Saint-Sixtus: artisanal brewery scales up with online presence and cross-border payments.

Is your business as unique as the one run by the monks at Saint-Sixtus? Let’s discuss with Saint-Sixtus’ Online Sales Project Manager, Jos Vermeulen, to discover how we are helping them to sell their award-winning beers cross-border and deal with demanding peak sales. While you might not get all the secrets of their secular recipes, we are happy to reveal some of the key ingredients in their online success.

Saint-Sixtus: brewery online payments

A business which started almost 200 years ago.

The monks of the Saint-Sixtus Abbey began brewing Trappist beer alongside their monastic activities in 1839, to become more self-sufficient.

The Saint-Sixtus beers carry the label of “Authentic Trappist Product”, which means the beer is brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery under the control and responsibility of the community of monks, whose revenue is devoted to social service. The abbey produces three types of beer: lager, 8 and 12.

“We needed an international partner with a strong fraud detection module that could process our demanding online peak sales volumes, without having any downtime for our online webshop. This perfectly sums up our collaboration with Worldline.”

Jos Vermeulen, Online Sales Project Manager, Saint-Sixtus

Digital solution to bring Trappist beer to an international clientele.

Saint-Sixtus Abbey established with Worldline a novel click and collect system with the ability to accept international payments. Thanks to this partnership, Saint-Sixtus’ online transactions’ value grew significantly, making online the main channel for their sales.
 

A user-driven ranking website for craft beer enthusiasts named Saint-Sixtus Trappist beer as the best in the world. The beer has since been awarded the title  more than five times and was named as one of the top beers in the world for taste, putting it on the map for international beer lovers.

Stable, secure and intuitive customer experience.

The click and collect system provides a fluid experience with intuitive and mobile-first payment pages, a stable platform with no downtime and a strong fraud detection module which sets sales limits and blocks transactions when necessary.

This has thwarted a number of fraud attempts against the monastery and greatly reduced black market reselling.

“We are located in Belgium and we sell our Trappist internationally online for in-person collection; we never ship. People planning their holiday in Belgium arrange to pick up their crate of beer during their stay.”

Jos Vermeulen, Online Sales Project Manager, Saint-Sixtus

Robust payment platform for intense international consumer activity.

  • Simple : An intuitive interface to guarantee a fluid customer payment experience.
  • Scalable : An advanced technology solution capable of handling peaks in activity.
  • Safe : A secure platform to protect customer data.
With the sales process open only twice a month for about two and a half hours and with a limit on number of beers visitors could buy, we needed a stable and reliable platform.”

Jos Vermeulen, Online Sales Project Manager, Saint-Sixtus

Further expansion with Worldline.

Saint-Sixtus is excited to reach out to an even bigger community of passionate beer lovers internationally thanks to the international visibility of their website.

“We hope that the interest in our beer will continue to grow and we will work on improving our customer services through the Internet.”

Jos Vermeulen, Online Sales Project Manager, Saint-Sixtus

Flash sales require frictionless payments and no downtime.

Because of their specific distribution model with limited products to sell, Saint-Sixtus was looking for an extremely reliable set-up to go online. Therefore, Worldline was delighted to help Saint-Sixtus from the very beginning when they launched their website.

As Worldline’s online payments platform has an uptime of 99,99% (Jan. ’20-Jan ’21), all transactions went through without a hitch.