Background

PEJU Winery, a renowned Napa Valley leader on Highway 29, sought to enhance its user experience, increase revenue, update the brand, and enhance its wine club and e-commerce services. However, PEJU needed to retain its legacy accounting system, AMS. 

Angelsmith’s vision was to provide a highly personalized, white-glove experience for visitors through an advanced and streamlined tech stack integration.

Angelsmith, a leading eCommerce and MarTech web agency, designed and built the front end of the project. This quick case study explores this web development’s challenges, solutions, and outcomes.

“We went beyond the standard Commerce7’s already excellent personalization features to create a next-level individualized experience for PEJU’s website visitors,” said Eric Oliver, Angelsmith’s president. He continues, “After experiencing the winery’s hospitality, we knew we wanted to create an online experience that matched its level of service.” 

Angelsmith built multiple layers of personalization so that the homepage completely rearranges itself depending on the user’s identity, anticipating their needs and addressing them seamlessly.  

Challenge

PEJU Winery faced several challenges with its previous website:

• Antiquated User Experience: The existing website had an older design and simpler technology, which hindered the ability to cater to individual customers’ needs and preferences.
  
  
• Limited Ecommerce Functionality: PEJU used AMS for both its ecommerce and accounting, which offers little functionality when it comes to personalization and e-commerce.
  
  
• Limited Member Usability: Members found it difficult or sometimes impossible to accomplish tasks like finding their next shipment, managing their orders, and making customizations.
  
  
• Content Management: The site required a user-friendly system, allowing PEJU to handle content updates independently.

Objectives

1. Modernize and Beautify The Online Presence: The in person PEJU experience is beautiful and welcoming, and the website needed to provide the same experience for site visitors.
   
   
2. Enhance Personalization: PEJU prides itself on providing white-glove treatment to its customers. We needed to create a website that offers personalized experiences for members, non-members, people considering a visit, and first-time visitors based on their interactions and location.
   
   
3. Support Seamless Backend Integration: PEJU tapped GSATi to handle the backend integration between Commerce7 and AMS, so we needed to ensure that the site’s front end integrated with and built off of everything they were doing behind the scenes.
   
   
4. Provide Comprehensive, User-Friendly Content Management: While the site’s design needed to be beautiful, it was important that its management be user-friendly, allowing the PEJU team to make frequent updates to all areas of the site without the need for external support.

Solution

Angelsmith approached the project with a focus on advanced personalization and efficient backend integration:

1. Personalization Based On Intent:

• Consumer Insights: Our first step was to identify and define PEJU’s website visitors are. 
  
  
• Anticipate Intent: We analyzed how they used the site when they came to it. Members want to manage their upcoming shipments. Tasting Room Visitors want to get key information about the tasting room and quickly book a visit. 
  
  
• Determine Who Is Visiting The Site: Angelsmith built on top of Commerce7’s native capabilities to be able identify if site visitors had previously visited, are members, are nearby on their mobile phone, and so on. This allows us to classify every site visitor into one of the previously-defined categories.
  
  
• Deliver What They Want Immediately: Now that we know who’s visiting the site, we can anticipate their wants and deliver exactly what they’re looking for. PEJU’s homepage completely redesigns itself depending on who is visiting. For example, Returning Members see upcoming club shipments, a personalized selection of wines tailored to their preferences, and reminders of their club benefits, while Tasting Room Visitors are shown key information like directions and hours, the different available tasting experiences, and of course the ability to book. The end result is an easier, more streamlined, and more rewarding experience for site users.

2. Tech Stack Integration:

• The Right Tech Filling The Right Role: Angelsmith worked with PEJU to ensure that each tech they used was filling the right role. AMS stays as their Accounting and Operations system, allowing them to retain critical processes that had been in place for decades. Commerce7 gives them enhanced ecommerce, tasting room reservations, personalization, and wine club management features. WordPress stays as their easy-to-use CMS. Redchirp continues to provide SMS messaging. We even built the integration with their email service provider to be easy to switch, since we knew they were going to be migrating to a new provider soon.
  
  
• Cooperative Development: GSATi did an amazing job of handling the back end integration between AMS and Commerce7. We wanted to be an excellent partner for them and to ensure the front end honored all the hard work they did. We communicated with them throughout the process and the integration between front and back end was seamless.
  
  
• Easy Administration: As advanced as the website is, it was critical that everything be extremely easy for the PEJU team to manage. Angelsmith used WordPress as the CMS and Elementor as a visual page builder to allow the PEJU team to manage content in complex layouts without needing assistance. We streamlined the product integration so that there’s no need for duplicate entry, pulling key information automatically from Commerce7. The end result is enterprise-level capabilities without needing enterprise-level training.

Results

While it was too early to provide precise conversion rate metrics (we will follow up with the e-commerce conversion rate when we have more data), the feedback received was overwhelmingly positive:

• User Feedback: Members and customers expressed satisfaction with the personalized features and ease of use. The site’s ability to present relevant information and offers improved the user experience.
  
  
• Operational Efficiency: The integration and content management solutions improved operational efficiency, allowing PEJU Winery to manage its site quickly and effectively.

Conclusion

The revamped PEJU  Winery website, designed and developed by Angelsmith, successfully addressed the challenges of personalization, usability, and tech stack integration. The new site offers a tailored experience for each individual visitor, integrates seamlessly with existing systems, and empowers PEJU Winery’s team to manage content independently. The positive anecdotal feedback indicates that the project has met its objectives, setting a strong foundation for future growth, user engagement, and increased winery revenue.