🥃 Improving the Limited Whiskey Release Online Experience - Three Levels of Options to fit any Distiller's Budget

Russel's Reserve 15 - A Bourbon Drop Case Study

7/18/24 marked the release of Russel's Reserve 15, one of the more sought after editions produced by Wild Turkey. The ubiquitous 10 year Russel's has a huge fanbase and is one of the more affordable bottles for the age statement and quality. Personally, I've consumed gallons of the stuff. The Turkey Family took to the web today in the hops of ordering the elusive 15 year Russel's Reserve, with rumors of the total yield varying a good bit (most speculation I have seen puts the number between 800-1500 bottles). As with most online limited drops, the user experience was terrible by all accounts. Turkey fans sat in front of laptops or phones frantically refreshing in the hopes of obtaining the unobtainable. For many, it wasn't clear when Russel's had sold out or if they should keep frantically trying. At the same time, bottles start showing up on Facebook marketplace where there have been posts selling purchasing bot services for weeks. Welcome to the limited edition web fiesta!  Sneakerheads have known this pain for a long time and with the bourbon boom of the last 10 years, the whiskey world has seen demand for low unit releases grow exponentially. Up front, this is by no means a dig at Wild Turkey or their web marketplace partner. Both are great organizations that have an opportunity to further improve customer experience with their respective brands. 

A wide open online release is bad for a number of reasons:

• Bad Actors Eat First - If you're a bit tech savvy or can swipe a credit card, you can get access to technology by which to have whatever number of artificial agents you're willing to pay for will attempt to grab that bottle for you, executing actions including at superhuman speed and killing website performance. Giving these clowns free rein puts a huge burden on web infrastructure and deprives genuine brand aficionados of product. 
• Good Customers Lose - Poor web performance and a reduced shot at what might be a dream bottle is a big wet blanket on what might otherwise be a devoted lifetime customer. Since these drops are usually premium products with similarly high customer lifetime values, souring the brand experience of potential buyers carries some significant downside risk. For big drops where there will be more losers than winners, hours of the website spinning will always result in bad press on socials.
• The Secondary Market Grows - You can argue weather or not the secondary market is a good thing, but the fact remains that secondary prices go brrrrrrrrr (and no I'm not shaming you for passing your buddy that extra bottle of Blanton's you found for a couple bucks extra once a year) With this margin comes the incentive for more botting or hording type behaviors and in the end, that additional profit accrues to the secondary market seller who is not adding value. I would much rather have seen those dollars go back to the manufacturer so that they can parley those funds into more cool offerings in the future. 

With some clear downsides to an open release, why don't companies try something different? 

In my experience, the Spirits Industry is much like the Tobacco Industry in the US: historical regulation and the enforcement of a tiered distribution system has resulted in there not being much ecommerce investment and business leaders being rightly more focused on product. It's hard to be a jack of all trades, and I'd rather distillers be good at whiskey than web development anyway! Beyond that, it does take some additional effort and money, though I will attempt to break down how the investment may be fairly trivial. If the master distiller is going to take the time to lovingly craft a majestic special release, does it not make sense for the auxiliary teams to craft the customer experience to a similar level of quality?

In the case of Campari and Russel's Reserve, they partner with Reservebar.com, an independent third party specializing in alcohol e-commerce that has a network of local liquor stores and web kits for standing up quick white label marketplace sites. The photos below show the breadth of service offerings that ReserveBar provides, and honestly, outsourcing all of these logistics to a third party removes most of the legal and technical challenges. Many brands utilize the same platform and it's likely that any expanded "special drop" features would benefit both ReserveBar as well as their customer base. To be clear, when someone is processing a purchase on the Russel's site, they're really transacting through Reservebar.com and could use an existing account with that platform. 

Resrvebar.com White Label Site Functionality

Our Beloved Russel's Bottle - note the embedded ReserveBar.com Functionality

Full Listing of Reservebar.com's Capabilities - Pretty Impressive!

You'll note that they already offer pre-orders and that the payment flow includes options for promo codes. If Campari wanted to work within the existing feature set, it seems they do have some flexibility in how to conduct the drop, either working with Reservebar to add features or leveraging the existing feature set to achieve more positive outcomes (more on the "How" behind that below). 

Okay, so what are the other options for processing a Limited Whiskey Release?

1. Deposit for Distillery Local Pickup - Under this method, you let customers put in an order for local pickup at the distillery, potentially as part of a lottery program. The geographical constraint limits the potential audience and allows the on-site retail staff to validate that someone isn't doing anything crazy (like ordering 100 bottles under fake names). A simple physical ID check, the same one required by law, is an easy control. That same geographical constraint is also a major downside. Brands these days have a national or international reach. Some of the  most lucrative or  most passionate customers likely do not live within driving distance of the still's beautiful copper walls. A desire to appeal to a national or global audience is the main reason to do an online drop in the first place, so this method is a poor option for a brand optimizing for maximum reach. 

2. Pre-Order Tiers - If the distiller has a good way to segment their customers, waves of pre-orders can be a great way to steadily release product to potential buyers. Under this approach, marketing would estimate the likely number of conversions and a buffer for each customer group, sending out waves of email with individual links to the web store. They'll keep sending waves of emails, monitoring the actual sales activity, until the entire lot is sold. This serves to limit the demand on the website and isolate any frantic buying activity and stock outs to the last cohort. It does add some additional complexity as the links may need some tech work to avoid one person being able to share the link publicly and unintended consumers find their way into the presale site. This can be mitigated for by requiring sign-ins or linking directly to a customer account. With pre-orders, there is also plenty of time to review and purge potential bad actions or fake accounts. Marketing also would need to have some decent email open or conversion activity metrics with which to make estimates. If there is flexibility regarding the number of units to be produced, the distiller could take pre-orders ahead of time un-capped and then scale the quantity produced accordingly. In Bourbon, where so much varies barrel to barrel and scaling the character of small blends is difficult, this may not be a realistic option. 

3. Online Auction - Start at MSRP and sell a bottle every five minutes let people log-in and enter a bid for the bottle and release the whole lot in order of bid amount. The whales can outbid the little man (certainly my budget would get squashed), but at least the extra money is going to the producer. There would still need to be some shipping controls to prevent resellers from bulk buying (could easily detect a bunch of shipments to the same address and simply void those transactions). To me, auctions have never been great brand building experiences. There is a lot of sadness in seeing eye popping amounts and you lose the joy of having your number drawn in a lottery. Some demographics may also see this option as unfair or predatory.

4. Online Lottery - You probably expected this one, and you're right because it seems to be the best answer. Local Liquor stores have done lotteries for a long time. A lottery is the best way to give a customer an equitable shot a limited product. Getting this right provides an exciting customer experience, hype social marketing, better buy channel experience, and geographical accessibility. Shifting to an online format, there is still the issue of bots and maybe there isn't much budget for a fancy ecommerce team or custom development. Campari has already shrewdly partnered with an third party vendor with the right skillset, but maybe Reservebar's development roadmap is already full. So how can we implement a low-effort and low-cost online lottery system that minimizes the impact of bad actors using existing functionality?

Solving for the Online Liquor Lottery 

Our ideal lottery process has three basic steps:

1. Customer Entry - The customer submits their information to be entered into the lottery.
2. Winner Selection -  The customer population is purged of multiple entries and suspicious accounts before the remaining population enters a random draw process. The customer is notified of their good fortune and next steps to complete the purchase.
3. Fulfillment - The customer submits final shipping and payment information, confirmations are provided, and the goods are shipped. 

After poking around a bit more on the Russel's and ReserveBar sites, I think there is a way to work a tokenized drop into the existing process with minimal technology change. For each of out three steps above, we'll discuss the options and various levels of effort associated.

Crawl - A mostly manual solution that an entry level marketing analyst could likely setup on their own with minimal cost, effort, or support from cross-functional teams.

Time to implement: One Day

Walk - A solution which is significantly more mature but is completely within Campari's control, reusing systems and functions that we can readily see are already in place. 

Time to implement: One Month 

 

Run - A single platform solution with best-in-class user experience and integration. This likely would require ReserveBar.com to build in all functionality as part of their product roadmap. While that sounds like a daunting statement, the operations we're talking about are very basic in terms of engineering and compute complexity. The "Run" option is doing what web teams do all the time, creating a new feature, and it could be used for many customers and years to come.

Time to implement: Three Months - One Time - Reusable forever with reasonable maintenance

Customer Entry - Really Just a Form

Collecting customer information is a basic marketing function. Upon passing the age gate on the Russel's Reserve website, Wild Turkey already automatically tries to add you to their mailing list! Would you look at that, most of the information we'd need to do some basic anti bot measures is already being collected. 

Crawl: Create a Microsoft or Google Forms document and ask interested customers to submit the lottery eligibility form. This could be done on the Russel's Reserve site on the relevant product page or even via a distribution to the "Family" mailing list pictured above. Adding the collection link is a simple text update. Pretty much every business has access to a forms type product for free as part of their Microsoft Office or Google Workspace subscription. Data is secured to the same degree any of their other cloud office suite info, and the sponsor can always delete all of the data after the limited release is complete, well within the timelines for deletion allowed by most privacy laws. An analyst could likely assemble such a form that in a single morning, spending the rest of the day trying to convince the marketing manager to add the link to an email distribution or badgering the web team to embed a link on the product page. 

Walk: Embed a web form like the one pictured above to directly capture interested customer information into the existing leads or Customer Relationship Management(CRM) platform. This will allow for easier data blending with other customer groups and expanded potential for automated processing by the marketing system or ecommerce platform. The company should already have processes for securing and maintaining this information in compliance with applicable privacy regulations. It may also be useful to be able to separate out who may be "premium" or more valuable customers through this self identification process. Getting these customers in the CRM presents some interesting opportunities for future marketing or retargeting for later releases. 

Run: Full website integration by which customers submit their information directly to the website, ideally connecting that information with a persistent user account. Again, the site should already have security and privacy built-in, this is really just a manner of populating additional attributes to a database. Properly designed data structures should allow for adding lists of attributes to customer objects and forms are a standard part of most frontend frameworks.

Winner Selection - Pick a "Good" Guy

For the second step, entrants are slimmed down into "winners", those who will get a change to buy the product. This can be done by simple random sample. Ideally, the population of entrants will be processed with some basic quality control and duplicate removal functions before this random selection occurs. Since it is not likely that 100% of the winners will actually convert their purchase, this process should allow for selecting multiple waves of winners. These waves would be sent out over time as the team monitors actual sales activity, sending another wave when the pace of purchase slows or stops. Would-be purchasers should receive a notification of their good fortune, some unique way to prove that they are winners, and instructions on next steps in the process. 

Crawl: Our resourceful intern downloads an export of the collected form information. Opening this export in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, they perform some basic data processing to remove duplicate email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. They may double check states or birthdays if needed. After validating the dataset, a process that likely takes somewhere form 30 minutes to a few hours, they can pull a sample using the RAND function in less than a minute, producing a cleaned list of winners. To make selecting easy, they could simply give every customer entry a ranking, going down the list in blocks of 100 (or some other quantity that makes sense) until the required number is achieved. Future waves could be pulled in order of this ranking. Now we need a unique code for each person, luckily they've already provided an email that has been de-duplicated. For this bare bones approach, we'll just assume that the customer is smart enough not to tell social media they got approved until AFTER they make their purchase. The last step of the selection process will be to send a big 'ole email out of the corporate mail account to the selected customers, one email to each wave with all of the addresses in the BCC field should be fine. Since the message can simply tell the winners to use their email receiving this communication as the key code, there's no need for unique text. Outlook limits you to 500 addresses so for a big drop they would have to copy and paste a few additional times. For an exclusive drop, multiples of five-hundred should get the job done quite quickly. Before sending those emails though, they should go talk with the web team about step #3 which involves setting up some promo/coupon codes...

Walk: The sequence of operations is mostly the same, but it should be possible to setup a targeting workflow in a CRM like Adobe Campaign to do these steps automatically. Basic data scrub, deduplication, and hashing of the email addresses into key codes (to obfuscate the simplicity of that operation) should be possible with built-in functionality. The mailing list functions can then send out personalized emails on a scheduled or manually triggered basis. Ideally, the marketing systems team would work with ecommerce or data engineering so that the unique key codes get automatically populated into the purchasing platform. Many web marketplaces have API functionality to do just that.

Run: In the fully baked scenario, all of the procedures discussed above are built into the site. Ideally, there would be some existing Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures in place, so it may not even be necessary to perform significant duplicate prevention steps.  Selected users are notified using their contact info on the account and can click unique web links to get to the sale page, no key codes required. This is also a great way for a platform like Reservebar to get new account sign-ups by making the lottery contingent upon signing up for a platform account. A true win-win!

Fulfillment - What we're all here for anyway

In all cases, making the purchase would utilize existing web store functionality. The difficult bits like validating addresses, ensuring compliance with local law, assessing stock levels, and calculating shipping are already built-in and accounted-for in the current website.

Crawl: That afternoon, the intern goes and meets with the promotions manager and a member of the web channel team. They mention that while this is a great idea, there is no way on the site currently to only allow specific people to make purchases. After another few minutes of conversation, someone asks "why not just set the price absurdly high with an absurdly generous promo code to knock the price back down to retail?". It's a simple fix albeit with the risk that someone does pull out the Bruce Wayne wallet and pay the producer a silly amount of money, but if that happens; great, I'm sure they'll do some even cooler drops in the future (the plan is to send out the "winners" in waves for a reason, no big deal if the odd rich person snags one at the charity auction price). The list of winner emails is then loaded to the marketplace platform as promo/coupon codes. Most modern platforms allow for almost a huge number of unique codes to be active and provide a way to upload them in bulk via CSV file (easy "save as" from where the analyst did their winner selection).  In the end, each "winner" gets their notification, goes to the checkout site, enters their email in the promo code box, the price drops from $99,000 to $250 and all is well. The site already supports quantity limits and there is no reason for anyone, human or bot, to try and overwhelm the site. After the drop sells out, the intern emails all who entered informing them that all bottles have been claimed and thanking them for their fandom. They could optionally include a small discount code on traditionally merchandise or a tour at the distillery. There's no reason to be mad, it's just luck after all!

Current Russel's Reserve Checkout

Walk: From their targeted email, the customer takes their unique promo code and enters it at checkout. The more sophisticated code creation in the targeting workflow prevents any issues with known influencer emails or adversaries trying to guess possible codes. Cheers governor! 

Run: The customer clicks a link to the marketplace or views the offer in their account details pane, clicking the offer puts a bottle of the good stuff in their cart ready for a speedy checkout. Shipping details and other information populate from the customer account, no problem! Under this approach, messing with promo codes or dynamic pricing is unnecessary, though the distributor could still choose to take advantage of that upside. 

Conclusion

With many different options for improving customer experience, all at reasonably low levels of effort, I am hopeful that more brands and their ecommerce partners invest in upgrading their limited edition sales process. There are always more problems to solve for than I've reflected in the straw man above, but that's why people get paid to work. Ultimately, companies like Uber, Amazon, and many more do this type of individualized web treatment every day; it's a solved issue.  When whiskey companies do such a good job getting that bourbon perfect, it's such a shame to see loving customers become disillusioned by a bad sale day experience.