Want to know more?
Are you interested in this project? Or do you have one just like it? Get in touch. We’d love to tell you more about it.
Raising a glass to customer experience at Waitrose Cellar
How the premium online wine retailer used MACH architecture to create a sophisticated website experience
Waitrose Cellar is a separate Waitrose business where premium alcohol, primarily wine, is sold online. The website showcases unique wines that aren’t available in Waitrose stores or at waitrose.com.
As a business in its own right, Waitrose Cellar has its own dedicated back office teams and systems. The need was to retire unsupported legacy systems in favour of a brand new, mobile optimised website aimed at growing market share and revenue whilst giving customers a premium shopping experience to match the vision for the brand proposition. It was estimated that improved site experience alone would yield significant additional revenue every year.
A decision was made to deploy a MACH-affiliated, cloud-based platform for the new website. The use of MACH (composable architecture) combined with bespoke-build microservices was seen as a future enabler for building new features – and responding to customer behaviour and feedback – post-launch far faster than was possible on the existing platform.
Outcomes
2 weeks
0-100% traffic migrated onto new platform
17%
average YOY sales increase in the first month
+10
percentage point improvement in CSAT in the first month
About Waitrose Cellar
If you’re in the UK, you’ll know the Waitrose supermarket brand, but you might not know waitrosecellar.com, the home of Waitrose premium wine online. Since its launch in May 2015, Waitrose Cellar has delivered over 3.4 million bottles as it brings top-quality wine to discerning British customers. The business also employs a number of qualified Masters of Wine – a qualification held by only a very few wine professionals in the UK, a significant number of whom work at Waitrose.
Industry
Retail (online and in-store)
Location
United Kingdom
Challenge
Building a top-notch e-commerce user experience
The Waitrose Cellar website was built around 15 years ago on a platform which is no longer supported. Upgrading the platform would be complex and costly, so a decision was made to start from scratch with a new build of waitrosecellar.com.
It wasn’t just a case of replicating what was already there, though. Waitrose Cellar saw this as an opportunity to address specific issues and opportunities across the customer journey to improve market share for their brand by increasing revenue, conversion and the return rate of customers. The new website needed to:
- Highlight the diversity of choice for customers, and position Waitrose Cellar as an authority in the wine sector, clearly differentiating itself from value supermarket brands.
- Have a more user-friendly and intuitive navigation, with curated content and a seamless experience that would meet customers needs better than competitors – encouraging return visits and increased spend.
- Be mobile responsive to offer a seamless user experience to customers shopping from mobile devices.
- Be optimally structured to support effective SEO (search engine optimisation), to improve Waitrose Cellar’s ranking on search engines.
- Be easy for Waitrose to maintain and evolve within their own engineering teams.
- Be able to support modern payment options like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Paypal, as well as account login for customers.
- Enable superior reporting to help analyse category performance and aid merchandising decisions.
Solution
User-centred design and MACH architecture
The newly formed team set out to identify the building blocks required to build the most usable and feasible new website. Usability data was collated from extensive user and market research, as well as from each iteration of the user experience design. Keeping the customer and internal users at the centre of the delivery process is an ongoing focus; it continues to inform the roadmap and priorities as the website evolves over time.
Considering the operating model, it was prudent to validate whether any of the existing ways of operating the Waitrose Cellar business online could be migrated onto the new platform, and which needed to be built from scratch. For example, because the cost of changing established fulfilment processes was so great, these were retained; however, it was deemed more effective to build new content management architecture to enable optimal SEO and user experience.
One of the pivotal decisions made was to use a MACH-affiliated cloud-based platform for the website back-end. MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless, and is a set of principles considered in the retail space as a faster and more efficient route to market than traditional architecture.
Several MACH SaaS platforms were evaluated against the criteria provided by Waitrose, namely
- Retaining the existing fulfilment provider
- Using the internal John Lewis Partnership payment platform
- Aligning with existing financial and contractual constraints.
The evaluation process led the team to choose commercetools as the best fit for Waitrose, to design the foundations of a website that could be managed and operated by the team without the need for onerous ongoing engineering work.
From here, the team built a bespoke customer-facing website, deploying new services to the existing Waitrose AWS platform environment and integrating with commercetools to seamlessly manage product and inventory data, promotional and analytics data, orders, payments, and everything else required to enable an exceptional user experience.
A cornerstone of successful delivery is effective collaboration. The implementation began with a relatively small team of engineers and designers from Waitrose and Equal Experts, however, this evolved to include a number of business areas within Waitrose as well as other suppliers – Deloitte and Mindera. Together, the overall team developed a collective focus for launching the replatformed Waitrose Cellar and bringing to life the vision of a premium shopping experience.
Results
A superior customer experience and a look to the future
The newly-launched waitrosecellar.com has far superior search capabilities, with multiple filter options and the ability to show or hide out of stock items, all giving customers more ways to find their perfect wine. The new taxonomy, category management, labelling and content makes it fully optimised for SEO, and gives Waitrose Cellar a website which elevates the brand from the competition.
In the process, both Equal Experts and Waitrose have refined our skills in MACH-based technology, and our understanding of how it can transform the e-commerce retail experience for both customers and delivery teams.
What’s more, the new platform ensures that future changes and feature developments can be delivered faster, at a much lower cost than was previously possible. For example, introducing account login will now simply be a case of introducing 1-2 new account-based microservices and some accompanying website UI changes that could be delivered in parallel to other work. Adding additional payment options will be just as straightforward.
Conclusion
Having integrated commercetools with Waitrose Cellar, Waitrose is now considering using the MACH-based tool across its wider online retail estate. There is always some trepidation around major transformation, but feedback from business leaders at Waitrose on the new system has been universally positive. The new website is much easier to manage and maintain, and delivers an exceptional experience for the customer, in line with the ambitions of the premium Waitrose brand.
Mike Bratt, Business Lead for Waitrose Cellar said: “We’re thrilled to unveil a new and improved Waitrose Cellar! With a faster, more intuitive experience, we’ve laid the groundwork for growth and some exciting things to come. It’s been a brilliant team effort, and I’m excited for what the future holds.”
Using MACH affiliated technology is a strategy we expect to see more retailers adopting as they upgrade their e-commerce systems. We know that many online retail brands are looking to transform their customer experience in the same way the UK banking industry has. Leveraging MACH-based technical expertise is how we believe they will achieve it.