Delighting Food & Wine Lovers With an Updated E-Commerce Experience

Client: Food and Wine E-Commerce Company
The client is an online food and wine retailer with a unique flash sale style offering model. The client operates with uniquely complex customer and supply chain mechanisms.

The Challenge:

Due to the complex nature of the client’s logistical processes, increasingly urgent problems were arising. They approached Eliassen Group with a particularly pressing challenge: their current systems were not effectively supported, and they were dissatisfied with their technology and their vendor.

As we set out to support the client, we faced several challenges. We needed to redesign and rebuild the entire customer experience by building on things that worked, removing the non-standard pieces of the experience, and ensuring that high-touch customers were not left without a path forward. The key supply chain systems also required dramatic improvements to support the logistics teams. These teams needed to be able to pick, pack, and ship non-standard items with unusual shipping cycles, with room for many exceptional cases. We also needed to improve data interpretation. While working with a subset of the actual data, we had to fill gaps with limited information without impacting customers negatively or reducing confidence in inventory. These goals needed to be achieved while continuing to ship with limited downtime to keep sales from tanking in a key time period.

The Solution:

In just a few months, we built a custom retail ordering and back-office application. This application replaced the key functionality of the existing replication with a new, simpler, and more flexible ordering system as well as extensive business process improvements. This resulted in dramatic improvements to uptime and response time and increased customer satisfaction with the efficiency of the new system. In addition to increased customer satisfaction, employees are also happy with the benefits of our support and company sales have increased.