The largest online wine merchant

Based in Bordeaux, France, Millésima has specialized in selling fine wines since 1983. A local, family-run business, it managed to conquer French and then international markets, by adopting an e-commerce strategy as early as 1997.

The company turned to SQLI to help it achieve its aims, which include maintaining its leadership position in online fine wine retailing, and growing sales while improving the customer experience.

After outsourcing the management of its e-commerce website for a number of years, Millésima took back the reins in order to have greater control over its platform’s performance and upgrades. Its challenges are twofold:

• Technology-related, to ensure that developments are stable and long-lasting, as well as to bring new features online faster.
• Business-related, with the redesign of its purchase funnel, to improve its conversion rate and optimize its customer experience.

With its complementary skills and the global expertise of its teams, SQLI supported Millésima through several stages:

• Rethinking of the UX/UI led to a redesign of the user journeys, with a view to optimization and reducing the rate of abandoned carts.
• For the development phase of the purchase funnel, homepage and product pages, SQLI’s technology experts worked hand in hand with Millésima’s technology team to select the best architecture, DevOps and framework solutions. They opted for a headless approach, to enable an omnichannel experience, and ReactJS for the front, which is one of the best-performing JavaScript frameworks on the market.
• Collaboration is continuing with application maintenance and error management, to ensure a high quality level and enable continuous improvement of the website and its performance. At the present time, 250 daily automated tests are performed to maintain the platform’s quality and ensure Millésima can run its business with peace of mind.  

SQLI also contributed its expertise in the area of Agility, as well as its good practices in data management and API security.

With the help of SQLI’s technical expertise and advice, Millésima has created a singular website that conveys the unique and personalized experience of the fine wines it offers its customers, while meeting optimal performance targets.

After its new e-commerce website came online, Millésima saw a sharp increase in traffic and growth of its sales: the website attracted more than 6 million visitors in 2020, 20% of which were new customers.

The online wine specialist has also seen an improvement in its conversion rate, thanks to the work done to enhance the user journey and purchase funnel. Millésima focused on the mobile channel in particular, which accounts for 50% of traffic. In order to improve its search engine ranking and adapt to Google’s new algorithm, it has adopted a mobile-first strategy.