Maryhill Winery was having a hard time finding a palatable e-commerce platform provider that fit its needs for its online and wine club sales.
Launched in 1999 and based in Goldendale, Wash., Maryhill began selling online in 2010 and produces more than 80,000 cases of wine annually and operates a wine club with more than 2,000 members, says Cassie Courtney, sales and marketing director for Maryhill Winery.
“We’re a large production winery and we have approximately 200 products for sale on our site, so it’s a lot to manage,” Courtney says. “Also, we have particular requirements around which wines are discounted, how they’re discounted and for whom.”
Maryhill has three wine clubs and three tiers within each club, which amounts to multiple and complex discount levels. Further, some wines are available for purchase only to members of specific tiers of specific wine clubs. Maryhill also often offers variable, mix-and-match case-quantity discounts for the general public where the total discount is specific to the order.
These kinds of parameters had been difficult for Maryhill’s prior e-commerce systems to handle.
“We provide bulk discounts depending on how much you add to your cart,” Courtney says. “So let’s say we wanted to offer a discount after six bottles were added. There was no system in place for that, so we had to custom develop the tool to do that and it didn’t always work.” Another workaround was with bottle carriers, which can hold three, six or 12 bottle of wine. Such carriers are expensive for Maryhill, and the retailer wanted to charge consumers for the carriers.
“We wanted to add the carrier cost to the total price,” Courtney says. “The system couldn’t tell that for a three-bottle order you needed a three-pack shipper, and there was no way to work around it. So we developed a custom solution, but it was very buggy and many times no [bottle] shippers were added to the order or the incorrect shipper was included.”
Consumers were frustrated by Maryhill’s interface and checkout process under the previous e-commerce platform. “Our cart abandonment rate was extremely high and we were losing a lot of potential sales,” Courtney says. “It was too difficult for customers to process their orders all the way through to completion.”
The old site had at least a 50% shopping cart abandonment rate, Courtney says. Buttons to add items to the shopping cart were hard for shoppers to find. Also, many of the winery’s wine club members had a difficult time figuring out where and how to log in and had a hard time deciphering how to retrieve their login credentials if they forgot them. That was important as wine club members were eager to receive the discounts that came with their memberships.
Additionally, once a consumer did add items to her cart, the checkout page was long and full of small text and fields, making it easy to miss a step and tedious to check out. “Things like inputting a different shipping address than billing address were difficult for shoppers to figure out how to do,” Courtney says. The poor design and clunky checkout led to shopper fatigue and ultimately abandonment, she says.
Late last year, Maryhill switched to a new e-commerce platform from Nexternal, which is owned by supply chain management company HighJump. The new platform, called TrueCommerce, was recommended by to Maryhill by Microworks, which operates a point-of-sale tool as well as business management software specifically for the wine industry that Maryhill was already using.
The new platform was ready in time for Maryhill’s biggest sales event, which occurs for two weeks in November. After switching e-commerce platforms, online sales increased 82% in November compared with a year earlier, Courtney says, because of better navigation, checkout and design for both wine club members and non-club members alike. “For our 2016 holiday sale we doubled the amount of money we brought in through e-commerce from the prior year—the difference in our customers’ experience and in shopping cart abandonment was like night and day,” she says.
While the post-holiday sale period is generally a slow time, Courtney says Maryhill experienced a 53% uptick in sales in December. Maryhill also immediately experienced a 50% reduction in cart abandonment. “The immediate drop in our cart abandonment rate shows that the new system is obviously functioning very well for us and also the customer,” she says.
The Nexternal e-commerce platform also enables Maryhill to offer shoppers several types of discounts and shipping options. “Our storefront lets customers choose between pickup, ship or a mix of both in the same order, and lets them specify multiple ship-to locations,” Courtney says.
Nexternal integrates with Microworks, so once a payment has been accepted and the order is processed in Nexternal, it flows automatically into Microworks as a paid, completed order, Courtney says.
It’s one thing to get through one difficult step but then if the next step is hard as well, shoppers will leave.
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Nexternal also integrates with Maryhill’s ShipCompliant compliance and transaction service, meaning online orders automatically are checked to ensure that the address entered allows for wine shipment. “With our last system we had to manually determine whether we could or could not send an e-commerce order to a particular state,” Courtney says. “Our system now automatically flags an e-commerce order if there’s a compliance issue, so our shipping coordinator can decide how to handle it.”
The system integrations don’t stop there. The winery uses the new platform for ticket sales for its winery events, streamlining that process and saving staff time.
The Nexternal platform also integrates with Amazon.com Inc., meaning orders placed on Amazon flow into Nexternal. With the old system, Maryhill’s shipping coordinator had to login to multiple systems to manage orders from Amazon. “Now it all funnels through Nexternal, and Amazon orders are flagged for her automatically, which is really helpful and definitely saves her a lot of time,” Courtney says.
Nexternal charges Maryhill Winery a monthly fee plus a percentage of revenue for its service. “There are less opportunities for the shopper to become frustrated and to abandon her cart,” Courtney says. “Customers have an easier time understanding the shipping process and they are telling us the site is much better.”
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