73% boost in competition entries

SWA’s competition website introduced new business efficiencies by automating much of the competition management process and drove additional revenue as entrants could manage and enter their portfolio of wines online quickly and easily.

The UK's premier on-trade wine competition

The Sommelier Wine Awards (SWA) is a unique event focusing entirely on wines aimed at the on-trade. Since starting in 2007, it has grown to become the first point of reference for the UK's wine buyers as well as the key competition for wines trying to increase their presence in hotels, pubs, bars and restaurants across the world.

  • User Experience Design
  • Ecommerce & Digital Platforms
  • Responsive Websites
  • Web Apps

Competition website brief

After a couple of years of solid growth, the Sommelier Wine Awards became difficult to manage and scale using spreadsheets and manual processes.
To address this challenge, Obergine were approached to create an online competition entry website that allowed:

  • Competition users to manage their own wine portfolio, enter and pay for wine competition entries

  • SWA staff to manage the competition and publish results easily and quickly

  • For the competition to scale to accommodate an ever increasing number of international entries from the world's biggest wine producers to small scale independents

The Brief

Stylish and easy-to-use

We crafted a responsive, modern and visually pleasing website for SWA that was easy for wine producers to upload and manage their wine portfolio, review past year’s entries and use these as a template for the forthcoming event to expedite the competition entry process.

Solution

Greater customer satisfaction, proven by hard numbers.

205%

increase in

traffic levels

73%

increase in

competition entries

292%

increase in

organic search traffic

Easy experience for entrants

It was essential for the competition entry experience to be straightforward for the entrant and for the different stages of the competition process to be clearly communicated. 

This was achieved by incorporating clear iconography to communicate key actions available to the entrant at any given stage in the competition process. Making the entry process simple and effortless increased the conversion rate of competition entries and sent submissions soaring.

Clear iconography made entering the competition a simple experience

Flexible ecommerce and payment processing

We integrated credit/debit card ecommerce payment facilities for competition entries as well as standard invoicing processes for competition payment of high value entries.  As a result of this, the SWA invoicing process has become vastly more efficient.

We integrated ecommerce payment facilities to increase efficiency in invoicing process

Robust database on Kentico

Since the inaugural competition in 2007, SWA has become an internationally renowned event and there has been a sustained annual growth in submitters. It was crucial that we provided SWA with a robust database on the CMS Kentico that could handle the high volume of wine competition entries, which can come in at a rapid rate!

We provided SWA with a strong database that could handle the high volume of entries

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