Majestic Wine have seen strong online growth and have recently taken on MetaPack’s delivery management software to help scalability in their delivery process for further expansion in this area. Their year-end figures showed online sales growing by 9.6% and the number of orders rising to 175,000, up by 9.4% on the previous year, with ecommerce orders being 10.2% of its total UK retail sales.

In addition to Majestic’s regular store-delivered service, where customers need to order a minimum of 12 bottles of wine or spirits online for delivery, they also operate a fast-growing service called Gift Solutions, offering smaller gift packs with next day delivery. These are fulfilled from their new warehouse located in St Albans. Although they currently use a single carrier for next day delivery, one of their main reasons to implement MetaPack was the potential to go multi-carrier in the future with all the service and cost benefits this achieves, as well as providing contingency so they are never in a position where they cannot ship.

Another important feature was the customer care aspect of the system. “We pride ourselves on our personal service with our direct from store deliveries and wanted to carry this over into the orders coming from the warehouse via courier, where customers can be kept informed every step of the way. MetaPack offers the perfect solution, and we get to take proactive action if something looks like it’s going wrong,” explains Richard Weaver, Ecommerce Director at Majestic.

Majestic Wine opted for a two-phase integration with their orders being initially entered into the system via file import so that they could be up and running quicker. The API integration is scheduled later this year which will fully automate the process. They pick and pack in batches of around 40-50 and print despatch labels and gift notes on a single sheet, a time-saver enabled by MetaPack integration, matching them up at the pack bench.

“MetaPack is instrumental in streamlining our delivery process and assisting our online growth strategy. We expect to see our packing time reduce significantly, especially as we prepare for the Christmas peak when we deliver half our annual volume in just four weeks. We look forward to offering our customers a range of additional delivery service options in the future,” concludes