Autoctono: a wine e-commerce with a community and content

The problem

In a wine shop the shelf does not make the sale. The person behind the counter does: they ask what you are eating tonight, what you enjoyed last time, how much you want to spend, and then reach for a bottle. Online that person disappears and what is left is a grid of four hundred labels with tasting notes written in a language almost nobody really speaks.

Autoctono had spotted the opportunity from the other side of the counter: wine producers who wanted to bring their sales channels together and, at the same time, have somewhere to publish educational content and grow a community of enthusiasts and professionals. Not another catalogue, but a touchpoint capable of creating a new line of service.

How we solved it

The structure that came out of it turns the usual order around. A wine questionnaire helps people work out what they actually like, and from there the marketplace suggests products based on stated preferences and on what the community is doing. The blog and the tasting notes supply the vocabulary. The events put people in a room together. Points earned on purchases come back as discounts, which is the most direct way of telling somebody to come back.

Buy the infrastructure where the problem is already solved. Write it where the difference is.

The architecture tells the same story as the product. Commerce is a solved problem: Shopify in headless mode acts as the purchasing engine without anyone having to rewrite baskets, payments and order management. Events are a solved problem: the Eventbrite APIs handle bookings and attendee synchronisation. What did not already exist, namely the wine profile, the recommendation logic and the layer that holds content, community and purchases together, is the only part written from scratch.

The results

The result is a platform where the sale is a side effect of something else. Somebody filling in a questionnaire, reading a tasting note or booking a tasting is not waiting in an antechamber before buying: they are using the product. The bottle comes afterwards, and it comes closer to right.