FineBar

The client

FineBar (finebar.ro) is an online shop specialised in fine drinks: whisky, cognac and brandy, rum, vodka, gin, tequila, champagne and sparkling wines, still wines, aperitifs and digestifs. The site is operated by Gedis Beverages SRL, which presents itself as an authorised importer and distributor of spirits, active on the market since 2013, with Finebar registered as its own trademark with OSIM, the Romanian State Office for Inventions and Trademarks. The catalogue covers more than 50 international brands, among them Johnnie Walker, Macallan, Glenfiddich, Chivas, Hennessy, Rémy Martin, Bacardi, Don Papa, Diplomático, Absolut, Grey Goose and Dom Pérignon, and the company publicly commits to fast delivery (over 90% of orders shipped the same working day) and its own distribution fleet across the Bucharest to Ploiești area.

The market for fine spirits sold online in Romania has a quirk that matters for any conversation about margin: the product is comparable one to one. A bottle of Macallan 12 is identical wherever you buy it, and a shopper can check that in seconds on a price comparison site. Shops compete on price, availability and delivery speed, not on product uniqueness. In a market that transparent, the usual commercial reflex is a blanket price cut applied across the whole catalogue, so you stay competitive everywhere. That reflex is exactly what erodes margin indiscriminately.

The challenge

FineBar was working with a commercial margin of 15-20%, workable, but squeezed by two factors feeding each other. First: discount campaigns treated the catalogue as a single block, with the discount applied horizontally, whether or not a given product needed a price incentive to sell or would have sold anyway at full price. Second: a shop with hundreds of drink SKUs has wildly different sales cycles, some products turn over constantly, others sit in stock for months, but the promotion budget and the discount policy drew no distinction. The practical result: capital tied up in slow moving stock, warehouse space taken by hard to sell products, and an average margin eroded by discounts given where they were not needed.

The two problems are not independent. A bottle that sits on the shelf for six months does not just fail to generate margin, it also occupies the space and the capital that could support a fast turning product, and sooner or later it gets sold at a clearance discount anyway, this time compulsory rather than optional. Every leu of ad budget spent “equally” on a dead SKU and on one with real demand is a leu that would have produced more if moved to where the market was actually buying.

What we did

The starting point was segmenting the catalogue by actual turnover speed, not by product category or nominal margin, but by how quickly a bottle bought into stock turns into a bottle sold. That segmentation fed two decisions, one about paid media and one about discount policy, which work together.

Catalogue campaigns (the ones bidding directly from the product feed, Shopping and Performance Max) were reallocated toward products with a short shelf cycle, not toward the hard to sell ones. The mechanism is simple but counterintuitive for anyone who thinks of ad budget as a cost spread evenly across the catalogue: a fast turning product sold at full price generates full margin and frees capital quickly for restocking; a product that sits in stock consumes capital and space without producing anything, and the ad budget spent on it does not automatically make it sell better, it just postpones the right decision. By moving money out of promoting hard to sell products and into ones with steady demand, the shop does not necessarily sell more bottles overall, it sells a better mix, with more of them at full price.

Discount campaigns were optimised on the same logic, from the opposite direction: discounts were targeted selectively, at the stock that genuinely needed a price incentive to move, rather than applied horizontally across the catalogue “so we stay competitive everywhere”. A product that sells at full price anyway does not need a discount, and a discount applied there is margin thrown away. The effect of this reallocation is not a change in the list price a customer sees, it is a change in the sales mix: more transactions closing at full price, discounts concentrated only where they actually recovered stuck stock. The weighted average margin across the whole catalogue rises through exactly that mechanism, not because anything got more expensive, but because the discount is no longer handed out where it was not needed.

The remaining services support that mechanism directly. The eCommerce platform has to pass stock and price for each SKU into the product feed correctly and in real time, otherwise catalogue campaigns bid on stale information and the money goes on out of stock products or outdated prices. SEO brings steady organic traffic to exactly the categories with real demand, reducing total dependence on paid budget to sustain fast turnover. Site maintenance ensures the stock, price and feed sync does not break at peak moments (holidays, seasonal campaigns), when a sync error costs margin and reputation directly.

Results

Over the course of the engagement, FineBar reported:

• Commercial margin: up from 15-20% to 20-25%.
• Sales: up from 450,000-500,000 lei/month to 600,000-650,000 lei/month.

These are the figures the client reported, as ranges rather than exact values for a single month, because the sales of a drinks shop naturally fluctuate month to month (seasonality, campaigns, stock availability). For that reason we do not convert the ranges into a single growth percentage: a range like “from 450-500k to 600-650k” has no single correct percentage, it has a minimum and a maximum, and any single figure would be an unjustified approximation. The results reflect the specific situation of this account, with this catalogue and in this period, not a reproducible promise for any other drinks shop.

Services involved

• eCommerce, the platform and the stock, price and feed sync that make correct catalogue bidding possible.
• Paid Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, reallocated by product turnover speed.
• SEO & organic, steady traffic on the categories with real demand, complementary to paid budget.
• Performance, security & maintenance, maintenance of the site and of the stock integrations.