Create a lottery for your most sought-after beers with this nifty CraftCellr app update

File this under simple-but-awesome ideas: Craft beverage technology solution CraftCellr has implemented a new app feature designed to provide consumers with a fair and equitable path to obtaining breweries’ most sought-after releases.

With CraftCellr’s Lottery system, breweries can launch a fully automated and randomized purchase process to customers seeking beers for which demand far exceeds supply, while precluding traffic-induced website malfunctions and providing invaluable market data to partner breweries. Lottery functionality is available now in the latest version of CraftCellr’s iOS and Android apps.

“We see horror stories every day of breweries struggling to release extremely limited amounts of popular beers, only to take serious reputational hits on social media when things don’t go according to plan,” explains CraftCellr co-founder Eric Thelen. “CraftCellr’s Lottery system not only gives brewery patrons an easy and equitable opportunity to purchase hyped beers, it also insulates a brewery’s brand from the consumer backlash that can be associated with high-demand beer drops.”

How it works

The Lottery system provides a simple, streamlined platform for randomly selecting winning customers and automatically processing payment. Randomization and pre-purchase verification circumvent historically problematic sales methods that require purchases to be made at a specific time, often resulting in site crashes and preventing customers with busy schedules from gaining access to sales.

By offering a more egalitarian solution, breweries utilizing CraftCellr’s Lottery system can improve the overall customer experience, protect staff from the ire of disgruntled customers, and avoid negative feedback on even the most competitive sales.

Also: blacklisting

Additional benefits built in to CraftCellr’s Lottery feature include blacklisting capabilities and demand tracking, tools that allow breweries to remove bad actors from sales and to accurately gauge the scope of consumer interest in specific products.

Blacklisting gives breweries the ability to block bad actors, from secondary market resellers to illegitimate proxy manipulators, ensuring that their beer ends up only in the hands of fans whose sole interest is an appreciation of craft. Demand tracking is accomplished through the presale submission of customer payment information, granting brewers a broader understanding of market demand to inform future production forecasts. The result is a system that minimizes downside risk, maximizes consumer opportunity, and grants partner breweries a demonstrable edge over the competition.

“Given the competitive nature of today’s craft beer market place, nobody can afford to alienate customers,” notes Thelen. “Lottery is really the only reasonable solution to allocating sales fairly, and our system puts the power in the hands of brewers to deliver the best possible service to their valued consumers.”