Delicando
Shopify Plus Stores on a Single Platform
Products, automatically up to date in every store
Months for a complex multi-store migration
Delicando: Four Stores, One Platform for Spirits E-Commerce on Shopify Plus
Delicando, based in Weiz, Styria, is the premium gourmet portal for fine spirits and wine: over 10,000 products, including more than 2,000 whiskeys alone, as well as rum, gin, tequila, liqueurs, and a wide selection of wines. Sales are conducted almost exclusively online, serving both private customers in six countries and the foodservice and wholesale sectors, complemented by an on-site pickup store.
Professional in our work, personal in our collaboration
With four different stores, diverse customer groups, and markets, our project was anything but standard. Digit-One understood our requirements and worked with us to develop pragmatic solutions. But what we especially appreciate is the open and straightforward nature of our collaboration. Over the course of our intensive collaboration on this project, a mutual trust has developed that has now taken on a friendly character, and that is exactly what makes this partnership so special to us.
Gernot Glantschnig
Managing Director @ delicando GmbH
The Starting Point: A Store for Everyone Is a Store for No One
Delicando was selling through a proprietary e-commerce platform that had evolved over the years and was reaching its limits. The real challenge, however, lay in the business model: Three customer groups with completely different needs share the same product lineup. Retail customers want to browse, discover, and order conveniently. The foodservice sector places recurring orders in bulk and on its own terms. Wholesalers work with their own terms and their own processes. And because prices, product ranges, and availability cannot be publicly mixed across customer groups, it was clear: a single store that shows everything to everyone cannot accurately reflect this. Added to this is an industry full of special rules: deposits on containers, excise taxes, price labeling requirements up to the Omnibus Directive, and, in Switzerland, advertising regulations that set their own rules for spirits. It was precisely this complexity that was the challenge.
The Concept: Separate Stores, Shared Foundation
During a joint concept phase, we worked with delicando to develop and approve a requirements and functionality overview that remains the foundation of the project to this day: each feature includes a description, a proposed solution, and clear accountability. Based on this, we made the architectural decision that defines the project: not a single store with workarounds and compromises, but four separate Shopify Plus stores that share a common foundation. Retail customers, the food service industry, wholesale, and Switzerland each get the platform that’s right for them, plus their own development store for risk-free testing.
To ensure that four stores don’t mean four times the work, the theme is housed in a shared repository: a single codebase rolled out to all stores via a CI/CD pipeline. New features and fixes reach every instance without anyone having to make the same changes four times. We started with a purchased theme, which we migrated to a professional development setup with version control, feature branches, and code reviews, and then thoroughly customized to align with the delicando brand. A deliberately pragmatic approach: The budget went toward the features that make delicando stand out, not toward reinventing the standard.
Automation instead of double work
With 10,000 products, nobody maintains data twice. The systems connected on delicando’s side remain the leading source: the stores automatically pick up what they need and hand orders and customer data back. We designed that route together with delicando’s IT team and anchored it in the shop so that it runs reliably across ten thousand items and four instances.
The same foundation carries everything that would otherwise be manual work. An automated pipeline keeps the translations in four languages up to date and touches only what has changed that day. Legally required items such as the deposit are added to the cart automatically by a Shopify function we built, with a note on the tile and the product page. And the sales channels beyond the shop draw on the same data, from Google Shopping to price comparison sites.
B2C: Browse 10,000 Products
A product range of this size is both a blessing and a curse: whoever helps customers find their way around will make sales. That’s why the consumer-facing store relies on an AI-powered search with smart filters, curated category entry points with a clear hierarchy and breadcrumbs, and brand pages that we’ve built as standalone, SEO-optimized pages rather than letting them languish as mere manufacturer listings. Added to this are the features that turn visitors into repeat customers: a wish list, product reviews, “back in stock” notifications for sold-out rarities, and a customer account with invoice downloads and cancellation requests directly from the order overview.
We’ve refined the price display down to the last detail: base prices, tax information, and strikethrough prices – consistently displayed across the storefront, shopping cart, checkout, and confirmation email. For a product range involving deposits and excise taxes, this isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s the foundation for trust and legal certainty.
In terms of content, too, the shop is built for visibility: Category pages organize their SEO content in dedicated fields and only display sections when there’s actually content to show. The blog separates knowledge articles from recipes, and recipes automatically provide their structured data to Google. International visitors are seamlessly redirected to the appropriate market via IP detection, with a country and language selector that integrates seamlessly into the theme.
Optimized for Two Metrics: Conversion and Cart Value
From the very beginning, it was clear what the new store needed to be measured against: conversion rate and average order value. That is why optimization is not limited to a single feature, but involves many steps throughout the entire customer journey. The progress indicator in the shopping cart shows how close the next goal is and turns shipping thresholds into an incentive rather than a surprise. Gift cards and store credit are redeemed directly in the shopping cart flyout, without having to go through checkout: a solution built on the Storefront API that is not available off the shelf. Case and quantity advantages make the larger order attractive and feed directly into cart value. Password-free login removes the biggest hurdle for returning customers, while guest checkout does the same for new ones. And even those who do not buy today remain reachable: via the wish list, back-in-stock notifications and web push, which works even without an email address.
B2B: Two Stores That Function Like Tools
The food service and wholesale industries place orders differently, so they get their own stores. Without logging in, the B2B stores display neither prices nor terms: tiles, product pages and the search function hide everything sensitive, the product schema does not pass prices on to search engines, and instead of a shopping cart button, a registration prompt appears. Only after approval by delicando does the store open, and it does so individually for each customer.
Behind the scenes, the actual engine is at work: individual customer groups, terms and B2B-specific ordering logic are transferred automatically from the connected systems. What a customer sees, and on what terms they order, is decided by their profile, not by chance. Our work lies in making that separation hold everywhere: in tiles and product pages, in search, in the structured data for search engines and in the feeds going out. A store that only hides prices in the frontend is not a B2B store. So the rules sit where nobody can bypass them.
After that, day-to-day business is about speed: repeat orders without detours, shopping lists, documents in the customer account and an inquiry route for anything outside the standard range.
Discounts That Shopify Cannot Handle on Its Own
Every customer group discounts differently, and that is exactly where the Shopify standard stops: combinability there is handled by class, and finer rules cannot be modelled cleanly with it. Instead of bending that in the theme, we built the mechanics as custom Shopify Functions. They calculate server-side, apply the same way in every channel and cannot be bypassed. Exceptions included: legally regulated items such as the deposit stay free of discounts, as do specifically excluded products via a tagged collection. The same layer secures what is not negotiable. Anything that must not be sold into a given country is stopped by a validation in the checkout, not by customer service afterwards.
Switzerland: When the Law Shapes the Architecture
Spirits are subject to their own strict rules in Switzerland. A dedicated store logic was therefore developed for the Swiss market that takes these local regulatory requirements into account, instead of punching special cases into the international shop. That made the fourth store not a second project but another instance on the existing foundation: same codebase, its own configuration, its own market. This is exactly what a multi-store architecture is built for. What has to be different locally is different. Everything else stays in shared maintenance, and visitors from Switzerland land automatically where everything is right for them.
Migration Without a Clean Slate
An established online store has a history, and we couldn’t let that be lost. We migrated customer accounts without causing password chaos: Instead of forcing tens of thousands of customers to reset their passwords, the new store uses email codes for login. Keep your account, log in, and you’re done. Several years of order history were transferred so that regular customers could find their orders again and customer service wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Balances from the loyalty program were transferred as store credit, and gift cards retained their remaining value. And to ensure that the rankings built up over the years survived the move, every old URL was neatly redirected to its new home, including a curated migration of the most important blog content based on Search Console data.
The go-live itself was almost unspectacular, and that was exactly the plan: Following a soft launch of the ordering process, the big moment technically boiled down to a single DNS entry, with the entire team on standby.
The Result
Four stores that can be managed as a single system yet feel like separate shops for each customer group. Retail customers browse 10,000 products in four languages, the foodservice and wholesale sectors work with their own terms behind the login, and the Swiss market runs on its own instance in full compliance with local regulations. The platform is live and keeps moving: new legal requirements such as the electronic right of withdrawal land in the setup just like new Shopify building blocks. It keeps growing in live operation and is continuously developed further by us: exactly as intended.
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