Auction and whisky icons on a blue background

Creating a Global Marketplace for Rare Spirits

Whisky Auctioneer Logo

Whisky Auctioneer serves a global audience through monthly auctions featuring old, rare, and collectible whiskies and spirits. Their platform connects sellers and buyers worldwide, with over 50,000 customers and a community that placed over 2.2 million bids across more than 115,000 lots in 2022 alone.

Their business serves collectors who purchase for investment purposes and enthusiasts who appreciate fine spirits. As a result, their website has to support massive auctions and storage subscriptions, which require sophisticated solutions for bidding, inventory management, checkout, fulfillment, and reporting.

Centarro assisted Whiskey Auctioneer in migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11, implementing an e-commerce architecture that could meet the platform’s unique requirements while scaling to support high-traffic auctions.

Project highlights

Seamless platform migration

Successfully migrated from Drupal 7 to 11 while preserving all historical order and customer data.

Custom storage & subscription system

Built a complete automated storage platform managing thousands of bottles across UK and EU warehouses with intelligent subscription billing.

Bi-directional commerce architecture

Created unified checkout systems serving both buyers and sellers with distinct workflows, payment processing, and commission structures.

Advanced search & filtering

Developed a sophisticated search for a massive index of bottles with filtering by region, age, distillery, and collector preferences.

Comprehensive reporting suite

Built 20+ custom reports for customs compliance, taxes, business analytics, seller payments, and international shipping requirements.

High-performance auctions

Progressively decoupled the bidding system with advanced caching to handle thousands of concurrent users during auction endings.

Whisky Auctioneer screen shot 1

Connecting buyers and sellers

Whisky Auctioneer is a marketplace serving both buyers and sellers, each requiring unique features. Since buyers can become sellers and vice versa, users are not locked into a single role, but have the tools available depending on their immediate needs.

Sellers can:

  • Submit lots for verification and track progress
  • Set reserve prices
  • Calculate revenue and fees
  • Easy resubmission of unsold or stored lots
     

Buyers can:

  • Bid on and track auctions
  • Customize their notification
  • Choose to ship or store their winnings
     

Monetizing collection storage

Many buyers purchase bottles for investment rather than consumption. Some buyers want to hold a lot temporarily before it is shipped. We built a storage subscription system that users can choose during checkout or that automatically activates for winning lots that aren’t collected.

The recurring billing supports multiple warehouses, and users can manage their collections through the website’s dashboard.

Streamlining global compliance

The platform required extensive reporting for business operations, customs, and government compliance. Drupal Commerce’s architecture enables the creation of unlimited custom reports to meet any requirement. Regular reports can be run for export documentation, storage and shipping manifests, auction performance, seller revenue calculations, taxes based on country of origin, and more.

To comply with international trade regulations, tariffs can be calculated during checkout based on the country of origin of the lot, not just the shipping location.

Screenshots of Whisky Auctioneer showcasing bottles

Easy and efficient bottle discovery

With 10,000+ lots per monthly auction, Whisky Auctioneer’s search index is massive. We optimized real-time search performance, giving users a snappy response as they filter by region, distillery, age, and other collector preferences.

"Centarro was flexible throughout the entire project, adapting as our needs and timelines shifted. They took the time to understand the complexity of our business and delivered solutions that worked for our very specific use cases. We’re delighted that they’ve delivered a platform that supports our unique model and helps maintain our position as the global market leader to buy and sell rare spirits at auction."

Alex McClune, Director of IT

Enterprise-scale auction performance

To eliminate bottlenecks, we progressively decoupled user-related interactions like the real-time bidding interface, instant notifications, transferring a lot to a cart, and more. This solution handles thousands of concurrent bidders without performance degradation.

We also implemented a refined caching strategy, optimized the database, and moved heavy operations to background workers.

The result: no downtime since launch and no slowdowns that plagued the previous architecture.

Screenshots showing the front pages of Whisky Auctioneer, Rum Auctioneer, and Wine Auctioneer

Multi-brand and multi-store

The same platform also powers Wine Auctioneer and Rum Auctioneer. Each brand’s website also supports two distinct stores (UK and EU) with different:

  • Fee structures
  • Tax calculations
  • Shipping options
  • Compliance requirements

Salesforce integration

All data is synced with Salesforce for business intelligence and customer management purposes. Transaction history and order management are tracked across all three websites (whiskey, wine, and rum). Automated workflows are triggered based on auction activities.

Whisky Auctioneer homepage at an angle

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