A Heritage Wine Merchant, Reimagined for Modern Commerce.
Making a specialist wine range easier to discover, explore and buy.
Founded in 1954, Direct Wine Shipments is Belfast’s oldest independent wine merchant, with a reputation built over three generations for expertise, quality and long-standing relationships with producers.
RockPaw was tasked with rethinking how that heritage, specialist knowledge and extensive product range could translate into a more intuitive digital experience. The result is a mobile-first e-commerce platform designed around how people actually shop — giving customers multiple ways to discover wine while connecting the online experience seamlessly with the systems that power DWS behind the scenes.
- Direct Wine Shipments
- Wine Retail & E-commerce
- Belfast, Northern Ireland
- 2026
A complex range needed a simpler way in.
Wine is not a product category people shop in one predictable way. Some customers know exactly what they want. Others begin with a colour, country, region, producer, price point or occasion. Some want to browse. Others want to search immediately.
The challenge was to create a digital experience that could accommodate all of those behaviours without making a large specialist range feel complicated or intimidating — while integrating with DWS’s existing retail operation, stock-management systems, point of sale and order-processing infrastructure.
The objective was clear: preserve the expertise, remove the friction.
Designed around how people actually shop.
Rather than creating one prescribed route through the range, RockPaw designed multiple ways into the buying journey. The platform allows customers to search directly, browse visually, explore the complete range, narrow products dynamically or move through clearly structured navigation.
Everything was designed mobile-first, ensuring that search, filtering, navigation and purchasing remain straightforward on the device customers increasingly use to browse and buy.
Start anywhere.
A central principle of the new experience is that customers should not have to understand DWS’s internal product structure before they can begin shopping.
Search immediately
A fast, dynamic top-level search gives customers a rapid route directly into the product catalogue.
Browse by style
Clear top-level style buttons provide immediate access to White, Red, Rosé and Sparkling.
Shop the complete range
Dynamic filtering across style, country, region, sub-region, producer and price.
Navigate traditionally
Structured routes through the range, supported by large menu panels and footer navigation.
The result is not one customer journey. It is a system that lets customers choose the journey that makes most sense to them.
Built from the smallest screen up.
The new DWS platform was designed mobile-first rather than treating mobile as a reduced version of a desktop website. Search, product discovery, filters, navigation, product information and purchase journeys were considered specifically around touch interaction and smaller screens.
This was particularly important for a specialist range where customers may move repeatedly between browsing, filtering, comparing and viewing individual products.
Find faster.
Browse deeper.
Buy more easily.
More than a shop window.
The homepage was structured as a series of clear, distinct routes into different parts of the DWS experience. Rather than relying on a single promotional banner or product grid, it introduces customers to a wider range of reasons to engage with the business.
Dedicated sections profile events, latest wines, gift vouchers and featured selections, alongside primary shopping journeys and discovery tools — allowing the homepage to function as both an e-commerce entry point and an editorial platform for the wider DWS business.
Less searching. More discovering.
Wine retail creates an unusual UX challenge. Too little structure makes a large range difficult to navigate. Too much structure can make shopping feel technical and restrictive.
RockPaw’s approach was to combine direct search, visual entry points and dynamic filtering so that knowledgeable customers can narrow the range precisely while less experienced buyers can continue exploring naturally. The aim was not simply to help people find a known bottle — it was to make discovery itself easier.
Making gifting more flexible.
RockPaw also integrated a powerful new gift-card platform designed to make purchasing and redemption considerably more fluid. Customers can choose their own gift value, rather than being restricted to a small set of predetermined denominations, and gift-card balances can be used progressively rather than requiring the complete value to be redeemed in a single transaction.
Most importantly, the system supports redemption across both the website and the physical store — turning the gift card from a simple online voucher into a genuinely flexible retail product.
What happens behind the website matters just as much.
One of the more technically demanding parts of the project sat largely out of sight of the customer. DWS uses CIN7 Omni for stock management and point-of-sale operations, so the new e-commerce platform needed to integrate with that existing infrastructure rather than operate as an isolated sales channel.
RockPaw and the development team had to map the online product and order environment to the DWS operational systems, enabling live stock information and order processing to move between the platforms — significantly more than a conventional WooCommerce implementation. The objective was to make the complexity invisible to the customer.
Seamless at the front.
Connected behind the scenes.
The customer sees one experience. Behind it sits a connected retail ecosystem.
- Live stock availability
- Online order processing
- Retail stock management
- Point-of-sale integration
- Product synchronisation
- Operational continuity between online and physical retail
For customers, the benefit is simple: greater confidence that what they see online reflects what DWS can actually supply. For the business, it creates a more connected approach to managing sales across channels.
Modern commerce. Independent character.
DWS has nearly three-quarters of a century of history, but the new platform could not feel nostalgic or traditional. The design balances the character and credibility of an established independent merchant with a cleaner, more contemporary digital experience.
Product photography, labels, producer stories, editorial content and heritage are allowed to provide much of the personality, while the UI remains clear and restrained. The intention was never to make DWS look like a generic national wine retailer — it was to make a distinctive independent merchant feel completely at home in modern e-commerce.
Expertise is part of the product.
The value of DWS extends well beyond the bottles it sells. Its knowledge of producers, regions, vintages and styles has been built over generations. The new website therefore gives content, events, education, producer stories and editorial material a meaningful role within the commercial experience.
They are not treated as an unrelated blog. They help customers discover, understand and ultimately choose wine with greater confidence.
Connecting digital discovery with real-world experience.
Events and tastings are an important part of the DWS relationship with its customers. The new platform gives them stronger visibility within the main digital experience, helping customers move naturally between online browsing and real-world engagement.
This creates a broader relationship than simply: visit → product → checkout.
Clearer for customers. More connected for the business.
The new platform gives customers far greater flexibility in how they explore DWS. They can search immediately, browse by style, filter a large specialist range, navigate through structured categories or discover new wines through curated content and homepage features. The mobile-first approach makes those journeys easier to use wherever the customer begins them.
The improvements extend beyond the interface. Gift-card integration creates a more flexible connection between online and in-store retail, while the integration with DWS’s stock-management and POS infrastructure allows e-commerce to operate as part of the wider business rather than as a separate channel.
The result is a platform designed not simply to sell wine online, but to support how Direct Wine Shipments now sells, communicates and builds relationships with customers across its business.
- Digital Strategy
- UX/UI Design
- Mobile-first Design
- E-commerce Strategy
- Information Architecture
- Product Discovery & Search
- WooCommerce Development
- Gift Card Integration
- POS & Stock Integration
- Systems Mapping
- Content Strategy
- Digital Marketing
- Platform Integration
- Ongoing Digital Support
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