Work / Wine and spirits, worldwide
Ten thousand wines, six languages, and rules that change at every border
An online store for Portuguese wines, spirits and gourmet goods, selling internationally from Porto. The catalog runs past ten thousand products, most of them from producers an overseas buyer has never heard of, and alcohol is one of the most tightly governed categories there is to advertise.
At a glance
The problem they came with.
What was actually going wrong, before anything was built.
The buyer cannot recognize a single name
Portuguese producers are not familiar outside Portugal. Without something to judge by, a buyer faced with ten thousand bottles does not choose carefully. They leave.
Alcohol advertising is governed by territory
Age restrictions, permitted claims and whether the category can be advertised at all vary country by country. Running one campaign everywhere is how an account gets shut down.
Price and language decide the sale quietly
A buyer who has to convert the currency in their head, or read about wine in a second language, abandons the basket without ever saying why.
What we built.
Described by what it does for the business. How it is put together is a conversation we are happy to have, but it is not what this page is for.
Let the critics do the recommending
Scores, medals and awards are surfaced on the products and made browsable, so a buyer with no knowledge of the producer still has a way to choose.
The store meets the buyer where they are
Six languages and more than a dozen currencies, so the price someone sees is the price they understand without arithmetic.
Campaigns scoped per market
Advertising is run inside each territory's alcohol rules and age requirements rather than as one global campaign that breaks in half of them.
The results
What is different about the way this business runs now.
- A buyer who knows no Portuguese producers can still narrow ten thousand wines down to a shortlist.
- Prices are shown in the buyer's own currency, in their own language, before they reach the basket.
- Advertising runs within each market's alcohol rules rather than risking the account on one global campaign.
- The catalog itself does the merchandising, so the ads can show wines a visitor has already shown interest in.
In a catalog this size, the work is not persuasion. It is giving a stranger a way to choose, and keeping the advertising legal in every country it runs in.
Other work like this
Is something in your business working like this?
Describe what is taking the time, and we will tell you whether it is worth automating, including when the answer is no.