Mockup of the Ake & Humphris wine merchant website shown on a desktop monitor and a smartphone, both displaying the gold and dark hero banner with wine glasses and "Wine Collection" and "Gift Cards" buttons.

Ake & Humphris e-commerce website

From cellar to sell out: Shopify e-commerce website for Ake & Humphris

A leading wine merchant, Ake & Humphris’ old website failed to do justice to their high-quality fermented wares.

We stepped in with a bespoke design and e-commerce solution that seamlessly migrated A&H’s product database to Shopify and dramatically enhanced user experience.

Project team

Smiling person in a lilac short-sleeved shirt typing on a silver laptop at a white desk, with a spotlight lamp and music album covers behind.A smiling person with a beard and short styled hair sits at a white desk beside a open laptop, wearing a navy green checked shirt with rolled sleeves, in an office with album art posters behind them.A smiling person with short, tousled brown hair and a trimmed beard, wearing a dark navy shirt, in front of a white shelf with colourful items.

Services provided

Challenge

A website of a particular vintage

With a rather dated design, some broken images and sub-par product filtering and navigation, A&H’s pre-existing website failed to pair up with their wine offering.

Mockup of a desktop monitor showing the Ake Humphris wine and beer website, with a dark banner of a red wine bottle and glass, and tiles for Shop, Offers and News. Labelled "BEFORE".Desktop monitor and smartphone showing the Ake & Humphris wine merchant website with gold buttons over a wine glass backdrop, labelled AFTER

Vision

Uncorking A&H’s e-commerce potential

Firstly, the website needed a complete visual overhaul. A mini brand refresh and revived colour palette gave A&H a smart visual uplift.

Then, there were structural considerations – we wanted to make the website a pleasure to navigate. It should be as easy as possible for customers to find the product(s) they like (and then pay for them safely and securely).

For this, Shopify is ideal. It affords us the flexibility to do plenty of things with product categories, filtering and metadata. Shopify also gives freedom to implement bespoke solutions – key when working with A&H’s existing product systems and data.

Ake & Humphris wordmark in cream serif capitals on a charcoal background, with a colour palette strip of cream, gold, and brown swatches below.Mock-up of the Ake and Humphris wine merchant website on a dark background, showing a hero banner, popular wines, a team photo and gift boxes.

Craft

A smooth, seamless database migration to maximise A&H’s product range

We manipulated data exported from the client’s old system in a way that Shopify would accept. Using this existing data, we set up brand new categories to allow products to be sorted in a number of ways – such as by region, grape, occasion and dietary requirement – allowing us to build a more diverse mega-menu.

This data also allowed us to set up a new filtering system on product index pages, allowing users to browse between and drill down on products of varying types – again, by grapes, regions, styles, occasion and dietary requirement, but also by stock availability and price range.

We also displayed more information about products using Shopify’s metafields. This included all the aforementioned category and filter information, but also details about ABV, vintage and other good-to-know features, such as sustainability and organic. This gives A&H’s content managers more flexibility and is great for on-site searchability and indexing in Google search results.

This was supported with new, high-quality images on the product detail pages. We also performed a few further bespoke changes to improve the product card components, so they worked with the tall wine bottle images as well as more standard-sized images, such as those for beers or cases.

Angled screenshots of the Ake & Humphris wine shop website showing product listings with bottle images and a product page for Produttori Di Manduria Alice VerdecaMockup of the Ake & Humphris wine shop website on a desktop monitor and smartphone, showing product listings with filters, prices and "Add to bag" buttons on a beige background.

Deliver

We’ll let the screenshots do the talking – cheers!

We migrated A&H’s old website to a new modern ecommerce platform using extracted data from their old system, and set up a brand new filtering system on product index pages, building a more coherent website solution where customer users could easily filter between categories and products.

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