Navisite has been selected
as managed hosting and managed web application support provider for Virgin
Wines, the online wine merchant which provides exclusive wines to its club members.
Virgin Wines was established in 2000 under Sir Richard
Branson’s Virgin branding and in 2005 it was acquired by Direct Wines. In 2013
Virgin Wines underwent a management buyout from its parent company and, as a
result, the online wine retailer needed to replace its existing IT system and
find a new provider to deliver hosting and managed application support. The wine merchant runs its business solely
online, as an eCommerce company, with uptime and stability a key priority.
Virgin Wines offers an exclusive wine delivery service
to its club members; over 95 per cent of its products are exclusive to the
business and cannot be found in supermarkets. With the average basket sale at
£110,its e-commerce
platform is critical to business operations and profitability. David
Wyatt, social media and communications manager, Virgin Wines explains, “As an
online service we don’t have that one-on-one customer experience like
traditional retailers, so the website experience is very important for our
customers. As customers increasingly want services on demand, uptime is
crucial. If the platform is down then they will just go elsewhere. Even a short
outage can impact our profits significantly.”
As well as keeping the system performance
levels stable and the ability to deal with peak times the online wine retailer
was also looking for a data centre provider that could be a trusted advisor for
the business, and to help them grow their business. Virgin Wines has just
rolled out a new gift service aimed at attracting new customers to reach its
goal of 100,000 new customers per financial year. This new business push has
led to Virgin Wines expanding its services with NaviSite with future plans in
hand.
“Since the implementation we have built a
great relationship with NaviSite. They are always quick to respond to our needs
and really understand our business. As we have started to expand our business
even further we look to NaviSite to help us increase and scale our web service
capacity and performance,” explained David Wyatt. “The service has been
reliable through our unexpected peak sales in July this year and we have no
doubt that this stable and reliable service will continue to run throughout our
peak Christmas period starting in late October.”
“The rapid increase and adoption of mobile
technology has created a whole new online customer experience. With users able
to order what they want, when they want, customers expect services to be
available, responsive and secure. It has been a pleasure to work
alongside Virgin Wines to help them provide this service to their existing
customers as well as enable them to meet their business growth targets,” Said
Sean McAvan, managing director, NaviSite Europe. “We
believe that our expertise in supporting clients in the online retail sector,
partnered with our tailored approach, system quality and reliability means that
NaviSite is an ideal partner for Virgin Wines and other online retailers.
”
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