Sommsation Needed to Build a Compliant Alcohol Marketplace Across All 50 States, Without a Blueprint to Follow.

Selling and shipping alcohol in the United States isn't one problem. It's fifty. Every state has its own rules and regulations for what can be sold, who can sell it, and how it can be shipped. For Sommsation, a curated marketplace connecting wine buyers with independent sellers and producers, this wasn't a regulatory footnote. It was the foundation everything else had to be built on.

They had a clear vision: a multi-seller commerce experience where discovery, purchasing, and fulfillment all worked seamlessly together. The compliance logic required underneath that vision, baked into every transaction, demanded both technical depth and a team willing to own it end to end.

Over four years, we served as Sommsation's full product organization, covering everything from product management and UX through backend, DevOps, and QA.

We embedded with their team to design and build the commerce platform from the ground up. That meant building compliance into the architecture, not bolting it on after the fact. Every transaction routes through state-specific alcohol sales and shipping rules, invisibly to the buyer and reliably at scale.

We built the checkout experience to handle the realities of a multi-seller marketplace: promo logic, gift card purchases and redemptions, and seller-specific fulfillment requirements all working together in a single cart. We also built out their wine club membership system, giving Sommsation a recurring revenue channel alongside transactional sales.

Post-launch, we continued shipping iterative improvements without disrupting a live platform serving real customers.