Once the team was in place and budgets were back on track, Lebamoff could squarely focus on the IT efforts needed to turn the online beverage venture into a dot-com success story. But carving out a new channel for a traditional corner-store industry wasn't easy. Lebamoff says one of the biggest challenges was working in an industry that is technologically stuck in the 1970s and has no standard way of exchanging information. We deal with over 120 vendors in five states. They each have archaic data feeds, and their internal ordering and inventory warehouse systems are 20 years old.
Laws controlling the distribution of alcohol vary from state to state.
Some states, for example, still forbid the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Lebamoff adds that an online retailer can also provide a better deal because it skirts geographic pricing regulations. This allows beverage orders to reach customers in two to three days. They configured the system to operate in five different states, with products and prices varying by each state. The work also involved mapping into the business processes' complicated promotional and tax logic for each state.