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About
Sotheby’s Wine offers a selection of the world’s best wines for every palate and occasion. Sotheby’s offer a comprehensive range of wines at all price points, offered with impeccable provenance, and from the best producers in wine regions all over the world.
Introduction
Multichannel international digital storefronts with integrated point-of-sale and subscription membership.
Sotheby’s Wine offers a selection of the world’s best wines for every palate and occasion. Sotheby’s offers a comprehensive range of wines at all price points, offered with impeccable provenance, and from the best producers in wine regions all over the world.
Think of Sotheby’s, and certain things immediately come to mind: auctions, art, antiques, jewelry, real estate, and fine wine, just to name a few. This multibillion-dollar organization has a long and distinguished history that stretches all the way back to 1744 – hundreds of years before the existence of the Internet. Moving this venerable company into the digital age was a serious undertaking, Sotheby’s Wine knew that it had some much-needed room for improvement with its eCommerce business.
The problem
The opportunity with Sotheby’s presented as a re-platform. The project to re-platform Sotheby’s Wine operations was extensive, encompassing the entire business from point of sales (POS) to back office, shipping, warehousing, fulfillment, inventory, and the public-facing sothebyswine.com website. Ultra Commerce, led by COO Dave Crouch, was responsible for migrating all legacy data, including orders, accounts, and products, into their system and integrating with the CyberSource® credit card processing platform.
The initial step involved collaborating with the Sotheby’s Wine team on wireframes to ensure a shared understanding of the user experience and architecture. Following this, the Sotheby’s internal design team created website templates, which Ultra then implemented into their platform.
The solution
Ultra’s new POS system offers Sotheby’s Wine substantial improvements over its legacy system. This state-of-the-art platform includes features like all-in-one POS receipt printing integrated with iPads, thanks to a partnership with Star Micronics, and cloud-based payment solutions from Datacap for a seamless card reader experience. The system also supports multiple languages, currencies, and payment methods, ensuring full PCI compliance and enhanced security, including GDPR, PA-DSS, and PCI DSS certifications, allowing for secure, paperless storage of customer credit card information.
Launched within nine months, the new system immediately benefited Sotheby’s Wine by improving inventory, order, and customer relationship management, especially with repeat customers. The platform’s stringent data management requirements, such as capturing email and physical mailing addresses for orders, have also contributed to a significant increase in business since implementation.
The outcome
Although the wine business was the first in the Sotheby’s family to harness the power of Ultra, Sotheby’s recognized early on that there were exciting possibilities for the rest of the organization – and that’s where yet another enhancement comes in.
“Sotheby’s has the overarching goal of unifying the experience for users who interact with the various websites that are under the Sotheby’s brand,” says Baldyga. “So, a customer who buys fine art at the Sotheby’s art website might also be interested in seeing what’s available at the Sotheby’s Wine website. The overall experience should be cohesive for the user and have the same Sotheby’s ‘feel’ across the different sites.”
That experience will add even more value – to Sotheby’s and its customers – if it capitalizes on the broad array of cross-searching and cross-selling opportunities that naturally exist throughout the various Sotheby’s businesses. To that end, Ultra is using a third-party tool to help turn opportunities into realities. The tool, Algolia, is a powerful search-as-a-service platform that improves and extends the way search results are rendered for the user.
Crouch notes that the philosophy of continuous improvement and enhancement isn’t isolated to the Sotheby’s Wine project – it’s central to the way Ultra does business and is one of Ultra’s greatest strengths. “Ultra is constantly enhancing the base code and functionality of the Ultra platform,” he explains. “Much of that work is the direct result of requests from our clients. But the great thing is that those improvements then get passed along to everyone. So each time there’s a new Ultra release, all clients ultimately benefit. That’s how you get much better-customized software. Everyone wins.”
Other highlights
“From a business operations perspective, we’re in a much better place than we were a year ago. We’ve seen big improvements in our ability to manage inventory, orders, and customer relationships – especially with our repeat customers.”
Jenna Johnsson, Ecommerce Manager @ Sotheby’s
