Mark Aylwin’s pioneering online drinks wholesaler is developing a community forum to improve customer loyalty.

When Blueheath was started six years ago, it was the first completely internet-based wholesaler.

We use our website to let retailers place orders and to update different product categories we are offering.

But more than that, we intend it to be an online one-stop shop for the independent retailer. So we’re looking at how we can provide more information to retailers and develop an online community.

Our technology is proprietary: we built it completely in-house. And it’s because of all the development work done in the early days that we’re in the position we are today.

Our forecasting engine allows us to carry minimal stock and we pass on savings to suppliers. Our website is easy to update and user-friendly.

And most of our processes are automated – such as the uploading of orders from our 3,000-plus retailers.

All we have to put in are price changes and updates to product information such as new product lines, which in our business change weekly. Our buyers feed in the information and the IT team applies it.

The ethos behind the site is to make it as easy as possible for our retailers, so they spend more time at our store.

It’s a bit like Tesco.com – you can see your entire order history and we offer suggestions about things you might want to buy. You can also place orders at your leisure and we will deliver them to you, rather than being told when you have to order.

One retailer I was speaking to recently did all their ordering overnight and told me it was a big advantage over the traditional wholesalers – it’s one of the primary reasons retailers come to us.

Another thing we designed in from the beginning was the ability to integrate other operations and other people’s technology into ours.

We’ve recently taken over two businesses and we’re in the process of integrating them now. That’s often a tough IT problem, so it was very important to prepare for it early on.

Once that integration is sorted, I’d like to look at providing more information for our retailers. We already do a lot – for example we provide “planograms”, with information on the suggested layout of products within stores.

And we work closely with suppliers on that – we have “category captains” who help us. For biscuits, for example, it’s United Biscuits.

But we also think we can provide more information of the sort that’s only currently available to major store chains.

If you look at how Amazon has developed, where you look up a book and you get so much information around it, we’d like to do something like that.

We also want to develop the community side of it, with retailers providing information and advice for other retailers. In our industry that’s really relevant. They set a lot of stock by what others are doing.

We already share a lot of information with suppliers: we download data on what people are ordering into a historical database and produce reports on how well particular lines are performing.

The suppliers have far more resources than we have to look at things like this, and they do quite a bit of analysis on the data we send them.

When we first developed our website, nothing was available to do what we wanted “off the shelf”, so we really had to build it ourselves.

We spent around £1.2m in terms of IT staff – but this is incredibly good value for a system of this complexity and we are constantly developing it. Most of the costs were in employee time.

We have a four-strong IT department led by our chief technology officer, who joined us from Safeway.

Some of our bigger competitors are now waking up to what we’ve done and starting to do it, but none are as advanced as us. It was our interface that attracted our retailer customers in the first place and it continues to be our biggest selling point.

Related tags: suppliers, stock control, in-house development, online community, forum, technology in business, online business, customer loyalty,