time to market
international reach
external CRM integrations available
external booking and reservation system
Tannico, the leading online wine shop in the Italian market created WinePlatform, a turnkey service that supports independent wine sellers with outsourced commerce technology, logistics and customer care. It enables these wineries to easily create an e-shop and sell their product under their own brand. The WinePlatform takes care of managing orders, from the receipt of secure payments to fulfillment and shipment to 20+ markets internationally.
Today, WinePlatform supports 250+ independent wineries with services that include:
- An ecommerce platform with Commerce Layer as its transaction engine
- Invoicing and custom duties
- Warehouse & logistic operations
- Customer care
- Data analysis
Creating a fast, cost-effective and turnkey service to bring brands online
Cristiano Pellegrino — a co-founder of Tannico, and the CTO of WinePlatform — is also a developer. To build out WinePlatform, he needed a unified, multi-tenant technology solution that could onboard new brands quickly, be highly performant as these brands scale, adapt quickly to changing business evolutions, and finally be cost effective. The solution also needed to integrate with existing warehouse flows. Cristiano quickly ruled out a monolithic architecture due to its lack of flexibility and tendency to accrue tech debt, and began exploring composable commerce.
A multi-tenant platform that gives wineries control over their own brand
The resulting technology stack for WinePlatform is comprised of the following:
- Commerce engine — Commerce Layer
- CMS — DatoCMS
- Payment gateway — Braintree
- CDN — Netlify
WinePlatform chose Commerce Layer because of its extremely flexible architecture. They needed a platform that could manage completely separate brands, with their own segmented markets, price lists, inventories, promotions, and customers. They also needed a platform that wouldn’t conflict with their existing workflows and solutions. With Commerce Layer, this is done by creating separate organizations within the same account, which also allowed WinePlatform to build accelerators on top of its APIs to onboard new wineries quickly without compromising their branding.
Each winery has a dedicated website that starts with a front-end template personalized with the brand’s content. Each brand is also set up as one organization within Commerce Layer where SKUs, prices, and inventory are imported via APIs using a standardized flow. Setting up a new organization within Commerce Layer is a matter of one hour for WinePlatform’s developers. Once an organization is created, developers simply need to connect it with the front end.
Once live, each brand works within its own environment; they can manage their own SKU lists, price lists and promotions with complete autonomy while leveraging the sophisticated logistics capabilities of WinePlatform. With over 400 API endpoints, Commerce Layer offers a robust set of capabilities around the entire lifecycle of an order, including promotions, subscriptions, multiple price lists, SKU bundles, private markets to handle B2B orders, etc.
Some wineries also manage omnichannel promotions through Commerce Layer for customers who have visited the winery and are registered in their CRM system. Since their CRM systems are connected to Commerce Layer, for every new registered customer, a coupon code with a discount is generated in Commerce Layer and sent via email to the customer.
According to Cristiano, customers are particularly pleased by how convenient it is to create a SKU bundle in Commerce Layer. Wine bottles are usually sold in sets of six as it’s more efficient in terms of packing and shipping costs. Having the possibility to build thousands of bundles with special pricing gives them greater flexibility when promoting their products.
Selling wine online is complex, requiring custom duties and taxes that change country to country and SKU to SKU. Being able to design the front-end and support orders to accommodate every exception is a must. Creating a multi-tenant application that manages all of this would not be possible without Commerce Layer.