ODDBINS: Improving with age

After a shaky start online, Oddbins is redeveloping its Web site to include some of the knowledge and quirkiness its high street off- licences are known for. Report Sean Hargrave

By its own confession, Oddbins' early foray into the online world wasn't much short of a disaster.

The interface was "not customer-friendly", the wine on offer was "restricted" and the back office system was "inflexible". Hence the turn of the century was spent by the Oddbins online team reversing this initial entry to the market and producing a site that would offer a more comprehensive list of wine, spirits and beers, as well as offering far more flexible search facilities.

However, the work still isn't complete. Sam Richardson, online marketing manager at Oddbins, reveals the company knows it still has a lot of work to do in order to make up for time lost building its first "naive" site. Mainly, he confesses, the effort now is to build up a far better profile of customers. Aside from launching a mobile wine and spirits service with Vodafone Live!, top priority in the last few months has gone to a new feature on the Web that's just been activated, which allows customers who are registering to tell the site what kind of wine they like.

"It gives us a far better understanding of our customer base so that we can categorise them a lot better," explains Richardson.

"We send out two emails a month to our 70,000 registered users. The first is one that explains what offers are available online and in store, and that will largely remain the same. The second one, though, tells customers when new wines are coming in, and we're working towards being able to customise that email for each customer so that we can tell them about wines which they're more likely to want to buy.

"It's a hugely powerful tool for us. The other day we sent an email about a new Australian Shiraz and sold 3,000 bottles straight away, the same afternoon."

This twice-monthly email marketing campaign is supplemented by an affiliate programme that can lay claim to 3,000 sites signed up through Trade Doubler, Affiliate Windows and the charitable Buy.at.

Of course, the main hurdle any online wine...