One single ecommerce that knows who it is talking to: homebrewers, resellers, breweries.
Mr Malt is the Italian reference point for home-brewed beer: a community looking for products, but also for expertise and technical support. The model is hybrid — B2C for private homebrewers, B2B for resellers and breweries — each with different languages and expectations. The challenge was not “putting a catalog online”, but digitizing a whole supply chain, from the home setup to industrial production, in one system that understands who it is dealing with without making them feel they are in the wrong place.
WHO MR MALT IS
Who Mr Malt is.
The Italian reference point for home-brewed beer, with a community looking not only for ingredients and equipment, but for expertise and support. A deliberately hybrid model: B2C for private homebrewers and B2B for professional resellers and breweries, each with different needs, languages and expectations.
We have worked with them since 2010. Over the years Mr Malt had built up a wealth of processes and complex commercial relationships — a real asset, but spread across fragmented systems that struggled to talk to each other online.
THE CHALLENGE
“Online, the care we take risked turning into confusion.”
The client puts it well: “We were used to handling every kind of customer with different attention. Online, though, those differences risked becoming confusion: we needed a system that understood who it was dealing with, without making them feel they were ‘in the wrong place’.” Three audiences, three logics: private homebrewers, resellers, breweries — each with personalized catalogs, differentiated price lists, specific purchase processes, but with the same promise: find things fast and buy without friction.
The risk was double: confusing the private customer with “price list” dynamics, and making professionals feel stuck in an experience that was too consumer. All of it to be integrated with established workflows, syncing stock and availability in real time.
WHAT WE DID
A “digital brewery”: same house, different experiences.
We chose Magento in a multi-store architecture as the foundation: several markets in parallel, with distinct identities but shared data, processes and integrations. The idea was a single digital brewery producing personalized experiences — every store keeps its own identity, but benefits from everything they have in common. A choice that was not only technical but strategic: making price lists, catalogs and journeys consistent without forcing one compromise on everybody.
On the B2B side we built tools that make purchasing repeatable — fast reorder for resellers and automatic quoting for breweries, with real-time quotations on complex technical parameters — and structured price management with lists per customer and group, multiple discounts and volume/history rules.
ADAM phases: Design + Measure
Magento multi-store
Fast reorder
Automatic quoting
Multi-level price lists
THE EXPERIENCE
Progressive disclosure: B2C and B2B in the same gesture.
Three markets, three languages, three sets of expectations: not “one site the same for everybody”, but a system that adapts without making the machinery obvious. The UX rule was progressive disclosure: basic information immediately, technical depth reachable only when it is needed. For the homebrewer the journey is also educational, with guides and hand-holding; for the professional it becomes operational, with tools and dashboards to plan and repeat orders.
All inside one single site, without splitting it in two. Because in a project like this the real performance is not only speed: it is reducing the number of pointless decisions a user has to take before reaching the right purchase.
THE FOUNDATIONS
Under the hood: technical SEO, performance and accessibility.
A supply-chain ecommerce only holds if the foundations are solid. We ran an SEO and accessibility audit with a 12-month plan of work, and worked on technical SEO: URL structure, category pagination, correct tags (self-canonical) and fixing more than 2,500 404 errors — the kind of invisible work that decides whether Google (and the user) finds you.
On the UI/UX side: mobile navigation rethought with an off-canvas menu, headers unified, inefficient sliders removed in favor of faster, responsive home blocks. And on performance: evaluating a CDN (Fastly) and lightening the images to speed up global loading. Accessibility treated as part of the project, not as an afterthought: with dedicated widgets and optimized conformance statements.
ADAM phases: Analyze + Measure
SEO & accessibility audit
Technical SEO (2,500+ 404s)
Mobile UI/UX
CDN / performance
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THE NUMBERS
LESS FRICTION, MORE SALES
Order restored, opportunities surfaced.
Mobile traffic
+250%
browsing from a phone has become central in brewing too.
Order processing time
−70%
thanks to fast reorder for B2B resellers.
404 errors fixed
2,500+
technical SEO put in order, visibility protected.
Online sales
Growing
in the first 18 months, with customers widening the range of what they buy.