This week we give you an important insight that might make a significant difference for your restaurant business.
The goal here is to show, with mathematical precision, the effect of the Top Picks feature on the InVine wine list.As you may know, the Top Picks are the first thing restaurant patrons see when browsing the InVine digital wine list. It features up to 10 wines on a beautiful scrolling animation, which we have named “bottle scroll”, as pictured to the left, and also featured in our Wine list Demo Video.
Most patrons usually browse the traditional list after going through the Top Picks, however, a few still end up choosing what they saw first. We wanted to find out the actual impact that this feature has on the final choice, so the Lab Team joined forces with some of the restaurants that have been with us since the beginning.
This is what the Lab Team did:
- We connected our wine management platform and the restaurant’s POS systems;
- We replaced the currently featured selection to measure sales over 3 weeks with a group of wines that:
- Was diversified enough so that results were applicable across price ranges and wine types;
- Included wines with a steady flow of sales, to remove effect of seasonality and to make sure these wines would be selected by the regular customer type;
- Included one wine (“Red High-End 2”) that was not being sold, to see if there was potential to trigger sales of “discovery wines”;
- Did not include wines that had been recently featured on the Top Picks menu.
- Finally, we restored the initial Top Picks selection and measured sales over 3 weeks once again, to make sure results were still comparable.
Results from the experiment
We are not allowed to show total wine sales, but as a reference point, unit sales during each of the 3 week periods were around 300 bottles, with sales of featured wines representing about 7% of total sales. Prices in USD.
The first and most important result is that featuring wines on the Top Picks menu can increase sales of those wines by 65% (with an impressive 95% confidence). It’s also interesting that we can see that, with the exception of one single wine, this increase was present across all types of wines, but most importantly price ranges.
Another interesting result is that “Red High-End 2”, which was not being sold before and after the experiment, was sold during the experiment, leading us to believe that restaurant patrons can accept less known, or “discovery wines” as a suggestion.
With the disclaimer that we will do this test again, with more data, the results are quite explicit on how the Top Picks feature is more than just a way to provide valuable advice to the restaurant’s patrons, it is also a tool for restaurants to manage sales and stock of specific wines, in any price range.
We’ll come back to this subject later on when we analyze the specific behavior of customers, after they browsed the suggested wines.