Last Updated on May 21, 2025 by nicole

Meet Jared Siebert, Owner and Developer of Vintools, a company revolutionizing winery eCommerce through smart integrations and streamlined marketing solutions. 

Jared combines deep web development expertise with a passion for solving real-world challenges in the wine industry.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Learn about Vintools’ offerings and their expertise with Commerce7 and WineDirect
• Explore the journey from customizable website templates to API-driven email marketing solutions
• Explore practical tips for integrating tools into winery campaigns
• Discover how Vintools’ referral engine boosts customer referrals and amplifies word-of-mouth sales
• Understand the role of client feedback in driving new integrations
• Get a peek into how AI tools are shaping code development

In this episode with Jared Siebert

Join us for a deep dive into the intersection of wine, tech, and marketing. In today’s episode of Legends Behind the Craft, Drew Thomas Hendricks chats with Jared Siebert, the founder of Vintools, about how modern APIs, integrations, and thoughtful design are helping wineries grow their online presence with less friction.

Whether you’re a tech-savvy winery or just starting your digital journey, this episode uncorks the tools and strategies that are reshaping how wine brands connect with customers.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Drew Thomas Hendricks on LinkedIn
• Barrels Ahead
• Jared Siebert on LinkedIn
• Vintools
• Commerce7
• WineDirect
• Klaviyo
• MailChimp
• Nimbletoad
• Andrew Kamphuis
• ReferralCandy
• Omnisend
• BigCommerce
• Shopify

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead.

Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search.

At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That’s why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors.

Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves.

So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today!

To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Drew Thomas Hendricks here. I’m the host of Legends Behind the Craft. On this podcast, we interview leaders in the wine industry and discuss current topics. Super excited for my guest today. It’s Jared Siebert. We met a couple weeks ago at the Commerce7 Partner Day, and he is an OG in the wine app development community.

Jared, welcome to the show.

[00:00:20] Jared Siebert: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So Jared, tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump in. ‘Cause I’ve got so many questions about wineries, wine apps and development.

Yeah, well I am the owner of Vintools, I founded that back in 2014. Have been working in web development since I think 2008 or 2009. And have just been learning about websites, API, integrations and custom software development ever since. I actually started working at Vin65 back in the old days. Now Wine Direct. Give our listeners a little bit of the landscape ’cause there’s quite the lineage between Vin65, Wine Direct now, and people see it as like three different things, or a takeover, but it’s quite an amazing story.

[00:01:17] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So. I have a long history with Andrew Kamphuis who’s the founder of Vin65 slash Wine Direct and Commerce7. And, I was going to Technical Institute in BC called BCIT to learn programming after I had graduated high school or to get some degrees, I guess.

[00:01:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: 

[00:01:45] Jared Siebert: I applied that to Vin65 through that connection of knowing that Andrew was in the tech space. And that ended up being my first introduction to winery websites. And Vin65 then got acquired by Wine Direct, so Vin65 was renamed Wine Direct and he continued working, worked there for I think about four years.

But part of that acquisition was a move from my hometown Abbotsford out to Vancouver. And that introduced a lot of extra travel time. I loved working there, but the travel time was making it really difficult. And so I branched out and that’s where Vintools originated. Wine Direct was looking for an easier way for their clients to get onboarded. And the biggest hit. Because Wine Direct is a proprietary platform. They’re, they have had their designer launch tools. You have to know the ins and outs of their system.

Oh man, that is the most complicated system. I do have to say that your templates made things a lot easier, but man, I’m not sad to see it go. So, yeah, that’s actually, how things started for Vintools is they were looking for a way to, for their clients to get on quickly. And having worked there for four years as the lead, one of the lead website developers, it was an easy way to build out some templates and that allowed clients to take, usually the web projects would start at like 5,000, $10,000 just to get integrated with Wine Reg because it’s such a proprietary system that nobody knew how to work with it. And now these templates, so we were offering ’em for free on Wine Direct site. So that allowed their clients to go from months and thousands of dollars to weeks.

They could say, “Yeah, I like that one,” and it’s set up within a day. And then they just have to enter the content. So that is how we, that’s where we started with, and then we heard about all the complaints with, you know, Wine Direct to email marketing tools. They’re limited. They’re restrictive. We can’t, the design, it’s so hard to design.

You have to hire an expert in HTML email coding to make anything look good. Why can’t we just use MailChimp? And that’s what pivoted our direction from focusing solely on templates to building out an API integration between wine direct and commerce and MailChimp. So that is where things pivoted and took a very, very nice twist for us, from solely doing website development and customizations and wind direct support there to helping our clients get ingrained with MailChimp and have access to better email marketing automations and all the design tools that they needed to make their emails look great without having to spend a thousand dollars a campaign to get the customizations they wanted.

[00:05:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, that’s amazing. I mean, what an unmet need. You go from having to hire an email expert to having a club manager being able to actually execute their own email campaigns.

[00:05:28] Jared Siebert: Exactly.

[00:05:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So now you’ve kind of evolved from templates to finding unmet needs that the system isn’t doing and actually extending the Wine Direct system. And now we’ve evolved, and Andrew’s kind of did his own thing. He left Wine Direct and founded Commerce7.

So in reality it’s like kind of the third iteration of his e-commerce journey. There’s been, I mean, we all woke up in mid-January and found out that Commerce7 had acquired the SaaS division of Wine Direct.

[00:05:56] Jared Siebert: Yeah. That was a,

[00:05:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That closes the full loop, it was shocking.

[00:05:59] Jared Siebert: Yeah, that was a very interesting morning to find that one out.

But man, it’s been making a lot of waves in the wine industry right now because, you know, a lot of the people are wanting to hang on to their Wine Direct system. And they don’t wanna make the change. And other people were, are jumping at the opportunity. It gives them a, a good excuse.

Sometimes the, the owners don’t want to go through a rebrand or a design overhaul, but this is like a, “Well, you’ve got till December, 2026 to do this or to, because wine direct’s shutting down.”

[00:06:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:06:45] Jared Siebert: So what a great opportunity for wineries to look at their website, redevelop, redesign it, and look at current design trends to get something brand new in the process of migrating to Commerce7 or a different winery solution for some clients.

[00:07:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Not to generalize wineries. I mean, there’s always some avan garter wineries that want the latest technology, but by and large, if you look at the 10,000 wineries out there, most of the owners are not, it’s technologically front edge. They’re not on, they’re not on the cutting edge, and they really resist change. So for the 1500 wineries that were on wine Direct, you can imagine a lot of these people, they don’t wanna look at the website anyways. They wanna be out in the field, they wanna be out in the vineyards, they wanna be making wine.

Now they’re being forced to move, not being forced, but they’re now being strongly encouraged to move as quickly as possible into this new platform, which is good with the whole industry needs to increase its, you know, technical savvy, if for lack of a better word. But you were, to step back, you were, Vintools is even before this acquisition, Vintools started to extend the Commerce7 platform.

So the whole tech side of the industry had kind of, sort of already started navigating over to Commerce7. At least in my business with Barrels Ahead, we were happy to jump on the Commerce7 platform.

[00:08:10] Jared Siebert: Yeah, so actually fun story about that one too. Speaking of going way back with working with Andrew, I was actually working with Andrew when Commerce7 was Barrel called, originally called Barrel Seven, and this was when Andrew was contemplating getting back into the wine industry. And we were working on the, I guess the beta version of Commerce7 together. That led to, once Commerce7 launched, I saw that Andrew had built or eCommerce and had everything as API driven. And there was this great opportunity of, “Well, let’s get our MailChimp app from line direct to Commerce7.”

Because what a great opportunity to be there in this new marketplace because wineries are gonna be looking at this latest technology and some, and a lot shifted right away. Especially the customers who were already had a WordPress website with a only hosting their Wine Direct e-commerce side of things as the checkout or club signup.

[00:09:33] Drew Thomas Hendricks: The most brilliant thing you did was actually detaching the e-commerce from the website and allow people just to use whatever platform we want. Squarespace, WordPress, I guess you could do it in Drupal, I don’t know why you would. You could, you could do it on any platform you want. And that was the, that was the first step.

[00:09:52] Jared Siebert: What about Joomla?

[00:09:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Joomla. Oh my Lord. I still, sadly, we still have a site on Joomla way back. Nimbletoad’s been around since 2007 and one of the original guys, he is so resistant to change. We got him on some like scary server that we don’t even look at, but he doesn’t wanna change his site. He loves his Joomla.

[00:10:11] Jared Siebert: Oh, fun.

[00:10:17] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. I have to ask this. What is the significance of Seven? Barrel Seven? Commerce7? Is this the seventh iteration? Is it a lucky number? Just looks cool?

[00:10:28] Jared Siebert: I think Andrew just loved the numbers. It was, you know, Vin65, and they did a, they had a brew version of Vin65 that had a number in it too. And now we’re at Commerce7. There’s just a. I don’t know.

[00:10:50] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I meant to ask that at Partner Day and I completely forgot. But yeah, if anybody knows, add it to the comments. So you extended now Commerce7 and, and added that MailChimp integration. Talk to me about like from 2014, now we’re in 2025, you’ve gone through three kind of iterations of this, the way development’s changed. Now it’s API driven. Educate us. In some ways it’s become easier. Some ways it’s a little more complex. Let’s talk about that.

[00:11:21] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So APIs have changed a lot. I mean, Wine Direct, their APIs are soap based. It was, you know, up and coming at the time. But there, it’s like a very difficult thing to work with in today’s age.

And now we have these beautiful recipes, APIs that from multiple different platforms. So, and they’re just easier to work with. They’re easier to parse. The things have changed a lot in the tech side too. So, originally we, I’m a Ruby on, or sorry, I’m a Ruby developer. And I started with Ruby on Rails.

And that was the way to do things at the time. You spin up your server, whether it’s on DigitalOcean for 10 bucks a month to just get playing around with something. But you had this whole beautiful framework to work with. And, but you had to manage servers, you had to manage your data, database, you had to manage security and to whatnot. And that’s how things started. We had our EC2 servers. We had our our Postgres database set up. And we had to configure all these security rules for making sure that only website traffic could get to our website. But no one could touch the servers in a negative way.

Now things have, are completely changed. You know, nobody wants to manage servers. And we have completely pivoted from the old way of managing servers to now we’re using AWS Lambda. We have our database, we’re in DynamoDB, we’re using a single table design. So instead of having multiple database tables for, one for users, one for products, one for orders, it is just a single database or a single table design that allows faster access and a unified approach. I believe Alex DeBrie or Alex DeBrie is the mastermind behind the single table design and his guides were incredibly helpful for getting this all set up.

But yeah, now we have all API requests come through the AWS gateway that we then transform and we send it out to our SQS system. That is then picked up by the Lambdas that are listening to SQS for the appropriate tags. So we tag it with the MailChimp, with Clay Deal with ReferralCandy.

And we put the vendor, the provider on it too, whether it’s Wine Direct, Commerce7 or some of the other new vendors that we’re looking at. We’re that way the Lambda is able to, the appropriate Lambdas pick up the job to be processed. And we then are able to handle that through queues.

And if there’s ever a failure on Klaviyo or MailChimp side, or whether we’re, you know, Commerce7 and every other system out there has their integration limits, you know, good old rate limiting. If for example, someone makes a batch request of changing their customers in MailChimp, that data comes back to us and we update the information Commerce7.

But if there’s thousands of customers updated, Commerce7 is a hundred requests, a hundred update requests a minute. And so, well, I think they said in V2 that change is coming. Or no, sorry, everything is going to cursor based in V2. The update requests that still something that we we have to throttle on our side and work within those limitations, but with the SQS queues, we’re able to, you know, if it, we’ve fire as many events as we want, but if they fail, we have a back off strategy so that they keep retrying until the process.

[00:15:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: For the, the way I kind of describe it to non-technical people, and correct me if I’m wrong, like previously when we were spinning up these EC2 instances with the server, it was to provide just the infrastructure to execute a function. Literally 95% of what’s happening in that server wasn’t even being used.

It just needed to be that container which caused all, it could crash, it could do everything. Now with Lambda and using Amplify, we’re able to just like execute the code as needed, making it super streamlined.

[00:16:21] Jared Siebert: Exactly. And it’s nice too because I mean, for firing off a web hook, instead of having a server running 24 7, you have this microservice that spins up and shuts down within a couple, couple hundred milliseconds.

And I mean, most, we’re receiving enough data that are Lambdas are always warm meaning they’re not having to spin up a new server at the exact request moments. But most of our events take just a less than a hundred milliseconds to execute.

[00:16:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So over the, you know, so over the last 10, 12 years development, development’s been streamlined and it’s been accelerating, and you’re able to better adapt to the changing, changing technologies and to provide these unmet needs.

Talk about the one. Well, I guess I’ll predicate this on like Commerce7. Andrew’s famous at just saying, “No.” Can you do this? “No.” Can you add this feature? “No.” But the brilliant part about that is he says, go talk to the development community. Go work with the partners such as Vintools to fix this need to enhance their version.

What allows it to do it, for me what it seems is  Commerce7 allows, remains nimble, remains a very core product, and you can extend upon it just what you need versus getting this bloated product that you’re only using 50% of it. ‘Cause you’re never gonna need a Klaviyo integration built in ’cause you’re using MailChimp or you’re never gonna use any of that. ‘Cause you’re perfectly happy with the automated emails that Commerce7 sets in.

[00:18:02] Jared Siebert: Exactly. It’s a great advantage for third party developers to, and for our clients too. Like one, like you said, they get to top-notch based services. And then they have the option to choose, well, you know, there are some systems where MailChimp is built in, or is a built in offering. So, right away they feel obligated to use MailChimp versus they’re wanting to use Klaviyo, but it, that’s a paid add-on. And so, well, I can use MailChimp for free, so fine, I’ll use it. But now, us developers have the opportunity to fit basically any custom need.

That’s happened with MailChimp, with Klaviyo. We developed a ReferralCandy integration. We’re gonna be releasing an integration with Omnisend soon, which is super focused on e-commerce platforms and those marketing automations, that not everyone’s gonna use the same product and it gives us a chance to offer diversity.

[00:19:13] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I think everyone gets their mind around why you want the integrate MailChimp and Commerce7. So you get user data syncing and you’re able to send out all the emails through there ’cause it’s a great platform. Talk to me about how the idea for the referral engine came up. Where did that spring from and what does it allow wineries to do and what were some of the challenges in rolling that out?

[00:19:37] Jared Siebert: Yeah. Actually I can’t remember who approached me about it initially, but I think it was an outside agency. They were working with a client and that client wanted to use referrals.

And they specifically wanted to work with ReferralCandy. And there’s a few other referral engines out there that offer similar features. ReferralCandy had seen was the one requested, and they had a very openish API. And yeah, after we had redeveloped our MailChimp integration from the old, the older Rails way to the Lambdas, we had a platform already there that we could copy paste it. And duplicate that same structure to work with ReferralCandy. And so we integrated with ReferralCandy. We worked within around their APIs. So we are able to send and retrieve a certain amount of data. But there’s certain things that the customers still have to do. So for instance ReferralCandy, to get up and running with your campaign, you have to have 500 coupons, single use coupons entered into their system. You could have one coupon, like, welcome 20, and that gives you, your friend 20% off their order. And that’s a reusable coupon. But then what we have are advocates. So if I come to you and say, “Oh, you gotta try out this wine, it’s so good. Here’s my link, check it out.” That’ll give you a coupon code using my share link.

 And then when, if you place an order that fits my campaign require, the company’s campaign requirements, say you have to spend a hundred bucks, and then I get a reward. And that’s a single use coupon that gets sent out to me, you and the winery can configure that any way they want.

It could be $10 off, it could be 10% off whatever.

[00:21:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, brilliant.

[00:21:50] Jared Siebert: It’s up to them. And then their advocates get to use these rewards to, to purchase from the winery. So it’s driving your customers to be doing the marketing for you.

[00:22:06] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If you’re doing any influencer marketing or any advocate marketing this is a good tool. So you, so you built the tool that allows wineries to actually do this through Commerce7. There’s other s but it’s a little more integrated now. You don’t have to do that second quality, second back check to see, “Did the referral actually come from here?”

[00:22:23] Jared Siebert: Yeah, exactly.

So what happens is, so there’s a big hurdle move to get started without an integration. And that’s that you have to have 500 unique codes, coupon codes. We let the customer set that up. And then generate those 500 codes to them. And because ReferralCandy doesn’t allow, their API doesn’t allow for entering the coupon codes, we email our clients CSV file with all the, the coupon codes after that we’re gonna generate and we create those in Commerce7. And they just simply have to import the CSV file into ReferralCandy. And they’re set up.

[00:23:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Why five codes? That’s, is it just. So that they’re big time? I mean, that’s a lot of codes.

[00:23:09] Jared Siebert: I think because they have a, from their clients that are using their tools effectively and pushing it too hard, they’re seeing a high turnover rate.

So they would, it would suck to get started with a referral campaign saying, “Hey here, give your friend this code for 20 bucks off and we’ll give you a code back for a discount of 10% off your next order.” It would suck if you got huge traction on that. And all of a sudden, “Sorry, we don’t have any codes to send you.” So 500 is kind a good sense.

[00:23:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: One time codes.

[00:23:51] Jared Siebert: Yeah, exactly. If they were, you could use how

[00:23:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Affiliate, like, use my board slash Siebert referral link. It’s gonna take me one time. It’s one. I get it now.

[00:24:01] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So it’s specifically that one time use and that, I mean, you can set up a, a repeating code.

But the one time use code seemed much more, it seemed like a safer option, right? You don’t have to worry about that code getting shared out and people abusing it.

[00:24:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It also scarcity, I mean, it just makes it look more legit.

[00:24:27] Jared Siebert: Exactly.

[00:24:27] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So you have to actually import the 500.

So you’re in Commerce7. You’re creating 500 coupon codes, basically.

[00:24:35] Jared Siebert: Yes.

[00:24:36] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And then what happens when they burn through those? You just rinse and repeat?

[00:24:40] Jared Siebert: Same thing. We just to create another batch and send them that batch to import into ReferralCandy, and then they keep going.

[00:24:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay. Yeah, I haven’t done much with coupon codes in Commerce7, so I don’t know what happens.

So eventually I would say, say you’re rocking and rolling. You’re a huge winery. You burnt through 2000 coupon codes. Those are all just sitting there, retired in the C7 database or?

[00:25:02] Jared Siebert: Yeah, so we’re looking at our options for cleaning that up. Like, we have some testing to do, but we’re looking at, you know, how will this impact the customer if we delete a coupon code after it’s been used? Because we don’t wanna mess with the, any tracking of the coupon use and impact their orders in a negative way. But at the same time, you know, having to paginate through 500 or 2000 coupon codes, we’ve actually put out a request to have like a master coupon with the multiple single use codes within Commerce7, and that would help alleviate some of the, instead of having 500 codes, you have one coupon with 500 single use codes attached to it.

May, may happen, may not, but we’re gonna work within what we have today. And to try and make it as friendly as possible. We prefix it, all the coupons that we generate to make it easier for them to filter past. So everything is like RC friend or RC advocate. And that way they can, you know, if they want to prefix everything with an under to get at it right away, it makes things easier ’cause nobody sees the title anyways.

[00:26:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That sounds like a very good tool. I wanna ask you, and you don’t need to share any, you know, secret things that aren’t, I’m not asking for that. More like, how are you going forward, how are you diagnosing some of the new apps, new projects that wineries may be needing?

I know at Partner Day there was a lot of talk about enhancing the reporting and they’re, people can’t get enough reports, but what are some of the other kind of avenues that you see weak points in Commerce7 that kind of need enhancement?

[00:26:59] Jared Siebert: So that one is interesting. We listen to what people are complaining about.

I mean, we’re in the marketing industry. Well, like we’ve worked with MailChimp for over eight years. And we’re expanding to Klaviyo, to Omnisend, to we’re looking at other marketing platforms that people are using and to integrate them with Commerce7 and others because marketing is our focus, but we’re also listening through DTC geeks on Facebook. We’re looking at what are people complaining about and how can we fit that need? You know, or it was even mentioned at the conference, the C7 conference, they were talking about upcoming requirements for dietary restrictions.

[00:27:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Ah, yes.

[00:27:54] Jared Siebert: So is that something that Comm seven is going to build outta the box, or is that something that a third party agency would have to develop?

[00:28:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: On that, just to, not to cut you off the, we had a person on the podcast and I wish I had his name. And EU already requires all this, all these dietary requirements. And he’s got a, he’s got his app set up where the QR code’s on the bottle and you can extend out to it, which sounded very similar to what we were talking about in that room at the C7 conference. Where is, should this be part of it? Should be extended,? What are they gonna do? But that is a big unmet need that’s coming.

[00:28:32] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So, you know, we’re, the way we find what integration developed next is just a lot of listening. What are people, what are people complaining about or what is a new feature that people don’t even know they need yet? Right? I think it was even at the conference that people didn’t know they wanted Amazon Prime. But they developed it because they saw what people were complaining about; shipping times and upcharge on price pricing or a way for getting member benefits. And all of a sudden you have Amazon Prime and not only do you get like next day or one or two day shipping for free. But now you’ve got access to movies, to music, to all this other stuff. People didn’t know that that’s what they wanted, but Amazon figured it out.

[00:29:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:29:32] Jared Siebert: That’s what kind of how we play it. We’re trying to figure out what do wineries need, how can we enhance this experience? What exists in other retail industries or other providers like BigCommerce or Shopify or whatnot that Commerce7 doesn’t have that our clients could benefit from.

[00:29:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, very smart.

[00:29:55] Jared Siebert: I love cruising the other like Shopify or BigCommerce app stores. Who’s integrated with them that’s not on Commerce7?

[00:30:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Smart. I was having a conversation with a, it was a private equity firm and they, they have five or six wineries under their belt and of the wineries, four of ’em are on Shopify and one of ’em just got migrated from wine direct to Commerce7.

And I was talking to the marketing director there who’s in charge of these five stable of wineries. And it was like he had no, he’s like, “What the heck is com?” I mean, he’s so used to all the data and all the tools in Shopify, he is like, “What the heck did these people do?” I’m like, well, “You just got the base model there. You gotta understand, you gotta understand the extensibility and that really what it does well over and above Shopify.”

It was a very interesting kind of outside in hearing that his perspective of looking at the two systems when he lives and breathes in Shopify all day long, and now he’s, and here’s Commerce7.

[00:31:01] Jared Siebert: It tends to be a different, a lot of difference. It’s funny to hear that because if I’m not mistaken, Shopify was one of the, one of the main examples that helped with a lot of the development decisions with Commerce7 on naming conventions on what features that were offered that they wanted to replicate, I think that originated from Shopify. I might be mistaken. So but

[00:31:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That experience would make sense. I think what he was looking at is, “Where’s the reporting? Where’s all the analytics? Where’s all the…”

I mean, it was more of that, that part I’m like, “Oh no, you gotta bolt that on.” So, yeah, that’s a curious, that’s a great thing.

I know on our side, we’re looking at kind of getting, developing apps. We’ve done ’em in other industries, not so much in the wine. We did a faceted search. We do have an app. It’s not an app because we developed it before that kind of the Commerce7 store came out.

[00:32:06] Jared Siebert: Yeah.

[00:32:06] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We were just allowed to code something that turned basically the Commerce7 site into a wine store where you can have many different countries and you can have 600 SKUs and it pulls the data in and does this faceted search.

So for us, that was, that was an unmet need that we just had to, had to create for the person. ‘Cause it doesn’t exist really. The Commerce7 search functionality is not, not there yet. I’m extending that.

[00:32:34] Jared Siebert: Yeah. It’s more of a filter based feature right now, right? Like what price or what region.

But you can’t, or maybe it’s in development for V2 to be paired with the V2 release, but there’s no like search box that would in caps off for 2015 and see what comes up.

[00:32:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Or they wanna let, the way this one was is you want it to behave like you would see like an Amazon store. You click France, then all the…

[00:32:59] Jared Siebert: Oh gotcha go.

[00:33:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Then you click bordeaux, everything collapses, and or you uncheck, and I mean, everything’s faceted. So you can quickly drill through exactly what you want, which is what people tend to, tend to expect in a store. But most wineries don’t have 700 SKUs crossing it. So Commerce7 wasn’t really intended to be that type of site, but it’s possible to extend to it.

One of the other things we’re, we’re looking at is more of a club retention type of app. ‘Cause right now if you can cancel your club online, but there’s no real upsell, down sell or ways to like reengage the club member automatically, especially for large clubs.

[00:33:38] Jared Siebert: Right. That’s actually something that we have included in our integrations.

[00:33:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Did you?

[00:33:46] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So not in, not built in, right? To Commerce7. But we’ve got that in a way. So we tag all our customers in or in, or sorry, all our client’s customers get tagged in MailChimp with a active on hold, canceled or canceling. So if you have a future cancel date set on a club member, that syncs over, and then you can trigger an automation to engage with different client, with different club members in a different way. So you have non-club member tags, you have former club member tags, and you have active club members that you can all interact with differently. Send different campaigns to a former club member to try and be, if they’re interested in a lower tier that is more affordable if they, you know, too much wine. Okay. Well here’s our three bottle club. Or here’s our quarterly club sort of thing.

[00:34:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s super powerful. How many, I mean, when you say a MailChimp integration, a lot of wineries just assume that’s that’s all it is. But this whole club retention thing seems like a super powerful feature that’s baked in.

[00:35:00] Jared Siebert: Yeah. So I mean, we per, we try and provide as much information about the, these customers as we can. We give their club signup dates, club members since X date or actively you know, joined the Premier club on May 9th, 2025. And that’s enabled them to send these anniversary emails. And that actually, that actually originated from a feature request of one of our clients that migrated from Wine Direct to Commerce7.

They said, “Hey, we can’t send our customers any anniversary emails. How do we do that?” Oh, well we can add that feature for you.

[00:35:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Awesome.

[00:35:44] Jared Siebert: Because they, they’re already working with the MailChimp and we just had to send over a little extra data.

[00:35:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s cool. That is really cool. Let’s talk about AI for a second.

Yeah. And how is that kind of, it’s just, it’s the elephant in the room and all we do now in marketing right now and, and development. How has it, how has AI affected your development process?

[00:36:06] Jared Siebert: It has helped in certain aspects. You know, we can use GitHub copilot to help review our coding structure.

And then as we’re developing new features, so we can start typing something and it’s already pulling from our code base to our coding standards to make this thing take two seconds instead of having to spend the next five minutes writing it, it all out and or finding the right file to, “Well, it’s kinda like this one, so we’re gonna use it here.”

 And it’s also helps streamline some of our code. You know, thinking outside the box and looking at what other people who, I’m not gonna claim that I’m the best developer on the market. But I’m very competent in what I do. But there’s people, a lot of people smarter than me that have done things different way.

And with AI programming, I can take a code snippet, have GitHub copilot check it and they review and give a more streamlined way or say, “Well, you didn’t think about this one or this case.” That’s how we have been using AI internally. But I cann see there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity coming for using AI to help our customers as well.

Right. Like in MailChimp, Klaviyo, they’re baking AI generated content into their platform. That’s not even something that we have to look at making a plugin for.

[00:37:39] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If I see any more AI suggestions in my content, I get it. Google tell me how it should be. Grammarly, it should be like this that I’ve got… then I’m in Clickup and that’s, I can’t write anything without three different tools telling me to say it differently.

[00:37:59] Jared Siebert: So too many cooks in the, too many chefs in the kitchen, right?

[00:38:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You gotta weave it into everything. But going back to development, do you see ai, I mean I, we see a lot of charts about how the number of developers are just decreasing ’cause AI can handle it.

Say you’re in college right now and you’re gonna, you want to become a developer. How do you make, and I see like us that we’ve cut our teeth in codings from day one, so we can actually look at the AI generated code and know if it’s hallucinating or not. But how does a junior developer, I mean, where’s the place of the junior developer and how do they become that senior developer that can actually just depend on AI for doing what a junior developer would normally do?

[00:38:40] Jared Siebert: So that’s the thing is AI has to come with that caveat of, it doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing all the time. So it would be a, I think it would be a big mistake for any developer or even junior developer to just say, “I need a function to do this or that.” And take it at face value that it knows what’s what it’s doing.

There have been many times that I’ve taken code that I’ve written, had AI evaluate it, and the their optimizations are, we’re gonna completely break it. So you have to understand what AI is giving you. You have to be pumped in enough in your programming skills or development skills to be able to understand what AI has given you back.

And know if it’s right or wrong. You can’t, somebody just saying, “Oh, well I don’t need to hire a programmer ’cause I can just use the AI to make it for me.” Well, if you don’t understand it, that is a very, very scary idea. Because it’s gonna break and you won’t know why.

[00:39:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. Well, then you put it in, it’s like it’s broken.

Fix it.

[00:39:57] Jared Siebert: Yeah.

[00:39:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Here’s exactly.

[00:39:59] Jared Siebert: And then, then they’ll give you multiple revisions of here’s a, well, this could work, or this could work, or this could work. But you still, if you don’t know why it broke in the first place, that is a, and you’re offering a product, that’s a scary place to be. I have seen an data anomalies come up of like you’re expecting an email address to be unique or you’re expecting that every customer that comes through the webhooks has an email address. But that is sometimes the through data validation issues or through other integrations submitting bad data, you get garbage that you never expect.

And when you’re relying on, “well, this is how it’s supposed to be,” and then things break. Well, that’s easy enough to identify and fix. But when it’s a logical issue or something because AI generated that code for you that you don’t even understand it at the base level of how this works, that is much bigger issue that I think us developers are gonna be safe in our position for quite some time.

Especially because the running joke is, “Well won’t AI overtake?” Well, no, because the client still needs to know how to define the problem in exact detail, and that’s a, something that we have to weave through. Right. That is part of the onboarding process. That is part of the understanding what their, what they’re, what need they’re trying to fix. It’s getting all these details out of them that sometimes they don’t even, they weren’t even aware that this problem was there, but we’re fixing it for them.

[00:41:46] Drew Thomas Hendricks: For a senior person, you can tell when it’s working, when it’s not, and you can actually feed it. You know what it doesn’t know to a, to a junior person, they might not even know what it needs to know.

[00:41:57] Jared Siebert: Exactly.

[00:41:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And now how does a junior, so if say, let’s just say you’re just graduating from college. You’ve already in college, let’s just, or university, let’s just assume that they’ve had to hand code some stuff, but now they’re coming into the workforce and they need to stay up to speed, what advice would you give a junior developer as far as AI and how to incorporate it in a, a beneficial way?

[00:42:24] Jared Siebert: I would say try your own way. And then see it. Paste your code block into AI and say, “Enhance it.” And see what it comes back with and try and understand what it came back with and how it’s better. Or if it came back with a version that’s better than what you wrote originally, take a look at it and see if there’s other functions available that could make it even better. One of the things that I like to do is benchmark things. Benchmark is in Ruby, you have string functions for equal, for comparison. So you can use the double equal sign to check if it equals exactly. You can use the dot EQL question mark to see if the string is the same, and you can use a RegX.

You can, there’s multiple ways to compare a string, but which one’s fastest? Which one is going, if you’re processing a hundred orders at a time and you need to be comparing this specific string value, which version is fastest because you want your Lambdas to complete in the fastest time possible so that your build less.

So sometimes just simply exploring the language that you’re working with to understand the AI recommendations. And to see what other organizations you could tell AI that you wanna use.

[00:43:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s a valuable tool that, that’s a good way to use it. I hadn’t quite thought of that.

That’s cool.

[00:44:04] Jared Siebert: I use it sometimes too when I don’t wanna spend an hour being through documentation. I’ll grab the documentation link to the service I’m working on. And I’ll say, “Hey, is this a service case sensitive for their values? For the data that you have to pass?” And the answer will be yes, no, or it’s a flexible tool.

You can use your own can sensitivity doesn’t matter here, but it does in this and this and this scenario.

[00:44:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s very cool.

As we’re winding down, is there anything we haven’t talked about or anything you wanna discuss?

[00:44:42] Jared Siebert: I think it’s how we as developers can work together in this upcoming shift in the in the industry, you know, with, there are agencies that specialize like myself, like in tools that specialize in app development and integrate, sorry, in integrations, app development and theme development. We don’t, we have access to designers, but we’re not a design agency. We can make things, but don’t ask, don’t ask us to make a brand new website that you know well. We like this font and we like the, our brand theme is, is a color blue and here’s our logo. Now make it look beautiful.

[00:45:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Uhhuh.

[00:45:37] Jared Siebert: That’s not our area of expertise. And I know there are plenty of other agencies that are experts in design, in marketing, in different needs that all our clients are gonna have, and I think it would be great for us to work together in this shifting market of clients moving from Wine Direct to Commerce7. Or it’s, I’ve seen more than one client come across that they don’t wanna work with Commerce7 for whatever reason, and they choose a different solution.

Like to Bottle360, order port to eseller. Whatever. I think, even Wine Hub Shopify solution came up recently. And so just learning how we can work to support our clients, our mutual clients the best. And well, I can develop that app, but to maybe you heard the client’s needs. And we work together to make it happen. I think that’s what would be great to benefit the wineries the best in this upcoming time, that partnership amongst the agencies to fill the gaps.

[00:46:56] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I couldn’t agree more. That is very good. Well, Jared, thank you so much for joining us today.

This has been a real education.

[00:47:04] Jared Siebert: Yeah, it was a great chatting and really enjoyed talking about these best practices and the ways that things have changed from good old Vin65 days to Commerce7 with the brand new APIs that support everything.

[00:47:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It’s exciting times, exciting times.

Well, we’re gonna have to have you back in a few months and see, see how the app environment is evolved.

[00:47:31] Jared Siebert: Sounds great.

[00:47:32] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Thanks Jared.