Sometimes Always brings the instore touch online

Sometimes Always is a boutique online wine store that sells both well-known and bespoke brands, it provides for its customers an instore experience online. 

Jared Brown, head of digital at Sometimes Always discusses with Digital Nation how the online retailer created a virtual bottle shop through embracing digital tools. 

When customers walk into a bottle shop, they are able to source information on the products they want from where it was produced to the alcohol content.

Brown said they wanted to emulate that experience online for their customers.

He explained, “When we were trying to design the business, we were saying, what is it about walking into a bottle shop and someone telling you about a product that makes it feel good and makes you trust it? A lot of time I spent thinking, how can we translate that into a digital form, and be educational?”

The started this through having consistent, custom imagery that they shot themselves.

“Other stores will just grab bottles from Google image search from wherever they can find them. We photograph every single bottle, it's consistent. People can look at it, and they get an understanding of exactly what the product is,” he said.  

Tasting wines is a bit harder to do online, Brown and his team developed a tasting key to help customers pick the right bottle.

“We ended up designing 150 flavour icons, we worked with our internal design team to design these icons. We decided that every product would get five of those to try and articulate what the flavour is going to be.

“On top of that we've got a rating scale of like alcohol, sweetness, tannin, acidity. The idea being that someone can look at the page, understand why we think it's worthy, understand about a bit about what there might going to taste that and then and know the product that they're going to get,” he said.

Sometimes Always also has a live chat to encourage customers to chat to staff.

He said, “We actively encourage people to speak to us about their selections, to try and reinforce the information we're giving and try and be that bottle shop where the person can give you the advice.”