delivers milk, fruit, coffee and other workplace essentials to thousands of sites around Australia. Customer expectations are high since no-one wants an office suffering caffeine withdrawal! The Fruit Box Group pride themselves on keeping teams happy with the highest quality of produce. Keeping office administrators and finance departments happy is equally important with easy to manage, flexible and transparent systems. 

As a supporter of local producers, The Fruit Box Group selected Aligent to implement a step-change in their online capability. Aligent's team designed a user experience to navigate the complex options involved in combining subscription and once-off purchases, while managing multiple delivery locations. 

A few notable custom features to highlight are:

Subscription functionality can be a daunting challenge at any time, and when it is combined with multiple stakeholders on the end-customer side, dispersed physical locations, and the ticking clock of perishable produce, it really challenged Aligent, Adobe Commerce and the Fruit Box Group's team to bring out the best in the flexible toolset selected. 

Diverse user role capabilities and permissions, with self-service administration;

Minimum order requirements and rules regarding once-off versus standing order products;

Multi-location subscription/standing order editing;

Ability to apply temporary changes and temporary holds for standing orders for set time periods (e.g. Christmas office closures).

Complex business rules regarding pricing, product availability across state borders, and deliverability were simplified for the end-user, and backed by a seamlessly connected ERP, including implementation of a web service to manage product prices in 15,000+ locations.

Other technical accomplishments included:

Seamless integrations include NetSuite ERP, Rudderstack, and Customer.io;

Full Headless PWA implementation using Aligent's TakeFlight accelerator;

Swift and smooth deployments - thanks to our split PWA/Adobe Commerce architecture - achieving zero downtime during front-end deploys, enabling rapid feature releases.

Advanced features like AI-driven search and recommendations for intuitive product discovery;

Enhanced user experience and contemporary design;

Ad-hoc product checkout with a mobile-optimized layout;

Invoice portal to allow viewing, downloading and payment of invoices;

Kathmandu

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