Online wine retailer Virgin Wines has upgraded to a new version of an e-commerce suite to enable the introduction of customer-facing services and back-office systems.

The company hopes to use the additional functionality to enable it to send wine recommendations to customers based on individual preferences, as well as real-time customised feeds of its products to partners' web sites.

Data mining and contact centre tools will aim to automate emails and reporting.

"The new features we have implemented have enabled us to do exciting things with our web site, most notably our intelligent wine recommendation tool for customers," said Virgin Wines’ IT director Derek Hardy.

Escalate Retail is supplying the software.