E-commerce development for a UK wine club where customers pick their own bottles and the basket applies the saving

The Wine Engine had just launched on a simple idea: customers choose their own wines and save more the more they buy, with the discount stepping up at three, six and twelve bottles. The store's standard Shopify basket couldn't keep that promise. Its quantity discounts couldn't see the bottles inside a mixed case, so a customer could fill a box and still miss the saving. Mixing a monthly box with one-off bottles also tripped up at checkout, just as the customer was ready to pay. It's a problem plenty of food and drink brands run into when they sell mixed cases or boxes on a standard basket.

Savings that apply themselves

The basket counts the bottles a customer has chosen, including those inside mixed cases, works out which tier they've reached and applies the saving itself, so there's no code to find or type. Bronze, Silver and Gold labels and a progress bar show the current tier, the next one and how close the order is to free delivery. A quick check puts the basket right before checkout, and express checkout buttons step aside from three bottles upwards, so nobody skips past their saving.

One-off or monthly, from any page

Building a box should feel like ordinary shopping, so customers can add wines from any page and switch their basket between a one-off order and a monthly box whenever they like. We started with a dedicated box-building page and soon took the same behaviour across the whole store. A monthly box never ends up tangled with a one-off order at checkout.

Built on the store's own theme

We built the club's buying experience on top of the store's existing theme instead of rewriting it. That lighter kind of Shopify store development let the founder keep editing the rest of the site himself. He still does, and the basket has kept working underneath his changes.

The Wine Engine's club now works the way it was designed to. Customers build their own boxes and get the saving they were promised, whether they buy once or every month.

The Wine Engine is one of our UK projects, and UK businesses can also work with us through our Liverpool office.

If your offer depends on mixed boxes or bundles, make sure the basket counts what's inside them rather than trusting discount codes to do it. It's easier to stop a basket going wrong before checkout than to sort it out afterwards. Building on your store's existing theme, rather than replacing it, lets you keep editing your own site.

Read more about our web design service, or see more web design case studies and other food and drink projects.