How a machine learning recommendation engine increased a popular online wine retailer's sales by 71%.
Executive Summary:
Scaling Faster.
Award-winning wine retailer United Cellars came to us to develop an eCommerce solution that would highlight its diverse wine selection and increase sales. United Cellars is a great example of how constantly updating your eCommerce site to stay relevant and profitable does in fact increase your revenue and how personalized customer experiences on a site can make a significant difference in sales.
The Challenge: Higher Sales Numbers, Lower Costs
To augment sales efforts and reduce costs by highlighting more wine options on the website.
The Solution: Sales-First Features
A recommendation engine that mines data to present options based on each customer’s likes and desires.
The Impact:
A 71% boost in revenue.
United Cellars is a premium wine retailer, with a catalog that extends from Australia to New Zealand, Europe, and the Americas. United Cellars launched its premium wine sales in 2004 and it was not long before they decided to sell online. Today the company has grown to be an award-winning wine retailer with an exclusive value proposition that includes a 100% money-back guarantee, a pricing match promise, and a tasting guarantee as well. United Cellars is a family-owned business that sells its exclusive wine selections online.
In search of ways to augment their sales, United Cellars turned to eCommerce to highlight more of their product catalog to clients and tailor the sales process. Having experienced the success of its personalized service through an offline sales team, the company had a clear vision of being able to further its order fulfillment by investing in a site for its brand. The level of custom development the site would require is what prompted United Cellars' collaboration with Resolve Digital, off which the company would launch a brand new site that would in fact cut costs from their current operations and achieve greater turnover. Bringing the personal experience of customers online proved to be a success as tailored features of what the customers had come to expect from the brand improved their traffic.
Upon launching the website Resolve Digital remained a trusted partner for the company and took care of enhancing and optimizing the customer experience that was live on their site. Having built that trust we decided to approach United Cellars during this post-deployment and analysis phase with a plan to increase “wine option awareness.” Our proposed solution was a recommendation engine that mines data to present options based on each customer’s likes and desires. So our next task became deploying a machine-learning recommendation engine that significantly improved sales for the wine retailer.
Upon production, the model was A/B tested and so recorded a boost of 71% in revenue for United Cellar. Furthermore, the test resulted in a 45% increase in user session lengths, a 22% increase in conversion rates, and a 37% increase in their average order size. With the work done by Resolve Digital, the company was able to focus on business strategy and product selections that would later bring them award-winning success. Their customer experience has reached users from all over the globe, who have made the decision to purchase from United Cellar.
