La Maison du Vin

e-Commerce / eSoft Integration / UX/UI Design

General

La Maison du Vin was established in Limassol in 1992 by Victor Papadopoulos, a Cypriot born in Congo. Having spent many years in France, Victor developed a deep passion for fine wines and cultivated a sophisticated understanding of wine culture.

La Maison du Vin in Limassol importing High-quality wines from some of the world’s leading wine producers, and  providing a gateway to premium wines for the local market in Cyprus. 

Objectives

The initial objectives were:
  • Create an online shop reflects the brand’s essence.
  • Highlight the premium quality and unique story of the wines through engaging content.
  • Ensure optimal user experience with intuitive navigation and responsive design.
  • Filtering by country, regions, type, producers, vintage (year) and food pairings
and
  • Automatically synchronize your items info from eSoft ERP systems to your e-shop.
  • Automatically synchronize your items prices.
  • Automatically download the e-shop orders to eSoft ERP system for you to complete/manage.
  • Automatically synchronize your stock availability.
  • Automatically synchronize your customers’ accounts.

The Challenge

  • Increase overall in-store cart value
  • Craft a friendly guide and partner for alcohol buyers, and democratize knowledge about alcohol
  • Lovers and The Daring
  • Orders & Invoicing according to eSoft Plugins

Overall, we wanted to design a website with atmosphere and style to reflect the world of alcohol. We wanted to optimize the navigation, categories and product search so that users are exposed to different discovery paths to find new products. When buying drinks, you can’t taste test them, so it’s important to elevate the other senses when trying to sell the product.

The Solution

It’s not easy to choose products from such a large collections. We focused on reducing cognitive load and encouraging particular discovery paths that users could take. They start from different points of the site; 

Navigation
We pared it down based on popularity and main Product Categories and also provided some alternative product discovery paths.
Filters & Grid

The product grid is the equivalent of browsing the shelves and the best way to help users find what they want based on different preferences is with filters. We went for a top filter that would remain sticky so the most popular options are available at all times to help product navigation and discovery.

Smart Taxonomy

Product categories and tags & attributes are main key to ease navigation for users. 

Some product attributes are as follow:

  • Country
  • Region
  • Brand
  • Wine & Food Pairings
Search

A rich search result has a huge impact. From providing inspiration and discovery pathways to exact product thumbnails, there’s plenty of information displayed to help customers and lead them to their desired purchase.

Product detail page

The product page is the main hero of this website. It’s designed to capture user imagination and emotion that is so commonly associated with wine and alcohol, but through visuals only. So the design was absolutely critical here, and had to convey both information and knowledge as well as evoke the senses. The idea was to create a sense of seamlessness between online and offline shopping, using a large image of the bottle that can be rotated so it’s almost as if you are browsing in real life.

Educate with blogs

A large group of respondents said they would like to learn more about wine: how to drink it, what to eat with it, how to choose it, and how to pair it with occasions. Blogs are a great way to achieve this and keep the pages fresh with new content.

The Result

Our final experience concept is much more than just the website. It’s about how the website interacts with the customer through many different channels — from the online content and imagery to physical store. 

Our Designer & Development team in LightBlack wanted to design specifically for our user groups because all these solutions indirectly support business objectives like in cart value and customer loyalty. These features not only help users make decisions, but will ultimately increase the value of their purchases without overly manipulating or aiming to trick them. By helping them learn more and explore alcohol, they can come to trust this brand as a place to go for knowledge and helpful purchasing advice. In combination with a trusted, physical store, the experience can go a long way to building strong business-client relationships.

LightBlack serves a lot of different retail industries, including alcohol. It’s a rapidly growing market, especially with the increase in online alcohol ordering. While you can buy alcohol in their stationary stores, we wanted to explore the online market and design an experience allowing customers to pick up their orders at their local grocery store. We want to provide a space to expand user knowledge, excitement and discovery of new wines and other alcohols, as well as help them make the right decision for their needs. By crafting a specific persona based on a selection of their market segments, we designed a whole experience spanning the physical and online touch points that would support our persona the whole way through their purchase.

lamaisonduvin.com.cy