Millésima becomes the world's largest online wine merchant

Millésima, a pioneer in online wine sales, entrusted SQLI with the overhaul of its e-commerce website to support its strong growth

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.

Striking a balance between the need for independence and expertise

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. For the overhaul of its e-commerce website, the online wine specialist wanted to work with a partner that:

  • Guides it through its technical choices and technology options, in order to ensure that developments are stable and long-lasting, as well as bringing new features online faster.
  • Provides assistance in redesigning the purchase funnel, to improve its conversion rate, and optimizing its customer experience.

Modern technologies to support platform upgradability

The SQLI team guided Millésima towards ReactJS and JAVA Spring Boot technologies, based on a headless architecture that promotes an omnichannel approach. SQLI also contributed its expertise in the area of Agility, as well as its best practices in data management and API security.

SQLI redesigned the user journeys before beginning development of the purchase funnel, homepage and product pages, as well as optimization of customer account and payment management. Among the new features of the platform, Millésima now provides a module for engraving on wooden wine crates, which helps make the customer experience unique.

Florent Piantanida, Web Project Manager at Millésima, had this to say:

"We consider ourselves fortunate to have initiated this project with SQLI. Their teams’ technical expertise brought stability to our developments. We now have a powerful platform, which will last going forward, and we will be able to use it as a springboard to pursue growth in the coming years.

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A project that is bearing fruit

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. Millésima’s business fared well during the lockdowns and the website handled the spikes in traffic faultlessly.

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.

Based on the excellent relationship built by Millésima’s and SQLI’s teams, the collaboration is being pursued to upgrade the website and continuously optimize 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.