Allocate.Wine — a private multi-vendor wine allocation marketplace connecting French wineries (Producers) with a vetted collector base in Asia. The platform serves a niche audience of high-value collectors and professional buyers, operating on invitation-only events rather than open e-commerce — they came to Gabsoft to build a reliable, auditable allocation workflow and admin tooling to run large, recurring private sales.
Challenge
Allocate.Wine needed to transform a manual, spreadsheet-driven allocation process into a scalable, auditable platform — fast.
They required:
- A way to run timed "allocation events" where collectors request products but only receive a finalized offer after an allocation step.
- Strong admin control — the business model depends on manual review and adjustments rather than fully automated checkout.
- Offline payment workflow — no public payment gateway; payments are bank transfers that must be tracked and reconciled in-system. How could the team run high-frequency, high-value allocation events with manual overrides — without losing control, traceability, or speed? How could they launch a robust MVP quickly to validate revenue potential? Constraints: 3‑month MVP timeline, two-week sprints, initial use of an Opencart MultiMerch prototype prior to a full rebuild, and workflows that required per-client manual audit.
Solution
We partnered closely with Allocate.Wine — product owners, producers, and operations — to deliver an event-driven marketplace tailored to allocation sales. We validated the model with a rapid MVP and then rebuilt for scale.
Approach — two-phase delivery:
- Rapid MVP (3 months, 2-week sprints) — prototype with MultiMerch (OpenCart) to validate business workflows and event-driven allocation UX.
- Production rebuild (12 months) — full refactor into a modern stack for reliability, performance, and developer velocity.
Key architecture and flow — event-first, admin-centric:
- Event orchestration layer — lifecycle dates (start, request deadline, allocation, confirmation, payment deadline)
- Request subsystem — collectors submit prioritized request carts (not orders)
- Allocation engine — runs an optimal/fair allocation proposal then surfaces it for admin review
- Admin review loop — per-collector offer editing, recommended products, min/max bounds, and offer publication
- Order generation and offline payment — confirmed offers convert to orders; deposits are logged manually against bank transfers
- Audit & transactions — all admin actions and payments tracked in system for compliance
Results
Allocate.Wine replaced a manual, spreadsheet-driven allocation process with an auditable, event-driven platform—enabling high-value private sales at scale while keeping full admin control over offers, allocation, and offline bank-transfer reconciliation.
