Home/Case Studies/Wine eCommerce
Case Study eCommerce · UK

Premium Wine Shop -
3x Revenue in 3 Months

A UK premium wine retailer needed three business lines under one platform a consumer shop, wine bar booking system and B2B wholesale portal. Here's exactly how I built it, the decisions I made and the results delivered.

Client
UK Wine Retailer (NDA)
Timeline
8 Weeks
My Role
Full-Stack Developer
Year
2023
🍷
3x
Revenue in 3 months
40%
Faster load time
200+
Bookings/month
5.0★
Client rating
Overview

The Brief

The client ran a premium UK wine business with three distinct revenue streams: a consumer online shop, a wine bar running tasting events and private bookings, and a wholesale arm supplying restaurants and corporate clients. All three were being managed manually no integrated system, no online booking, no B2B portal.

Their existing Shopify store only handled the consumer shop, and even that was underperforming. They wanted everything unified under one custom WordPress and WooCommerce platform, built to reflect the premium nature of their brand.

"We need one platform that handles our online shop, takes bookings for the wine bar, and lets our B2B clients place wholesale orders with their own pricing. It needs to feel as premium as our wine."

The Challenge

What Made This Hard

Three separate business models had to coexist on one platform without the UX of any one feeling compromised. The consumer shop needed a premium editorial feel. The booking system needed real-time availability, capacity management and automated email confirmations. The wholesale portal needed customer-group pricing, minimum order quantities and a clean B2B checkout flow.

On top of this, the client had an existing Shopify product catalogue of 800+ wines with custom metadata region, grape, vintage, food pairing that all had to be migrated cleanly and mapped to a new custom taxonomy structure in WordPress.

How I Built It

Project Phases

1
Discovery & Architecture (Week 1)

Mapped all three business models into a single WordPress data architecture. Designed custom post types and taxonomies for wines, events and wholesale products. Chose WooCommerce as the commerce foundation with custom PHP plugins for the booking and wholesale layers.

2
Shopify Migration & Data Architecture (Week 2)

Migrated 800+ wine products from Shopify to WooCommerce using a custom Python script. Mapped all custom metadata region, grape variety, vintage, tasting notes, food pairings to a custom WordPress taxonomy. Zero data loss, all SEO slugs preserved via 301 redirects.

3
Custom Theme & Consumer Shop (Weeks 2–4)

Built the custom WordPress theme from scratch no page builders. Implemented advanced product filtering by region, grape and price. Built a wine club subscription with recurring WooCommerce billing via Stripe. Integrated Stripe and PayPal checkout with full order management.

4
Booking System Plugin (Weeks 4–6)

Built a custom WordPress booking plugin in PHP event creation, real-time seat availability, capacity management and automated email confirmations. A React-powered calendar on the front end gave a smooth, modern booking experience. Integrated with Stripe for instant payment on booking.

5
B2B Wholesale Portal (Weeks 6–7)

Built a separate WooCommerce customer group for wholesale accounts with custom pricing tiers, minimum order quantities and a bulk order form. B2B customers log in to a dedicated portal that hides consumer pricing and shows their negotiated rates. Invoice-based checkout with 30-day payment terms.

6
Performance, SEO & Launch (Week 8)

Optimised for Core Web Vitals lazy loading, WebP image conversion, Redis object caching, CDN via Cloudflare. Implemented structured data (Product, Event, BreadcrumbList schemas). Load time dropped from 4.2s to 1.8s. Launched on time with zero downtime migration from Shopify.

Technology

Tech Stack & Why

💻
WordPress 6
CMS custom theme, no page builders
🛒
WooCommerce
Commerce foundation extended with custom plugins
📊
PHP / Custom Plugins
Booking system & wholesale portal logic
React
Booking calendar frontend component
💳
Stripe & PayPal
Payments, subscriptions & B2B invoicing
WP Engine + Cloudflare
Hosting, Redis caching & CDN
Outcome

The Results

The platform launched on time, on budget. Within three months the client saw measurable improvements across all three business lines. The wholesale portal alone onboarded 45 new B2B accounts in the first month a revenue stream that had previously required manual phone orders.

3x
Online Revenue Growth
Within 3 months of launch compared to Shopify baseline
40%
Faster Load Time
From 4.2s to 1.8s Core Web Vitals all green
200+
Monthly Bookings
Wine bar fully booked most weekends within 6 weeks
45
New B2B Accounts
Wholesale portal onboarded in first month of launch
"

Harwinder understood our business from day one. He didn't just build what we asked for he asked the right questions and built what we actually needed. The booking system alone has transformed how we run the wine bar. Highly recommended.

UK
Wine Retailer Client
Director · UK Premium Wine Retailer
Start a Similar Project📅 Book a Free Call

"We do a lot of programming projects and we always use Harwinder. We have worked with him for several years now and will continue working with him for many more."

CF
Coby Foster
Chief Operating Manager · Country & Town House · ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Upwork
All Case StudiesStart a Similar Project