Majestic Wine is aiming replicate its high street offering online by tailoring its website to each of its 161-store network, handing over control to individual stores.
Working with e-commerce services provider Snow Valley, Majestic is enhancing the online profile pages for each of the stores within the retailer’s network. Visitors to the Majestic website can now see up-to-date details of daily wine tastings in their local store, as well as other event listings, staff biographies, and a Twitter and news feed.
Since its launch in 2000, the Majestic online store has grown to become a significant part of the retailer’s business, accounting for 10 per cent of sales.
Majestic e-commerce director Richard Weaver said: “It’s really important to us at Majestic that our staff engage with our customers – the ‘come in, queue up, pay, and leave again as quickly as possible’ model is not something we aspire to. We want wine lovers to flock to their local Majestic store where they can enjoy tastings and benefit from the expertise of our staff.
“We also want the Majestic stores to actively reach out to wine lovers in the local area. Every one of our stores is distinctive, principally because they are staffed by different people, and we embrace that lack of uniformity – we see it as a very good thing and we want all of our customers, whichever channel they use, to get to know the personality of their local branch.”
The solution itself was delivered using cloud technology from Microsoft Azure. A shared database in the cloud allows information to be uploaded from the order management system and then accessed in near real-time by the e-commerce service for display on the Majestic website.
Snow Valley development director Sarah Lynch said: “For high street retailers, the online channel can no longer be a separate part of the business – it has to be integrated and run as part of the overall strategy. The great thing about Majestic is that it has a clear vision of what its customers want and how it wants its brand to be perceived.”
