Helping alcohol brands grow through fulfilment

Simplicity is key to a fruitful fulfilment journey, even if your brand sells via numerous channels. When a customer places an online order, whether via your website, a marketplace, or a social media platform, it should automatically feed through to your warehouse team. The chosen vessels – whether they contain beer, wine, cocktails or spirits – should then be carefully picked, scanned and dispatched on the same day to ensure prompt delivery and a first-rate customer experience. A reliable system will also update your stock levels so you’ll never sell a product that’s not available while alerting you when stocks are running low.

The logistics journey for your offering is likely to be complex and hard to keep track of without the right support, particularly if you’re selling multiple variations of an alcohol-based product that must remain compliant with rigorous government and HMRC regulations. Outsourcing this time-consuming process to a trusted fulfilment partner will enable you to save money and focus on other key aspects of your brand, safe in the knowledge that your customers are privy to a seamless, satisfying service.

And don’t simply accept a one size fits all approach to fulfilment. Your fulfilment partner needs to understand your specific requirements and create a bespoke plan that will best serve your business and its plans for growth into new territories and marketplaces and subsequent increasing order volumes going forwards. This is particularly important in selling alcohol, where each new territory may bring a raft of further regulations to consider.

For example, at Huboo our Continuous Improvement Team analyses all client processes to optimise the service we provide, working in tandem with operations, finance, supply chains and future projections departments to identify untapped opportunities and make improvements. This enables the team to fully collaborate with you throughout your Huboo partnership to guarantee scalable growth while maximising efficiency.

A frictionless fulfilment process affords brands the time to be more agile as new consumer drinks trends – and subsequent commercial opportunities – emerge. You need to be able to react quickly to meet sudden spikes in customer demand and, while this will inevitably pose challenges to inventory planning, this can be overcome if you’re using software that offers real-time insight into omnichannel sales and warehouse inventory levels. Assessing current sales data alongside historic data makes it easier to spot patterns and ensure that you aren’t left with expired or leftover products once a spike has passed.

This is equally important to bear in mind when preparing for peak-season eCommerce events. A fulfilment provider needs to have the tools and account managers in place to meticulously forecast orders so that warehouse teams can flex in size to serve different needs across various marketplaces while making sure there is unlimited scalability to order volumes with zero breakages or customer complaints. This includes detailed knowledge of key annual periods for alcohol, such as the summer months, bank holidays, Christmas and New Year, as well as being able to predict other one-off events that might lead to an increase in sales, such as the Royal Coronation.

On the flip side, your fulfilment also needs to be flexible enough to adapt when things don’t go to plan. Whether it’s industrial action, an economic downturn, supply chain issues or a product recall, you need to work with your fulfilment provider to ensure that there are clear contingency measures, with your provider able to act as an extension of your brand and communicate what’s happening to your customers.

Your warehouse should include dedicated, premises-licensed storage areas for alcohol products so that they leave in the same condition they arrived. Not every warehouse will be up to spec. You need to make sure you have clean, temperature-regulated ambient spaces and, of course, that your valuable products are kept out of direct sunlight and, preferably, in a cool, dark place so they don’t lose any of their flavour, colour or potency over time.

In addition to this, your fulfilment provider needs to demonstrate that it has batch control, stock checking and quality assurance measures to ensure products don’t exceed best before dates. This is particularly important in the case of perishable products or those that contain organic ingredients. One example of best practice is adopting a first-in-first-out method so that older products are picked, packed and shipped as a priority, minimising the risk of waste and items reaching expiration dates.

Unboxing is the first physical interaction that your customers have with your product. So it’s vital that customers experience products and packaging as per your instructions and, crucially, without any damage or breakages, particularly when it comes to transporting glass bottles.

Sustainable, alcohol-specific packaging, protective insulation materials – such as Flexi-Hex – as well as appropriate-sized boxes and fragile stickers are all helpful when it comes to achieving this. Some fulfilment providers can even meet more targeted packaging requests so that alcohol products arrive complete with a sample, branded note or other marketing collateral.

Brands need to consider the optimal locations for getting products out to customers effectively. Geographic proximity means faster, more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly shipping, so try and choose a fulfilment partner that has a proven presence in the locations that matter most to your business – and that can boast easy access to major transport networks, allowing for cohesive and effective distribution further afield.

A good delivery experience encourages customers to order again. But this doesn’t always mean the same or next day. Customers want high levels of service at a reasonable cost and transparency throughout the fulfilment process. In a nutshell, they want to know where the item is, when they can expect it and a guarantee that it will arrive at the time stated when they made the purchase, all from alcohol-compliant couriers who make the effort to ask for age verification.

In addition to this, customers are becoming more eco-conscious, so it’s important that you’re fulfilling orders in a way that’s as sustainable as possible. Alcohol brands can clearly demonstrate their ESG credentials to customers when they have the relevant accreditations in place.

As part of this process, fulfilment providers should have teams dedicated to achieving relevant industry standards. This isn’t merely a box-ticking exercise, it ensures that your products are managed, fulfilled and delivered – from eco-friendly warehouses – with integrity.