Majestic Wine selects Intershop and Javelin Group for its e-commerce solution

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Majestic Wine selects Intershop and Javelin Group for its e-commerce solution.

Majestic Wine has selected Intershop and Javelin Group to provide a flexible e-commerce platform to support growth over the next five years. The competitive tender process included evaluation of not only the e-commerce platform, but also the systems integrator.

Richard Weaver, e-commerce director, Majestic Wine said, "Intershop and the Javelin Group development team offered a solid combination of software and support. The solution proposed fits the needs of our online business today and for future growth."

Majestic Wine had two main drivers for initiating the e-commerce project. The first was to have an enterprise e-commerce platform that is future-proof to give the retailer a stable base for on-going development. The second was that Majestic Wine had a number of new ideas for additional functionality best tackled by a full overhaul rather than through incremental development.

Weaver continued, "We were not wedded to any particular IT supplier; instead we wanted a best-of-breed product capable of meeting our requirements, from a vendor which continues to invest in and develop its solutions. Intershop's comprehensive content management system and simple back-end tools impressed us. Furthermore, Intershop's platform is not resource hungry, which was a pleasant surprise given all the functionality available."

As part of the bid process, Majestic Wine specified seven key online capabilities required of the new e-commerce platform. These included the ability to:

• Place six bottle order minimum
• Purchase pre-mixed cases or mix customers own
• Provide personalised product recommendations
• Include non-product specific content including blogs, video and wine guides
• Support fulfilment by local store
• Enable customers to browse stock based on local availability
• Support complex checkout rules, and a second storefront for Majestic's stores in France.

The solution also needed to fit with Fredhopper, as the selected search and navigation solution.

Jochen Moll, member and spokesman of the board of management, Intershop said, "Intershop will support Majestic Wine as it seeks to develop a new and leading e-commerce site that will be pivotal to its business growth. Intershop 7 provides retailers of all sizes with the rich functionality required to be competitive in today's market place. Furthermore our partnership with Javelin Group has helped to cement this deal given its in-depth knowledge of retailers' needs and Intershop."

Fraser Davidson, director of technology services, Javelin Group said, "Together with Intershop, we are developing a world class solution for Majestic Wine that draws on our extensive retail and ecommerce experience."

The new Majestic Wine site is expected to launch in summer 2013.