How Boost AI helped Wines Direct deliver a 3.4% conversion rate and nearly €450k in revenue

Ellie Ho

June 20, 2025

•

5 min read

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In the world of wine, choice is a beautiful thing, until it becomes overwhelming. At Wines Direct, a family-run business in Ireland with decades of wine expertise, helping customers find “a wine they love” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a mission.

But with a growing product catalog, multiple use cases (from gifts to food pairings), and a diverse audience, the team faced a challenge: how to make that discovery experience feel simple, elegant, and personalized.
That’s where Boost AI Search & Discovery came in.

In just one year, Boost helped Wines Direct transform complexity into clarity, improving search accuracy, automating merchandising, and delivering personalized recommendations at scale.

By implementing AI-powered search, intelligent synonym recognition, and dynamic product recommendations, they achieved powerful results:

Total revenue climbed to €447,998.53
Average Order Value (AOV) reached €102.66
Conversion rates held steady at 3.4% across the year

Let’s break down what happened and how your store can do the same.

Why was finding the right wine so hard?

Wines Direct was built on the belief that discovering wine should be intuitive and enjoyable. But as their online store expanded, with hundreds of wines spanning different styles, regions, and price points, so did the complexity of helping each customer find the right bottle.

Translating the personalised, human-led experience of a sommelier into a digital environment was no small feat, and a common problem for online drinks retailers. Online, there’s no friendly expert to read your taste preferences or suggest a perfect pairing. The team needed a way to bring that level of understanding into the eCommerce journey.

The core challenge? Product discovery. Customers weren’t aimlessly browsing - they were searching with specific intent. However, the site’s existing tools were unable to understand that intent, resulting in friction, frustration, and missed opportunities.

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Challenge #1: Search That Didn’t Understand How People Shop

Traditional keyword-based search struggled with the language of wine. A customer looking for a ‘light red’ or ‘crisp white’ might never see a match unless those exact words appeared in the product copy.

Without AI-powered semantic search, intent was lost, and so were conversions, along with a frustrating user experience that directly contradicted Wines Direct’s core mission: making wine discovery easy and enjoyable.

Challenge #2: Filtering That Didn't Match Shopper Intent

Wine is deeply personal. Shoppers often want to filter by grape, region, food pairing, or even sustainability values. However, the site’s filtering tools weren’t designed to accommodate that level of nuance.

With wines from over a dozen countries and countless regions, grapes, and styles, effective filtering isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Without dynamic filtering, customers struggled to cut through the complexity, making it harder to connect each shopper with the wine that truly matched their needs.

Challenge #3: Merchandising That Couldn’t Keep Pace

Spotlighting seasonal wines, promoting key producers, or prioritising high-margin products required constant manual effort. As the catalog grew, so did the workload. The team needed automated, performance-based merchandising to keep the storefront optimised without relying on guesswork or daily updates.

“Finding a wine you love isn’t always easy; the burden of choice can be too cumbersome. Our mission is to make it easy for the Wines Direct customer to enjoy good wines and to drink better,” says Mihaela, eCommerce and Data Specialist at Wines Direct.

How Boost AI Helped Wines Direct Simplify Discovery and Grow Revenue

The Wines Direct team knew they needed more than a basic search tool. They were looking for a product discovery solution that could understand how people really shop for wine, by flavour, feeling, or occasion, not just keywords.

After exploring several options, they chose Boost for its powerful combination of performance, flexibility, and seamless Shopify integration.

“We chose Boost AI Search & Discovery because it offered the best combination of performance, flexibility, and user experience for our store,” Mihaela notes. “It had a good cost and the support was great.”

While initially having reservations that a powerful new tool might be hard to use or install, the team at Boost quickly put those fears to rest. The Boost team, with a dedicated Account Manager, provided significant assistance with the installation. Every time a problem or concern arises, it is handled promptly.

Wines Direct implemented a suite of Boost features designed to tackle their specific challenges head-on.

Smarter Search That Understands Intent

The first major upgrade was to Wines Direct’s search functionality. Boost’s AI-powered semantic search uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what shoppers mean, not just what they type. It interprets intent, corrects typos, and delivers results that feel tailored, not technical.

A key part of this is Boost’s AI Synonym feature. The platform automatically detects and understands related terms, ensuring customers always find what they’re looking for, even if they use different words. Whether a shopper types ‘gift voucher,’ ‘fish wine’ or ‘light red,’ Boost connects them to the right product, even if the exact term doesn’t appear in the product data.

Examples of AI Synonym Matching in Action:

fish → trout, aquarium
gift voucher → gift card, gift cards
crisp white → Sauvignon Blanc
light red → Pinot Noir
bubbly → Sparkling Wine
wine for seafood → Albariño

This intelligence means a customer searching for a ‘gift voucher’ is instantly directed to the correct ‘gift card’ page, eliminating a potential dead end and lost sale. This ability to understand context is crucial for a store where discovery is part of the experience.

The search results for ‘voucher’ and ‘gift card’ are interwoven thanks to AI-recognized synonyms.

Automated Merchandising That Adapts in Real Time

To solve the challenge of manual merchandising, Wines Direct enabled Boost’s Product Performance Ranking. This feature utilizes AI to automatically analyze real-time performance data, including click-through rates, conversions, and views, to optimize product visibility.

It ensures that bestsellers, trending items, and high-margin products are always given visibility, while lower-performing items don’t crowd the space.

No more manual reshuffling of collections. Boost’s dynamic merchandising keeps the storefront optimized while freeing up the Wines Direct team to focus on growth, content, and strategic planning.

Personalised Product Recommendations That Increase AOV

To further enhance the discovery journey and increase average order value, Wines Direct implemented Boost’s AI-related items recommendation engine. This feature displays smart product bundles and suggestions on the Instant Search Widget, Search Results Page, and Product Pages.

A product bundle curated by AI is displayed on the instant search dropdown of the Wines Direct online store.

The AI analyzes shopper behavior and product data to surface highly relevant suggestions. For example, a customer viewing a bottle of Italian Valpolicella might be shown a similar Ripasso style or another top-rated wine from the same producer. These intelligent cross-sells encourage customers to explore more of the catalog and add additional items to their cart, directly contributing to a higher AOV.

Because the bundles are powered by AI, they are dynamic. They appear based on a shopper's search terms, ensuring the recommendations are always timely, personalized, and relevant to their current journey.

Great to know:

Intuitive navigation with dynamic filtering makes discovery easier

Beyond the search bar, Wines Direct understood that the journey of discovery often begins without a specific bottle in mind. Sometimes they’re shopping for dinner parties, birthday gifts, or a great food pairing.

Boost’s smart filtering system provided them with a way to browse by the criteria that matter most, without requiring expert-level knowledge. The feature provided an intuitive and powerful way for shoppers to navigate the extensive collection based on the criteria that mattered most to them, including country, region, price, percentage sale, and style. Filters are dynamically updated based on product data and customer input, helping people refine their choices with confidence.

“The filtering options were the most useful for us, it’s a key part of how we make the site more shoppable.” - Mihaela, Wines Direct’s eCommerce and Data Specialist.

By empowering customers to shop according to their own needs and preferences, Boost’s filtering directly delivers on the Wines Direct promise to make finding the right wine "Always Easy."

How guided, efficient, and optimized discovery pays off

By investing in a smarter product discovery experience, Wines Direct cultivated incredible growth. The data* from one year of using Boost speaks for itself.

Metric	Value
🛒 Average Order Value (AOV)	€102.66
🖥️ Average Conversion Rate	3.41%
📦 Average Orders Per Month	344
👥 Revenue Per Visitor	€108.41
💰 Total Revenue (12 Months)	€447,998.53

*Data from April 2024 to April 2025, measured by Boost’s Analytics.

Grow your AOV with Boost

Wines Direct set out to solve a simple, human problem: making the vast world of wine accessible and enjoyable for everyone. They succeeded by choosing a technology partner that understood their mission.

By implementing Boost AI Search & Discovery, they replaced friction with a frictionless journey, transforming their site from a simple catalog into an intelligent, responsive, and personalized sommelier.

If you're a growing brand looking to simplify discovery, surface the right products at the right time, and increase revenue per session, you don’t need to reinvent your store. You just need smarter tools.

Are you ready to uncork your store's true potential?

Book a demo with our team to see how Boost AI Search & Discovery can help you increase conversions, boost AOV, and create a shopping experience your customers will love.

FAQs

1. What specific Boost features did Wines Direct use?
They used AI-powered semantic search, advanced filtering, product performance ranking, and AI-based product bundles across their search and product pages. These features worked together to guide shoppers and increase both conversion and average order size.

2. How long did it take to get up and running?
Thanks to Boost’s seamless Shopify integration and responsive support team, setup was fast and frictionless. The Wines Direct team received full assistance with installation and ongoing adjustments.

3. Can I achieve the same results if I’m not in the wine or gift retail industry?
Absolutely. Boost works across various industries, including fashion, home goods, beauty, and wellness. Any store with 500+ SKUs and customers who need help finding the right product will benefit from smarter product discovery.

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Ellie Ho

•

Content Marketing Specialist

June 20, 2025

•

5 min read

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How Boost AI helped Wines Direct deliver a 3.4% conversion rate and nearly €450k in revenue

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