Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits (SGWS) was a premier account with Beverage Media Group. As a value-add, I worked with their Events Coordinators to create a ticket registration system over an eight-year span for both their New York City Wine & Food Festival (NYCWFF) and South Beach Wine & Food Festival (SOBEWFF) Trade Day tasting events. Each year, we expanded on the system to add more features. For these projects, I was the Product Manager, UI/UX Designer, Frontend Developer and Backend Developer.

The checkout User Experience (UX) was hampered by older technology and retailers weren't checking out their carts. The system was in need of a new User Interface (UI) to go along with their updated UX. I coded the whole frontend system, from new HTML/CSS design templates to DOM manipulation with jQuery/JS.

Problem: When adding to the cart, the whole page needed to be submitted, processed and rebuilt which put a large strain on server resources.

Solution: Using AJAX, only a small bit of data was sent to the server. Once the server added the data to the order, a confirmation was returned and the cart numbers were updated. The buy button was changed to "ITEM ADDED" to indicate a successful submission. A tooltip was also added with a link to view the cart for quick access to the cart page.

Problem: The old design had a word salad for various indicators and characteristics of the product.

Solution: Use of icons with tool tips helped free of space and reduce visual clutter.

Problem: The retailers were using the cart to hold products for review while they called their salesperson to actually place the order. At the time, there wasn't a way to separate placing orders for certain products or certain distributors so it was a pain to have multiple individual checkouts with only the products by distributor.

Solution: In the redesign, I offered two views, a comprehensive view that separated the orders by distributor and a simplified view with a listing of all items that were in the cart.

In the distributor view, I allowed the retailer to only checkout by distributor or all distributors. I allowed for further item level checkout by having the option to save for later. This would then skip the item during checkout submission.

The all items view was just another compacted view based on the product, not the distributor, for easier product manipulation.

Result: Saw an immediate 25% increase in checkouts compared to the previous version. The Average Order Volume (AOV) and Gross Merchandising Value (GMV) increased year after year. The site was the longest running B2B three-tier beverage alcohol ordering platform.