Australian online retailer Beer Cartel has won the 2022 Make it Big Innovation Award from BigCommerce.

BigCommerce is an open SaaS ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brands. The Make it Big Awards spotlight and celebrate online retailers’ achievements on the BigCommerce platform across four categories for design, innovation, emerging brand and global strategy.

The innovation award recognises a brand that has solved technical ecommerce challenges with a creative use of the BigCommerce platform.

For Beer Cartel this involved the use of API (Application Programming Interface) connections to manage its inventory of 1000+ beers, as well as to enrich the product data of the beer it sells.

The judges said: “Beer Cartel has created a slick, fast, compelling customer experience, using the best of BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box capabilities that enable shoppers to find what they want easily, including filtering on product listings. In particular, though, the use of the BigCommerce APIs to expand the technical ecosystem, plus the inclusion of partners such as Lightspeed, make for a solid and scalable long-term solution.”

Richard Kelsey, co-founder of Beer Cartel, said it is surprisingly tough to manage the sale of alcohol products on most ecommerce platforms, but there are solutions.

“You’ve got beers being sold by the single, four pack and case of twenty-four. Out of the box ecommerce platforms aren’t designed to work with that complexity,” he said.

“Thankfully you can get creative and use data connections with other software to create strong inventory controls and that is what we’ve done. We then took these data connections a step further to link into Untappd, the world’s leading beer review site. They have thousands of independent reviews for beers on their platform which provide customers with unbiased opinions about the products they’re looking to buy.”

This is the second time Beer Cartel has won an innovation award from BigCommerce. Previously, the company won Best Marketing Innovation in the 2017 BigCommerce Innovation Awards, an annual contest recognizing the best in ecommerce innovation.

“These awards are real pinch yourself moments” said Kelsey, “when you think about the tens of thousands of websites that operate on BigCommerce, to be getting an award like this, not just once, but twice is very exciting.”

As part of Beer Cartel’s prize for the award the business will receive USD $4000 and branding in New York’s Times Square on the Nasdaq Tower. To learn more about the awards, visit: https://www.bigcommerce.com/make-it-big/awards/