Maeve Wine
A stunning heritage-listed bar in South Brisbane brings exquisite wine, a European-inspired menu, and newly added hand-selected online wine subscriptions: delivering Australian and International artisanal wines to customers' homes.
Background & scope
With the addition of their new wine subscription packs, hoping to extend their market reach, they needed to expand their website into ecommerce and foster closer connections with their customers.
Maeve Wine already had a website showcasing the beautiful dining and wine experience in South Brisbane (not designed by Simpleism). For the release of their artisan wine subscriptions, we rebuilt and migrated the Maeve Wine site to Shopify to create a new revenue stream, connect with customers and market their existing restaurant and bar.
The challenge was to maintain the current design system to meet a humble budget, and maintain familiarity with existing customers while adding new and complex ecommerce features. The main goals of the new website was continuous automated purchasing through subscription plans and account management.
Empathise & define
To enhance the user and client experience, initial consultations revealed that a Shopify migration and rebuild would improve the current CMS (based on Trello/FTP) and streamline product management. Additionally, we identified key gaps in the old website content and design that required improvement.
Ideate
UI & UX design
- Typography: To improve usability while maintaining the website's existing foundations, we updated the visual text hierarchy for better readability.
- Image gallery: For improved customer acquisition at the restaurant and bar, we added a dynamic gallery page so customers could get a better understanding of what to expect when dining in.
- Booking form: Additionally, we created a functions page, which featured a user-friendly contact form, allowing customers to easily send enquiries about events for easier and faster event quoting.
- Site architecture: We restructured the navigation and information architecture into a simplified menu by combining existing pages and reducing the complexity to enhance user experience.
- Subscription purchases: Finally, we implemented common ecommerce practices for purchasing subscriptions, managing orders and personal information, a cart and checkout process and store policy pages.
Implement
Front-end development
Using Shopify's Ruby-based language 'Liquid', we created a custom theme by rebuilding the site with existing designs and front-end foundations. To meet budget and timeline constraints, we integrated with a third-party subscription app, allowing us to focus on the user experience for stock and product management. Migrating to Shopify also made content management user-friendly, as the client could edit and make changes in one place.
Release
In November 2021, the new Maeve Wine website was launched and they introduced new wine subscriptions to their loyal customers, which led to a noticeable boost in revenue with a surge of fresh orders.
Outcomes
Key highlights
As of August 2022*:
- Almost $13K in sales
- As a side business to their already successful bar and restaurant
- 58% returning customer rate
- The standard rate is between 20-40%
- Just over 37,000 visitors to the site
- And over 41,000 sessions
- Online store speed of 65
- Based on Google Lighthouse performance metrics - faster than speeds of similar stores (measured by Shopify)
*For logistical and business reasons, the Maeve Wine subscriptions have since been removed as a product from their website.
