A Beer Store on a Wine Club Platform
July 21st, 2022 by Gage Pacifera
When Fort George crafted the plan for their Lovell Auto Co. beer club, they saw that they needed to create a more sophisticated online store that could account for annual membership fees, beer allocations to members, exclusive members-only purchasing and some advanced customer account operations. The company’s previous Squareup store didn’t have the capability to handle the new functionality and neither did the Big Cartel store they were using to sell their merch (sidenote: both of these were put together by Harmonic Northwest). They would need to find a different way forward.
That way forward turned out to be Vinespring. Vinespring is an online selling platform geared toward wine clubs and membership-based purchasing. Their platform had a lot of the features we needed and their SDKs and APIs were flexible enough for us to build using a headless next.js tech stack.
One neat feature to point out: we built a custom page for filling up 12-beer cases. Club members accumulate beers every month and if they want to fill up a case to ship out ahead of their case being full, they can add more beers to the case and pay for the extras at checkout. This isn’t a feature that any wine/beer club platform that we’re aware of offers and it’s an essential feature of the club. We were very happy to draw on our extensive experience building custom e-commerce modules to make this happen for them.
In the end, Fort George now has an elegant, easy-to-use store and club membership site that they are quite happy with.
Check out the store at: https://fortgeorgebeer.com