Booze Carriage was an alcohol delivery company started in Manhattan in 2012. Experience with a previous client in the wine delivery space gave us the insight we needed to solve their unique challenges.
You weren't able to deliver alcohol by mail back then. But being based in Manhattan gave Booze Carriage an advantage - local delivery. There were no rules against having couriers and local delivery drivers delivering alcohol to your door. Booze carriage set themselves up as a marketing company and devised a way to circumvent the delivery rules of the time.
The method that allowed Booze Carriage to deliver to the Manhattan area was to set up ‘territories’ - set up via Zip Code. Each ‘partner’ was a liquor store in that particular zip code.
We set up separate Magento Marketplaces for each partner and used a Spreedly integration, which is a payments orchestration platform.
Every liquor store was set up as a vendor and every vendor would be set up in Spreedly as well. When you would come to the site, it would ask you for your zip. You would type in your zip code and it would show you the inventory for a specific liquor store. You could add everything to your cart and you could check out.
When entering your Zip code, you'd be connected to that partner's marketplace, with their own inventory and checkout being shown. This was all transparent to the customer, and using Zip Codes as territories made certain that customers couldnt order from a partner from another zip code.
At check out, it would take your payment and since every vendor was set up in Spreedly, it was only one integration for us, but they could have 30 or 50 or 150 liquor stores each with their own payment gateway. When you shopped and paid for your product one of the caveats was you could only shop at one store at a time.
The order was placed via an automated fax via email to the partner. The partner would then fulfill the order. The payment would go directly to the liquor store partner. This was transparent to the consumer and their credit card information would show as ‘Booze Carriage’.
Working with Booze Carriage, we were able to connect users to local liquor stores via digital channels with a multi-vendor platform that allowed the company to deliver alcohol to the Manhattan area.
Booze Carriage was acquired in March 2015 by Minibar Delivery, another New York-based based tech company that provides on-demand access to wine, liquor and beer.
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