ReserveBar uncorks ecommerce scalability to sell 150K products.

Premium beverage ecommerce leader ReserveBar needed greater ecommerce flexibility to merchandise and deliver millions of product variants for its 3,500 partners. Commerce Cloud allows ReserveBar to scale its business and offer on-demand delivery with real-time inventory and headless ecommerce.

ReserveBar partners with almost 3,500 retailers to sell roughly 150,000 products. But its previous ecommerce solution continually hindered ReserveBar growth due to limitations in catalog breadth, payment processing, merchandising, and customization. It also lacked the scalability necessary for major new product launches, associated traffic, and checkout. Today, Commerce Cloud provides real-time pricing, partner integrations, and page design efficiency while enabling regulatory compliance across 50 states.

Sharing your favorite alcoholic beverages with friends used to be as simple as filling a cooler. Today, there are thousands of beers, wines, and spirits to choose from — and purchasing online presents a number of challenges, from inventory synchronization, pricing, and availability to compliance fulfillment management. The company needed a more robust ecommerce solution to market, merchandise, and deliver 150,000 products across thousands of retailers, numerous platforms, and corresponding deployments. Now, ReserveBar can extend its services to help partners across industries, from retail to travel and hospitality, meeting consumers at their point of need across the digital landscape.

When ReserveBar first came online in 2013, it used a disconnected ecommerce solution. ReserveBar was on a mission to transform the way consumers discover and shop premium alcohol online — but it had difficulty scaling to meet consumer demand. This caused continuous integration challenges between third-party applications, which ReserveBar had to build custom integrations for, costing the company time, money, and opportunities for growth.

Now, ReserveBar has ultimate flexibility and seamless integration through Commerce Cloud for unlimited growth.

Scaling to meet product variety and multisite brands

ReserveBar’s inventory and prices are updated across its partner stores every 10 to 60 minutes. Instead of populating price books (a catalog of list prices for multiple SKUs) every so often, ReserveBar can update regularly in Commerce Cloud. Now, ReserveBar has no roadblocks to offering real-time pricing, availability, and on-demand delivery, a crucial part of its business.

• ReserveBar partners add 80 to 100 new products every week. Commerce Cloud makes it easier and faster to launch each one with custom page design, email and SMS integrations, and automated categorization.
• When ReserveBar launched its craft beer and ready-to-drink cocktail platform GetStocked, Commerce Cloud’s multisite architecture allowed the company to build an entire site in just 30 days.

Delivering at the right moments     

• For nearly a decade, ReserveBar could only ship its products to customers over several days — never the same day. With real-time inventory and pricing updates from Commerce Cloud, ReserveBar evolved its business to offer on-demand sales, delivering products in just 20 minutes to an hour or two.
• ReserveBar’s luxury spirits pair well with many of life’s celebratory moments: Consumers may add a bottle of champagne to their Mother’s Day flower order or gift an engraved bottle of The Macallan to a friend. ReserveBar provides a seamless shopping experience for customers with Commerce Cloud.
• ReserveBar’s previous ecommerce solution could not support a custom checkout experience for different brands. Now, using a series of APIs and software development kits (SDKs), partners like 1-800-Flowers.com can embed ReserveBar’s alcohol-selling technology on its website. In some instances, partners can begin selling wine, spirits, and/or beer on their site compliantly, within hours.

Behind the scenes

Many of ReserveBar’s partners, including Thanks and Alyce, use Salesforce CRM, which already integrates with Commerce Cloud. When these partners make a sale that includes alcohol, the system automatically sends ReserveBar the order for processing.

Going forward

ReserveBar is also exploring shoppable video through Salesforce partner Bambuser. When shoppers view videos on the site’s “Cocktail Lounge” page, “Add to Cart” buttons make it easy to purchase featured products as the video plays.