In the next few months, coffee behemoth Vittoria will relaunch a far more e-commerce-friendly website, allowing customers to order its blends from the comfort of their own home. The relaunch comes after Vittoria realised that its current website – currently viewed as an educational tool, rather than somewhere to transact – was no longer up to snuff. “[Our current website] is very content-rich, which is relevant and important, but the primary reason most people are visiting your
g your website these days is to make a transaction,” Vittoria’s managing director of food and beverage Rolando Schirato told Inside Retail.
“We were amateurs in e-commerce, to be fair… we’ve had to change the whole philosophy of the website. We had to create a shopping experience, and make it as convenient as we could for the customer from the moment they landed on the site.”
According to Schirato, the light-bulb moment came when Vittoria’s food service clients were largely shut down during the Covid-19 crisis – but coffee consumption did not decrease.
Instead, people who normally bought Vittoria coffee at cafes and restaurants were now making it at home, Schirato explained.
“A lot of our customers who were used to enjoying our coffee in different contexts were now drinking from home, so we saw a lot of growth in our retail partners’ online businesses, as well as our own,” he said.
“We looked at a range of propositions for online customers and we introduced things like subscriptions to our website, which has been really successful.
“[With the new website], it’s all about making it as seamless an experience as possible for customers who want to transact with us, but also learn about what we do or what they’re purchasing, in the most efficient way possible.”
Hyper-caffeinated retail
One of the biggest mental shifts Vittoria has made is realising that online retail never stops.
“It’s live every day, all day, and it’s changing. The strategy isn’t just to get a product somewhere, run a promotional campaign, and then that’s it,” said Schirato.
“The online environment is constantly changing, and what worked yesterday might not work today. It’s living and breathing, and you really need to set your business up to be able to support that.
“For example, we run the logistics across most of our business, but for e-commerce, we use partners that specialise in direct-to-consumer fulfilment. There have been a lot of lessons [already], and I imagine there’ll be more to come.”
Beyond the new website, Vittoria is also planning an expansion into several new categories of coffee, following its launch into instant coffee, as well as a blend that was made to specifically work with plant-based milk, earlier this year.
“At the end of the day, our aim is to make sure we are providing customers with the best quality coffee in the format in which they like to enjoy it. So if we’re not available in all the different sub-categories of coffee, then we’re not really serving our customers to the full potential,” said Schirato.
