Virgin Wines

Launched in the summer of year 2000, Virgin Wines is Richard Branson's venture into the business of online wine ordering. It provides a highly personalized service to develop a person's own wine profile and recommends wines that it guarantees the consumer will really enjoy. It remembers your likes and dislikes and provides a service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and if you don't like a wine that is recommended you don't pay and if you find any of our wines cheaper elsewhere, the company refunds the difference. Virgin Wines currently offers the largest range of wine for sale in the world with a list of over 17,500 wines.

For Virgin Wines, being able to verify addresses as well as offer consumers a simple and stress-free way of entering their details on their website is vital. After all, capturing the correct contact information and postal address is one of the most important factors for successful business in the online world. With the correct address, Virgin Wines can guarantee that orders are delivered to the right depot and ultimately speed up successful deliveries to the customer. That's why in the spring of year 2001 they approached Capscan, a leading supplier of UK and international address management systems, for an online Web addressing solution. Virgin Wines chose Capscan's Matchcode Webnet Java API on a Sun Solaris Server to power their online registration pages.

James Bennett, Chief Technology Officer, Virgin Wines, comments, "Before we implemented Matchcode, all the customer addresses were checked against the Postcode Address file when orders reached our warehouse. The fallout from this affected up to 2% of all orders that then need to be manually edited by our Call Centre Agents. This was a laborious process, taking up considerable time and resources. We realised it made good business sense to introduce an address and data-capture system at source on the website. "As a result of installing Matchcode, Virgin Wines expect to make savings of more than £10,000 per annum. Bennett concludes, "It's not necessarily a huge saving but it will cover the cost of implementing."

An unforeseen benefit of Matchcode for virginwines.com was the substantial marketing boost it gave to its gift section. Matchcode helps Virgin Wines' customers find the full and correct address for the recipient of their gifts. This is crucial if people are to buy and send gifts with confidence online, and be reassured that their gift will reach the right person - a critical success factor for ensuring healthy sales. Previously the lack of the correct address and postcode had proved to be a barrier to the success of the gift section. Virgin Wines can now guarantee to deliver on their promise to customers.

Bennett adds, "We looked at several solutions and Capscan's was the most cost effective for us. We went so far as to contact an existing customer of Capscan who had nothing but praise for it. They were already using Matchcode with the same software that we have on our website, so we knew before we bought it that it would work ".