Beer Cartel has been internationally recognised for e-commerce innovation by leading open e-commerce platform, BigCommerce.
While it also operates a bricks and mortar store in Sydney, Beer Cartel is widely known as one of the pioneers of the online alcohol retail space in Australia. It is often recognised on a local scale for its performance in this space, including being named best online craft beer store by National Liquor News’ sister title, Beer and Brewer, for five years running.
In the 2022 BigCommerce Make it Big Awards, which are judged on a worldwide scale, Beer Cartel received the Innovation Award, beating out thousands of other online stores of all industries that use BigCommerce’s platform.
The Make it Big Awards are intended to celebrate retail achievements on the BigCommerce platform across four categories; design, innovation, emerging brand and global strategy. The innovation award in particular recognises a retailer which has solved technical e-commerce challenges with creative use of the platform.
Beer Cartel said its creativity involved the use of API (application programming interface) connections to manage an inventory of over 1000 beers, as well as to enrich its product data.
Richard Kelsey, Co-founder of Beer Cartel, explained his company’s approach in managing the challenges that e-commerce usually presents.
“You’ve got beers being sold by the single, four-pack and case of 24. Out of the box e-commerce platforms aren’t designed to work with that complexity. Thankfully you can get creative and use data connections with other software to create strong inventory controls and that is what we’ve done,” Kelsey said.
“We then took these data connections a step further to link into Untappd, the world’s leading beer review site. They have thousands of independent reviews for beers on their platform which provide customers with unbiased opinions about the products they’re looking to buy.”
This is also the second time that Beer Cartel has been recognised by BigCommerce for its innovation, previously winning Best Marketing Innovation in the 2017 BigCommerce Innovation Awards.
“These awards are real pinch yourself moments. When you think about the tens of thousands of websites that operate on BigCommerce, to be getting an award like this, not just once, but twice is very exciting,” Kelsey added.