My Wine Canada Case Study

What does My Wine Canada do?

My Wine Canada is an online marketplace specializing in Canadian wines, offering more than 1,300 small-batch bottles from 90 wineries across the country. The site sells reds, whites, rosés, sparkling, icewine, and non-alcoholic options alongside curated gift packs, gift cards, and a monthly wine club subscription. Shoppers browse by wine type, grape, region, or expert-curated picks - including sommelier and award-winning selections - with shipping available across Canada.

The problem

Before PuppetVendors, My Wine Canada ran on a custom Magento marketplace, and it was breaking down on every front.

Every change required a developer. Adding a winery, tweaking commission structures, or adjusting a shipping rule meant filing a dev ticket and waiting. The marketplace logic was custom-coded, so the team couldn't move at the speed the business needed.

The site was slow. Magento was sluggish for customers and for the wineries logging in to manage their own listings, hurting both conversion and vendor experience.

Commission and payout work was manual. Calculating what each of the 90 wineries was owed every month was a painful spreadsheet exercise, and any error was costly to unwind.

Canadian alcohol shipping rules were hard to enforce. Every winery has different provinces it's legally allowed to ship to, different carriers, different package sizes, and different minimum order quantities. Encoding all of that into the cart and checkout flow required heavy custom dev, and any change to a vendor's rules meant going back to engineering.

Onboarding new wineries was slow. Adding a vendor meant configuring ship-to provinces, package dimensions, minimum quantities, commission rates, and payout details - most of which needed engineering touch.

Why PuppetVendors?

The team's evaluation criteria were specific: out-of-the-box marketplace functionality so they'd stop paying for custom dev on every feature, native Shopify fit since they'd already decided to move off Magento, true vendor self-service so wineries could manage their own products and orders, commission and payout automation that handled discounts and tax correctly, and a real support team that could engage with a complex use case.

The main alternative considered was Shipturtle. PuppetVendors won because the team was open to building for My Wine Canada's specific use case - in particular, splitting shipping accurately across vendors when an order contained wines from multiple wineries.

How they implemented it

The migration ran across five workstreams over roughly three months:

1. Migration and data setup. Moved the product catalog and 90 winery vendors from Magento to Shopify, with PuppetVendors as the marketplace layer on top.

2. Configuring vendor rules. For each winery, set up commission rates, ship-to provinces, minimum ship quantities, package dimensions, and carrier integrations.

3. Checkout and cart logic. Configured multi-vendor cart splitting, per-vendor shipping rate calculation via Intuitive Shipping, and the rules that block checkout when a vendor's minimum quantity isn't met or the customer's province falls outside its legal ship-to list.

4. Vendor training and onboarding. Trained the wineries on the new vendor portal so they could log in, manage their own listings, approve orders, and generate shipping labels themselves.

5. Payouts and financials. Connected each vendor's Stripe account so payouts flow automatically, with commission, tax, and fees handled in the background.

The biggest implementation challenge was vendor-level shipping rate splitting. PuppetVendors initially split shipping equally across vendors in a multi-vendor order, which didn't reflect what customers were actually charged. The PuppetVendors team built a solution that splits shipping based on the real Shopify shipment charge per vendor, with each vendor assigned to a separate Shopify shipping profile so checkout shows accurate per-vendor rates and methods. Intuitive Shipping handles the per-vendor Canada Post rate calculation in the background.

The results

Three months after going live, the operational picture has changed across the board.

The dev backlog for marketplace changes is gone. Adding a winery, adjusting a commission, or tweaking a shipping rule used to require engineering. Now it's a self-serve admin task - roughly three hours per week recovered.

Vendor onboarding is more than twice as fast. A new winery can be onboarded in four hours, down from ten.

Payouts are automated and accurate. Roughly eight hours per month saved on payout reconciliation, with commission, tax, and fees handled correctly without manual work.

And the headline result: sales have grown 30% since moving to Shopify + PuppetVendors.