Moore Brothers Wine Company Delivers Personalized Online Experiences with BigCommerce

Making wine an unforgettable experience.

In 1996, longtime fine-dining industry veterans David and Greg Moore joined forces to create Moore Brothers Wine Company in New Jersey. Since then, they’ve expanded to two other states: New York and Delaware.

At Moore Brothers, customers receive a personalized experience from the second they walk in the door. From tasting notes to cultural and geographic education, every customer gets to pair knowledge with their purchase.

When they created their first ecommerce store in 2014, they wanted to keep their customers front and center. “The intent with our website has always been about trying to give our customers the kind of experience and information they would have gotten in-store,” David said. Creating that kind of experience online is no small feat.

CHALLENGE

Pushing ecommerce boundaries wasn’t easy on an unstable platform.

Their first website was delicate and handcrafted, much like the wines they carry on their shelves. This bespoke platform was custom built from the ground up, because that was the only way they could create the kind of customer-focused experience they strived to provide their shoppers.

As time went on, maintenance and stability became a major issue. “I was busy holding together a technology that I built, and we never had the time to invest in technology when we really needed it,” David explained.

David set out looking for a new ecommerce platform. He wanted an existing robust feature set with the option for customization, and a support system in place that would keep them from worrying about the kind of day-to-day maintenance that their bespoke system required.

SOLUTION

An easy-to-use, customizable platform with robust APIs.

After evaluating three different options, including Wix and Shopify, David decided to use BigCommerce to build their new online store. But he and his team wouldn’t be going at it alone. With the help of BigCommerce agency partner Groove Commerce, they set out to create a site that would give visitors a customized, in-store experience while expanding on their existing ecommerce workflows.

“When it comes to deciding factors, stability was up there along with operations, where I don’t have to worry about the server's ability to work with such a rich array of APIs,” David said. “If we set up our store on Wix, we wouldn’t have the potential for any kind of real integration between our existing customer data and theirs.

“When we looked at Shopify, they had fairly good API documentation, but it’s nowhere near as rich and varied as the documentation from BigCommerce,” he continued. “When we were going through the discovery phase, it struck me that if we were going to migrate our store, and we want this to be the last time we do it, we had to go with BigCommerce.”

Using customer data to tailor the online shopping experience.

Now that they had selected a platform, they would be able to use the BigCommerce APIs to grow a tech stack that could relieve pressure from their internal teams. They were able to easily integrate their existing POS system and create a link between their physical store inventory and their online catalog.

With these improvements, they’ve been able to take advantage of the wide array of customer data they have gathered over the years and can use it to improve their website. First, using the BigCommerce Advanced Promotions Editor, they are able to create customer groups from their database and provide them with discounts at specific times during the year.

By using the Klaviyo integration, they have been able to serve their online customers in ways they never thought possible. “Based on the customer data that we have,” explained Terry Moore, Operations Manager at Moore Brothers Wine Company, “Klaviyo can really synthesize that and make more personalized recommendations to our customers who may be shopping more online than in-store.”

Using Klaviyo, they have also set up abandoned cart emails to nudge customers to make their purchase. “We have recovered over a lot of sales using abandoned cart emails,” Terry continued. “The Klaviyo integration is really wonderful and easy to use.”

Custom functionality to process payments with ease.

One particular challenge the Groove team faced was, because the merchant operates their three separate locations as independent stores with three separate Chase Bank merchant IDs, collecting payments was a complex process.

To overcome this, the Groove team partnered with Soliant Consulting, Moore Brothers’ point of sale consultants, to create a custom integration with Chase Bank which enabled these types of transactions to take place. This unique integration had to be approved by Chase Bank. Now that it is complete, Moore Brothers can conduct business without changing their entire payment system.

Creating a robust customer experience online.

Most importantly, they have been able to build the right tools to create the kind of hybrid experience that they wanted for their customers. In their retail locations, customers aren’t met by glaring signs separating wine by type. “Instead, we talk to people about how they live and how they cook. What sorts of BYOB restaurants do they go to, and how do they use wine in their life?” David said.

Online, David’s goal is to describe to his customers not only the tasting notes, but also the people and places associated with their wines. “When we create a product page, it’s all wrapped up via API, so it goes up with all of our custom fields and has the tasting notes, the growers’ background, the maps, the label — all of this happens automatically,” he explained.

RESULTS

Exceeding customer expectations, no matter where or how they shop.

After switching to BigCommerce, the team at Moore Brothers have seen great improvements on their site, particularly with engagement. Since launching, they’ve seen a 15% increase in average session duration, a 6.5% increase in the number of sessions per user and a 3.3% decrease in bounce rate.

"The goal of building the all-new Moore Brothers site on BigCommerce was to improve the user experience for both back-end employees and front-end users,” added Spencer Flaherty, Internal Marketing Manager at Groove Commerce. “Since Moore Brothers Wine was previously hosted on a home grown ecommerce platform, designing and developing on BigCommerce enabled us to do exactly that.”

In fact, the team at Groove Commerce has been able to create all the functionality Moore Brothers needed to give their customers an amazing experience both in-store and online.

“They really did a beautiful job,” David said of the Groove Commerce team. “They do beautiful design work, but what’s more important is they have developers who really understand how the APIs work. We have, for example, a customized payment solution for our site, because we have three different locations. They were able to not only implement that, but implement it seamlessly. Everything just works.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Leveraging technology to help serve future customers.

With their future-forward attitude, David, Greg and Terry Moore know they’ve laid a solid foundation for ecommerce growth with BigCommerce and Groove Commerce. With that, they hope to be able to leverage customer data more efficiently and provide quality recommendations both in-store and online. “We know every customer’s purchase since 2008,” David said. Using that data, they can improve customer experience drastically by serving up new recommendations through different marketing channels.

As with many family owned businesses, Greg and David are looking to pass the torch onto the next generation, Greg’s son Terry. “We have to be able to have a company that can survive and thrive by leveraging these new technologies,” explained David, “because those new technologies are what the next generations are going to expect.”

“Now that we’re on BigCommerce, I can kind of relax a little bit and focus on other things,” said Terry. “Having that integration between all of the data we have and our point of sale database, and having a website that's comfortable and easy to use for our customers, that's terrific.”

Published: June 2023