Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits

Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits is a brand new wine and spirits retailer located in the recently opened Oculus in the Westfield World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Founded by two individuals already familiar with downtown’s hospitality industry, Chef Henry Meer and Richard F. Hanano, who were responsible for the venerable City Hall restaurant in Tribeca. While the initial focus was on the brick and mortar storefront, the ultimate goal for Pure Liquid is to do a majority of their transactions online.

The Challenge
Pure Liquid Wine & Spirits opened using the Square point-of-sale technology. Square allowed them to centralize their payment processing, inventory management, and customer management all in one place. Square, as a company, had partnered with several hosted e-commerce solutions that were evaluated as potential platforms, but all fell short of the expectations and vision we had for the website. One of the main challenges of retailing wine and spirits online is the breadth of attributes that could potentially be used for searching and sorting items. Wines alone may have a bottle size, a vintage, a varying regions, a grape variety (or several), wine style, etc. Additionally, in-store products somehow needed to be synched with e-commerce products and inventory management should be reflected across both platforms in near real time. Inventory and products are managed across two different locations and location of sale depends on the delivery method, shipping or local delivery/in-store pickup.

The Solution
As in previous projects, the decision was made to move forward with the relatively new Magento 2, which would allow us complete control over every aspect of the online store. And while Magento allowed for implementing various payment processors, we wanted to run everything though Square as our payment processor. At the time, that module did not exist and so as part of the project, we wrote a full-featured, custom module to integrate not only payments through Square, but also to interface with the inventory management in order to keep online and in-store inventory almost instantaneously identical. No more overselling or outdated inventory levels. No more remembering to hand-import inventory CSVs.

The Result
drinkpureliquid.com launched meeting nearly all of the challenges that were faced. Inventory was maintained in Square and synched to Magento in near real time, automatically. Products were input into Square and imported into Magento where additional attributes could be added and modified. All payments ran through Square which helped us negotiate a better transaction rate. Additionally, the website was fully responsive and allowed for customers to order products on the go and select from three different delivery methods: nationwide shipping, local delivery, or in-store pickup. The website was also fully integrated with our newsletter solution MailChimp which allowed us to quickly and easily deliver product-driven emails an campaigns.