Our latest site, the California Wine Club, wanted to make both their customers’ online shopping experience and their entire operation of order fulfillment and phone orders much more efficient. Launching just in time for the 2007 holiday season, this newly dynamic site features two-way XML integration with CRM and order fulfillment, allowing for real-time price, inventory, customer information and order information updates. This integration has made their entire backend operation run on automatic (not to mention the trees and ink saved).

To make navigating the site a faster and better experience for customers, we restructured all wine categories into a guided navigation scheme. Customers can now find their preferred wine by filtering the wine listings by price and country of origin attributes as well as searching by keyword.

One of the California Wine Club’s most-prized benefits is its monthly wine club subscriptions. Subscribed members receive every month (for the length of the subscription) two bottles hand-picked by the California Wine Club expert staff. Needless to say, setting up a solid subscription system was extremely important to the company. Working closely with the client we developed a flexible subscription system which allows customers to purchase memberships with no money down, collect post-dated payments and streamline a previously cumbersome process.

Since every state in the US has different laws regarding the shipment of alcohol, we set up an advanced shipping system for the store to help eliminate the headaches that updating these rules can cause. The Store Owner has complete control over the store’s shipping methods, and is able to create customized shipping rules for individual states to ensure that the company is always within the letter of the law. To make it easier for customers to purchase wine for themselves and for others, we also added Ship to Multiple Address functionality. Now, customers can easily purchase and ship gifts (along with a little something for themselves) without having to go through multiple transactions.

We also restructured the store’s My Account system, adding an address book, and membership upgrade capabilities. With the site’s new ratings and review system, customers can now rate and review their favorite wines in the My Account section and on each product’s page. To improve the site’s promotional capabilities, we added a landing page building tool for use in the regular catalog and for special items. We also included an advanced coupon tool to support general and specific promotions.

So if you’re looking for a gift for the upcoming holidays or want to explore our latest work, check out the site. Let us know what you think in the comments!