My Wine Canada
My Wine Canada is an online retail platform, which was first developed in early 2015. Today, it's the biggest online marketplace for multiple wineries and distilleries to sell their products.
However, it's not just a wine shop; customers can learn about each winery, its history, and the products it provides, as well as get a sommelier consultation and join a wine club. It's an extensive platform for true wine lovers. Each vendor has to go through an approval process before receiving access to the vendor portal.
The Challenge
The client required us to create a large and convenient wine marketplace as a platform for different brands to sell their products, with convenient filters and product choices. While Magento is usually used for simple online stores, we had to create a marketplace.
The reason why it was a challenge is that we had to enable vendors to register on the platform and sell from their separate stores instead of creating a general store with a wide range of products from all the vendors altogether. This would minimize the paperwork for the website and leave it to each vendor individually, which involved the tiresome process of obtaining a liquor license.
The goal for the final project was a marketplace with separate online selling points with an individually integrated payment system directed to the particular vendor. At the same time, there was supposed to be a single cart to put products from different vendors while browsing the website, yet the payment would be separately directed to each store at the checkout. This required ensuring that all the payments proceed well, and a failed payment could be easy to detect.
- Client:My Wine Canada
- Year:2015
- Industry:Food & Beverages
- Location:Canada
- DataBase: MySQL
- Hosting: Rackspace
- Server: Apache, Memcache
- Backend: Magento 1 (PHP, Zend Framework)
- Frontend: Custom Magento theme based on PHP, HTML, CSS (SASS pre-processor), JavaScript (jQuery, Prototype)
The Solution
To speed up the implementation, a third-party multi-vendor module was purchased, but it still did not provide all the necessary functionality. First and foremost, it had no support for individual payments for each vendor. The module worked under the assumption that the main website collects all payments, and only then are they manually distributed to vendors as appropriate by the admin. This approach was not acceptable for the reasons discussed earlier. So the module functionality had to be significantly extended. Except for our own payment implementation, we had to develop a custom solution for the integration of Canada Post shipping provider.
The Result
All the data from the store was migrated from OpenCart to Magento 1. We developed a custom responsive theme with multiple bells and whistles, such as Ajax Shopping Cart, and Google Analytics, for advanced user behavior tracking and a single centralized cart creation. One of the biggest milestones we reached was developing a well-functioning payment system based on the purchased Magento module that performed as initially planned and allows direct payments from customers to appropriate vendors from a single cart \ checkout option - it’s speedup purchase flow and removes restrictions to the end customers which positively affects the purchases. Also it gives wider opportunities for vendors which are no longer limited to a single specific payment method.
We also implemented a custom integration of Canada Post with Manifest Management, shipping label creation mechanisms, and Intelligent 4D bin packing while using a grouping algorithm to minimize shipping costs. In addition, we integrated MailChimp and Wordpress to the platform.