Since moving its bookings from Rezdy to Easy Appointment Booking on Shopify, Gibson Wines has seen:
(All figures current as of August 2026.)
How it started
In the Barossa Valley, one of Australia's most storied wine regions, Gibson Wines has been doing things the family way for decades. The cellar door is where the brand comes to life: guests taste the wines, walk the winery, and meet the people behind the label.
Sam Cartwright, Gibson's Direct to Consumer Experience Manager, looks after all of it. And by late 2025, "all of it" was a lot to manage. Tastings at the cellar door ranged from a casual glass to a full hosted winery experience. Behind-the-scenes tours ran during vintage. And the dinners, Gibson's travelling showcase, were taking the winery to guests in capital cities across the country.
Sam arrived at Gibson already knowing the product. What she inherited was Rezdy, a separate bookings platform that kept the winery's guest data outside Shopify.
The conversation that sealed it
What tipped Gibson was not a demo. It was a conversation at a local networking catch-up, where Sam compared notes with a winery down the road already running Easy Appointment Booking. They raved about it:
"The team from Easy Booking had been so flexible and accommodating. They're always keen to improve the usability. I thought that was really good feedback."
In the Barossa, that kind of endorsement carries further than any pitch. It is a close-knit region, and wineries there tend to phone each other rather than open a support chat.
She was not starting cold, either. At a Barossa group running several Shopify stores she had set the app up twice before, building the first of those by mirroring that same neighbour's booking journey. And at Gibson she found her predecessor had already identified it, installed it, and started building on the free plan. What it had never had was someone with the time to finish it.
What she wanted from it was never a better calendar:
"I'd really like to replicate that relationship building, where the experience starts before you arrive and keeps going after you leave."
— Sam Cartwright, Direct to Consumer Experience Manager, Gibson Wines
The challenge: One winery, many kinds of welcome
A cellar door that isn't one product
Gibson's tastings aren't one-size-fits-all. A walk-in-friendly Wine by the Glass visit runs on a very different rhythm to the full "You're in Fieg's Hands" experience, and Behind the Scenes: A Taste of Vintage only makes sense when the winery is actually at work. Each needed its own capacity, price, and schedule, without turning the calendar into a puzzle.
A 25 year wine club the booking system couldn't see
Gibson's club has been going for almost 25 years, and its members are the winery's most loyal guests. But their bookings arrived through Rezdy, so the team had no idea a member had booked until the moment they walked through the door.
Dinners a thousand kilometres from the winery
The wine dinners raise the stakes. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and two venues in Perth, each one a real venue booking, a real menu, and real money committed before a single seat sells. Launching a dinner in a city on a guess is how wineries lose their appetite for events.
And the old routine made every release a relay race. A marketing email went out with a link to a Google Doc where customers registered interest. Members who pre-registered got first access to book. Payment ran through Rezdy, and someone on the team then created a matching order in Shopify by hand. An email, a spreadsheet, a payment in one system, and a hand-made order in another. Every time.
Bookings that should live where the wine sells
Gibson sells its wine on Shopify. If the tastings and dinners lived in a separate booking tool, every guest relationship would start in one system and continue in another, and the connection between the visit and the next order would be lost. For a team of three full-time staff, that gap is not just untidy. It is time nobody has.
Sam's brief was short:
"We want to keep our CRM as one source of truth. We want to take payments directly, without secondary transactions. We want to improve the customer journey and how we stay in touch after the visit. And we want to manage our staff time more effectively."
The case for moving was never the booking fees. It was what the winery gave up by keeping its guests somewhere else:
"Keeping all our data in Shopify is more of a business opportunity than commissionable experiences."
The solution: One calendar, launched to the people who asked for it
Gibson replaced Rezdy with Easy Appointment Booking in December 2025 and put every experience on one calendar, inside the same Shopify store that sells the wine. Sam's four asks map almost one to one onto how it was set up:
- Every experience, one system: casual tastings, premium hosted experiences, vintage tours, and capital-city dinners all bookable in one place
- One source of truth: every booking is a Shopify order, so a guest's visits, club membership and wine purchases collect in the same customer record instead of two systems that never speak to each other
- Payment at the point of booking: seats are paid for through Shopify checkout, so there's no secondary transaction to chase or reconcile afterwards
- Waitlist-first launches: new experiences open to a waitlist before dates are announced, so the team can pick the venue and price point knowing the demand is already there
- Follow-up in Gibson's voice: the Klaviyo connection carries the before-and-after journey Sam admired up the road, written in Gibson's words rather than a generic system template
- Check-in at the door: on the day, the team checks guests in through Shopify POS, so the cellar door knows who actually arrived, not just who booked
Custom times for the guest in front of you
One small thing gets used more than anything else. Fixed time slots are the enemy of hospitality: when the calendar only offers 10, 11 and 12, a guest who asks for 1:30 gets written into the 1 o'clock and the day quietly gets messier. Gibson's team can now open a custom time for the guest in front of them.
"Love custom time. Use that every day."
The waitlist-first approach isn't theory either. When the capital-city dinner series launched in March 2026, all five city events went up on the same day, and more than 100 guests joined the waitlists within weeks, before Gibson had committed to a venue in any city. The relay race is gone: from joining the waitlist to the invitation to book to the paid confirmation, the whole run now moves through the app's Klaviyo flows on its own, with nothing updated by hand.
The results: The tasting is where the relationship starts
For a winery, the booking is not the sale. It is the start of one.
Nearly 500 reservations came through in the first nine months, a steady month-in, month-out rhythm rather than a one-off spike, and what happens after those visits is the part Gibson cares about most. Guests taste at the cellar door or take a seat at a dinner, go home, and keep ordering, with most of that follow-on spend coming through the online store. Because the booking, the visit, and the follow-up all live in the same Shopify stack, Gibson can actually see that relationship instead of guessing at it.
This is the journey Sam admired on that tasting up the road, now running at her own cellar door: the relationship keeps going long after the guest leaves the tasting bench. Every booking creates a Shopify customer, and Sam explains what that's worth with a guest named Joe:
"Joe makes a reservation online to join us for a tasting, and at the end of Joe's experience we can process his order using Joe's customer data in Shopify. This creates better CRM management, and better data integrity for things like Klaviyo segmentations."
The system earned its keep in April, the Barossa's peak month. Gibson added a bookable vintage tour that ran before cellar door opening hours, on top of the regular tastings, and Sam set the month's roster using the app's bookings-by-day-of-week reporting rather than gut feel.
And day to day, the cellar door team spends its time on hospitality rather than admin. Sam checks bookings from her phone through the Shopify app, which is how a seven-day service stays manageable. There is quieter revenue in the toolkit too: Gibson runs private, customisable events that never appear on the website, bookable only by the guests they were built for.
What's next
With the calendar humming, Gibson gets to think about what to launch rather than how to run it: more cities, new experiences, and whatever the waitlist asks for next.
Her thoughts for other wineries weighing the move:
"With staff training, the seamless integration with Shopify is a powerful tool in our winery DTC toolbelt. The data reporting built into Easy Appointment Booking is insightful and accurate."
Still running your cellar door on Rezdy or another standalone booking platform while your wine sells on Shopify? Gibson's move is what one system looks like: bookings, club, and wine sales on the same customer record.
Gibson Wines runs on the Ultimate plan of Easy Appointment Booking, with waitlists, Klaviyo flows, and POS check-in at the cellar door. Curious how other wineries run their tastings? See how Tantalus Vineyards grew its winery experiences by 10%, or explore our winery booking software.
