Sector(s)
Hedonism Wines approached Open Imagination in 2019 after having created an e-commerce store using a proprietary system that had its limitations. The Hedonism Wines brand is a globally well recognised brand for the sale of fine wines and spirits, and they were ready to expand.
Hedonism Wines required a modern, enterprise-grade ecommerce platform that can scale the business, provide enhanced SEO while customisable to evolve as the business grows. Their product catalogue consisted of 60,000 products competitively priced from ÂŁ10-ÂŁ200,000 and stock ranging from 1 to 100 of each. Custom experience and brand integrity was essential when working with luxury goods so the website quality and UX had to be exemplary.
The new Drupal Commerce solution was designed to integrate with EPOS, logistics, and fulfilment systems while enabling complex regulatory workflows and a premium end to end customer experience. The website has evolved as the business has grown, providing a 30% increase in sales year on year.
Schedule a call with Open Imagination to discuss what we can do for you.
About the project
The objective was to deliver a resilient enterprise e-commerce solution capable of managing a substantial product catalogue, detailed product metadata, and the regulatory requirements involved in alcohol sales. Hedonism Wines required real-time integrations with EPOS and logistics systems to reflect stock availability, fulfil orders efficiently, and support omnichannel operations.
The project was initially implemented using Drupal Commerce 1 on Drupal 8, supported by a suite of custom and contributed modules. In 2024, the platform was upgraded to Drupal 10 with Drupal Commerce 2. Custom checkout events enforced region-specific tax and duty logic, and specialised fulfilment workflows. A scalable product content model was designed to support more than 60,000 items, with custom import pipelines automating updates from business systems and external suppliers.
The resulting platform offered the stability, flexibility, and performance required for Hedonism’s global online store. Ongoing management, hosting, and marketing services ensured continuous optimisation and long-term commercial growth.
Schedule a call with Open Imagination to discuss what we can do for you.
Key Features
Hedonism Wines’ platform has continued to evolve well beyond launch, with frequent feature improvements to support growth, operations, merchandising and international expansion. Below are several key features delivered as part of that ongoing programme.
Stock Location Split
Hedonism required the “Available stock” figure to be displayed normally to customers, but also needed “Free stock” to appear for internal sales users to support in-store selling and operational confidence.
VAT Overseas Sales Tax
To support international conversion, Hedonism requested a cart-stage feature that enables customers delivering overseas to choose their delivery destination and automatically benefit from ex-VAT pricing. The solution included:
- Enabling Commerce Tax with UK VAT conditions
- Displaying ex-VAT pricing alongside product pricing
- Storing VAT rate per product variation, populated from Vintner VAT type via migration
- Creating a cart UI block to select the delivery country based on allowed shipping countries
- Adjusting cart prices and order submission logic so the Vintner order remained accurate
This work significantly strengthened international customer trust and improved checkout clarity.
In Bond and Duty Paid
Hedonism required the ability to sell both In Bond (IB) and Duty Paid (DP) variations of the same product concurrently, without creating excessive admin overhead or risking data inconsistency.
This work extended the initial In Bond groundwork using Drupal Commerce product variation attributes, with clear UX requirements to allow customers to switch variation types, and improved price-handling through dedicated pricing bands in Vintner.
ShipStation Integration
ShipStation was implemented to streamline fulfilment workflows and reduce manual effort during despatch. Orders are pushed into ShipStation automatically using business logic that determines when an order is ready for fulfilment, ensuring operational teams can process high order volumes efficiently.
ShipStation then enables the fulfilment team to select the most appropriate carrier based on delivery location, service level, and pricing, while automatically generating shipping labels and waybills. This reduces fulfilment time, improves shipping accuracy, and supports a scalable dispatch process across multiple delivery destinations.
Dynamic Stock Allocation
Dynamic Stock Allocation automatically assigns each order to the most suitable warehouse based on stock availability across locations. When an order contains multiple items, the allocation logic selects the warehouse that can fulfil the majority of the order from a single location, minimising unnecessary movement of products between warehouses. This reduces handling effort, improves fulfilment speed, and helps maintain operational efficiency as the catalogue scales.
Realtime Stock Control
Realtime Stock Control ensures stock accuracy across all sales channels by syncing stock changes frequently between the EPOS and the website catalogue. To prevent overselling, stock availability is checked centrally in real-time at multiple stages during checkout, ensuring that the inventory is still valid at the moment the order is placed, even for high-demand products with limited remaining stock.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal Commerce on Drupal was selected because we can be confident that the e-commerce ecosystem is highly scalable with minimal financial risk.
The e-commerce entity structure allowed it to be compatible with their internal EPOS system (Vintner Systems). This means Open Imagination can automate the maintenance of the product catalogue, product attributes, product categories and push orders through for fulfilment while the Vintner System took control of account reporting, stock control and purchasing.
Drupal was also the ideal platform to become the interface to the Vintner system for all online services with its ability to be expanded to integrate with many other third-party systems to support marketing, fulfilment and payments.
Schedule a call with Open Imagination to discuss what we can do for you.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Drupal
Drupal was selected because the selected contributed modules form the core of Hedonism Wines' enterprise ecommerce platform.
Drupal Commerce 2.x provides the foundation for products, orders, checkout flows, and pricing logic. Commerce Shipping and the Shipping API were chosen to support complex, multi-condition shipping requirements and to enable integration with external fulfilment systems.
Stripe Payment was selected as the primary payment gateway for its reliability, wide card support, and seamless integration with Drupal Commerce. Klaviyo API Integration enables automated marketing and customer lifecycle communications, allowing product and order data to sync in real time. Search API (together with Solr where applicable) was chosen to handle indexing and fast retrieval across a catalogue of more than 60,000 products, ensuring accurate filtering, faceting, and discoverability.
Solr was used to power fast, scalable catalogue search and filtering, reducing database load and improving browsing performance across a high-volume product range.
Together, these modules provide a stable, extensible, and performant e-commerce architecture suitable for Hedonism’s high-volume product catalogue and operational requirements.
Schedule a call with Open Imagination to discuss what we can do for you.
