Binny’s Beverage Depot – Enabling business users to keep the fridge stocked with a new client-centric eCommerce experience
Binny’s Beverage Depot
Niles, IL
Wine & Spirits
Introduction
Binny’s Beverage Depot based out of Niles, Illinois, is the Midwest's largest retailer of fine wines, spirits, beer and cigars. Binny’s faced challenges related to their existing eCommerce experience and maintaining agile functionality in the back-end. They wanted to be able to properly expand in the digital world for their customers, in order to: better connect with them, address their issues with their omnichannel experience and have an online platform that showcases their in-store personality. Binny’s has built their empire on long lasting relationships that are established through clear communication and trust. They decided to partner with Luminos Labs to help them achieve these visions because of our eCommerce expertise and ability to leverage and extend Optimizely functionality, as they saw Optimizely as the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to handle their needs.
Binny’s determined that the best way to help their omnichannel experience was to create simplicity for their end customers and focus on building tools that were easily managed internally and could scale up with their needs. The key features they decided that would best help this experience were related to their inventory, pricing and search functionality.
The omnichannel and digital experience started with expanding on their Store Locator. The geolocation component allows the store locator to match users to the closest store, and if they preferred a different store to give the customer the opportunity to manually select the store of their choice.
Once the store was determined, a customer could build on this feature that allows them to create multiple wish lists within the site. The wish lists also automatically synced with the existing mobile app to allow for the customers to add items to their wish list during the day, then ensure they have access to those lists as they are on the go and even while shopping in the store.
In the past, Binny’s faced inventory issues when trying to look at store-specific inventory levels. The previous experience would not allow for a call to inventory until they were ready to checkout which made the online shopping experience very cumbersome. The new experience allowed for customers to check inventory directly on the Product Detail Page (PDP) and quickly cross-check availability across multiple stores. The PDP also included specific functionality that highlighted if a product was available for shipment or not since there are many additional regulations that need to be considered when it comes to shipping alcohol in the United States.
Another important feature that was the result of direct client feedback was the ability to have a “search within results” function within the search results page. For example, if a customer were looking for a specific wine, they could parse their search down even further to get the exact wine that they were looking for.
With the new solution, Binny’s was also able to put in pricing logic that always extended the best possible price for an individual customer when it came time to checkout. This includes logic for items on sale and comparing them against quantity discounts that can get very specific and granular.
Finally, an important aspect of the overall eCommerce solution was the implementation of a new payment gateway (Cybersource) that allowed for credit card processing and taxation to reflect the appropriate region that the customer was purchasing.
Through this project, Binny’s was able to greatly enhance their customer experience and provide a truer omnichannel solution that was based on client-specific feedback. It tackled many challenges from their previous solution and allowed them to not only more easily sell products online, but also drive more traffic to the stores since that is a core backbone of their business model. Binny’s can rely on a scalable architecture that can grow and adapt to their business needs of the future and are continuing to work with the Luminos team to implement site improvements based on both anecdotal and data-driven client feedback.