Main Goals

The Krasnostop project offers visitors a complete catalog of the best Russian wines available for order. Initially, the client had an offline store and a simple informational website, for which we developed prototypes and page design a few years ago.

Then the business expanded: the client opened more offline stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was necessary to create an opportunity to centrally manage the catalog of Russian wines, so that the administrator can create product items, upload their description, images and significant SEO data, and the project partners (vendors or sellers, speaking in terms of the marketplace) can add the necessary wines from the general catalog that they plan to sell in their offline stores and indicate the desired prices and balances.

Service scheme

Thus, the service should provide a single catalog and offer competitive opportunities for vendors, while allowing them to manage the prices of the assortment. This prompted the idea to unite the client’s own stores on one website and attract new partners from other cities. The ideal solution in this case is to launch a service based on the marketplace business model. This would make it possible to monitor the range and stock of products in stores and maintain the legal independence of sellers. And, in the future, to promote each store separately and expand the partner base.

Project Objectives

• develop and integrate turnkey design;
• create a single product catalog for all sellers;
• perform SEO optimization;
• make registration of sellers convenient;
• take into account Russian legislation in the field of sale of alcoholic products;
• develop a product reservation system;
• implement geolocation: display the assortment depending on the location of the buyer.

Our Work Process

1. We determined the logic of the project

According to russian laws, there are several rules for the sale of alcoholic beverages:

• You can not sell alcohol with delivery via the Internet.
• You can sell alcohol only at the time established by law.
• All sellers on the marketplace must have licenses to sell alcoholic beverages.

How to ensure following all these laws on the marketplace? We offered the client an option – to allow users to reserve the selected wine online, but redeem it in a physical store during the hours established by law. Also the vendors provide comprehensive information about their activities and attach licenses on their pages.

AS A RESULT, THE INTERACTION OF USERS WITH THE SERVICE LOOKS LIKE THIS:

1. The vendor registers on the marketplace and selects a tariff plan.
2. Depending on the tariff plan, he adds products from the general catalog of the marketplace to his assortment (rather than uploading his own catalog). 
3. Vendor indicates prices and stock for these products. 
4. The buyer enters the site and confirms his legal age. 
5. The system determines the location of the buyer and shows the nearest stores in his range (not all products available in the system). 
6. The buyer chooses the wine and reserves it. 
7. He then picks up an order in an offline store at the time established by law.

2. We developed and integrated the design

We decided to create a light and user-friendly design, not overloaded with elements, but at the same time reflecting all the necessary information about wineries: location, vineyards, grape varieties. So that every customer could feel like a sommelier.

First, we developed page prototypes. In order for the client to immediately understand what his future marketplace will look like, we developed not sketchy black and white prototypes, but full-fledged solutions in .png and .psd formats.

• Hover-effects for key elements of pages;
• User-friendly cataloge;
• A lot of different filters;
• Dynamic banners on the main page for important site sections;
• The product page has all important information: crop year, region, tupe of wine, grape variety, links to products list of wynery;
• Page “About project”;
• Customized blog: categories, tag cloud, sharing buttons, customizable baner;
• Vendor’s page has all the necessary information: legal details, license, adress, working hours;
• Marketplace is attractive on any screen thanks to adaptive layout.

3. We adjusted the store’s functionality to the client's business goals

In order to save time, we developed the marketplace functionality in parallel with prototyping. It was necessary to adapt the CS-Cart Multivendor platform to the specific business tasks of the client.

Disclaimer

When you open the main page (or any other page when you navigate from outside of the store), a disclaimer about the legal age for viewing the content of the site is displayed. The visitor is obliged to confirm his legal age. This information is stored in the session of the visitor, so during this single visit, a buyer will no longer need to confirm his age again.

Geolocation

We have modified the default geolocation functionality to make it easier to select the right product and save the buyer’s time.

The location of the buyer is determined automatically. Depending on it, a list of wines that can be bought in his city (and not all wines from the catalog) is offered. If the system determines the location incorrectly, the city can be changed manually. If there is no offline store in the buyer’s city, the system will offer to choose another city.

Reservation system

We needed to modify the standard checkout of CS-Cart into a reservation system. In fact, when making a reservation, the delivery address is the same as the address of the store; payment for the products is not made through the payment system, but in an offline store. We took into account all these features and created a very convenient one-page reservation.

The checkout page contains all the information about the store where wine is reserved, its address, map, and hours of operations. The field with the date of birth is available only for adult buyers.

You only need to fill in a few lines – and the order is reserved. New checkout is significantly simplified compared to the default one. Fewer clicks, easier checkout.

When the user places an order, the store administrator will receive a notification.

Wineries

Additionally we developed a new CS-Cart entity — wineries. They are displayed on the product page as a separate characteristic, according to which you can adjust the filter. Then we performed SEO-optimization of the winery pages, which allowed us to bring them to the top of the search results.

Product characteristics

The characteristics on the product page are not just text values, but links to the corresponding catalog filters. That is, by clicking on a characteristic a list of products with the same characteristic is formed.

Characteristics can be applied as a filter in a combination: from two or three selected values, each of which is also a link. The ability to move between them in one click makes navigation through the catalog even more convenient.

SEO optimization at the development stage

The catalog has a huge number of products and characteristics by which you can filter those products. In order for the filter pages to be well ranked by search engines, we set up SEO filters: when applying any filter, URLs are automatically generated. It is also possible to enable automatic generation of title, description, keywords and H1.

4. We improved the administrative part

The main administrator adds products to a catalog common to all vendors. The vendor cannot add new products himself. He only can select products from the main catalog. The number of products depends on what tariff plan is in effect for this particular vendor.

The pricing of the vendor also depends on the tariff plan. This is regulated as follows: the main administrator sets the price gap through the tariff settings, within which the vendor can set the price himself. When the vendor adds a product to the catalog, he sets a price that does not go beyond the backlash. Otherwise, the product cannot be customized. Such measures create a healthy competitive environment among sellers: they do not raise or dump prices.

Since the vendor functionality has been significantly limited, we have simplified the administrative part of CS-Cart for them. When there is nothing superfluous, it is much easier to manage the store.

5. We organized the vendor’s registration process

In order to become a member of the marketplace, the vendor must fill out an agreement and an offer. We have automated this process so that everything can be processed through the administrative part.

IT HAPPENS LIKE THIS:

• Krasnostop administrator draws up a contract through CS-Cart.
• The vendor sees a notification that there is a document for him to sign. 
• He opens the document and accepts its terms. The document can be exported to .pdf format and signed on paper. It is important that until the vendor accepts the terms of the contract, his store will not be added to the marketplace. 
• Signed information goes to the administrator. 
• The vendor's shop on the marketplace is ready to go.

For the convenience of vendors, we set up the geolocation of stores through the Yandex API. While registering, the seller starts filling in the address from any field, the rest is pulled from Yandex.Maps. Information about the store is automatically filled in the administrative part and on the storefront.

6. Project testing and launch

When the client personally tested all the functionality and was convinced of its quality, we set up a “live” server and transferred the project to it. The result was not quite a marketplace, but a service based on it, so we handed over a complete product to the client: a combination of the CS-Cart platform, design, ideas and business processes, as well as improvements. The Krasnostop service was completely ready for work from the first day of launch.

Our Work Results

Management transparency

If earlier information on the assortment, nomenclature and its description was maintained by each partner independently (which could lead to errors and inaccuracies in creating an affiliate program), now all these problems have been solved through the renewed service. All the content and product assortment are created centrally, and partners manage only the parameters that are significant for the business: availability, prices, and stock.

Scalability

The built-in opportunities of the project are: common products, geolocation, rules for maintaining partner catalogs – all this allowed not only to launch the project in the existing realities of the client’s business, but also to create points for the future project development. You just need to register a new vendor, select his city and add products from the general assortment.

Compliance with the legislation of the Russian Federation

The niche of this business imposes a number of restrictions on the classic marketplace model. This is taken into account in the project, which allows it to keep working without any issues for 2 years after launch.

Unique design

The proof of this is that in 2019 the project won the Tagline Awards as the best marketplace.

Excellent promotion potential

We configured metadata for filters and templates. When searching for wine by winery, the page gets to the top of the search results

Convenience for buyers

Buyers see only products that they can actually find and reserve in their city.