Topdrop Wine Shop. Finest Wines – Lowest Prices.

One wine. One price. One opportunity. — How Topdrop sells premium wines with Vendure

Hey Jaroslav!
Tell us a bit about your client and the "Topdrop" project.

Jaroslav Bobrowski: Our client topdropmarket GmbH, based in Hamburg, runs topdrop (topdropmarket.de), an online wine shop with a radically simple, forward-looking concept: Finest wines — lowest prices. There is always exactly one top international wine on offer — hand-picked by wine experts and sold at an unbeatable price thanks to market knowledge, good connections and low storage costs. Each offer is strictly limited: as soon as the current wine sells out, the next one goes online.

It's exactly this "one-product model" that makes the project so exciting from a technical perspective. Almost everything a classic shop system requires — large catalogs, category trees, faceted search — is irrelevant here. Instead, what matters is a watertight offer lifecycle, a fast, emotional storefront and a smooth checkout.

Products

Exclusive wines

Main Services

Digitalization strategy

Technology selection

UX/UI design

Webshop frontend

Webshop backend

Website

www.topdropmarket.de

Vendure.io Partnership

What factors influenced your decision for Vendure?

JB: We were looking for a headless, API-first commerce framework on a modern TypeScript stack that we could adapt to a very unusual business model without having to fight the platform. The deciding factor was Vendure's plugin architecture: we knew from the start that topdrop would need a lot of custom business logic (offer rotation, invoicing, referral program, payment processing) — and with Vendure, all of that can be implemented as a clean, isolated plugin without ever touching the core.

We bet on Vendure early: the project started on Vendure 1.0.0-beta, and the shop has been running on the latest version ever since. The migration effort across all major versions was always manageable — which confirmed our decision: the platform grew along with the project, and all of our custom plugins survived every migration.

The GraphQL APIs (Shop & Admin), the NestJS foundation and the extensible Admin UI rounded out the picture: for our team, everything felt familiar and productive from day one. In the meantime we have become a Vendure partner and use Vendure whenever a project calls for a flexible, developer-friendly commerce backend.

„What convinced us most about Vendure wasn't a single feature, but the confidence that we would never have to fight the platform. We could build every quirk of our business as its own, clean plugin. The result is a platform that feels like it was made specifically for this business model.“

Jaroslav Bobrowski,
Senior Lead Developer @campudus

FLEXIBILITY WITH PLUGINS

What challenges did you face?

JB: The central challenge was the technical representation of topdrop's flash-sale concept: only ever one product is live and purchasable, strictly limited — and as soon as it's sold out, the system has to switch seamlessly to the next offer. We solved this with a custom offer-rotation plugin that manages the entire lifecycle: scheduling, activating the current wine, enforcing the limited stock and automatically switching to the next offer.

Beyond that, we built a whole range of other custom plugins around the Vendure core:

Invoices & Delivery Notes
A plugin that generates PDF documents directly from Vendure orders — including ZUGFeRD support for electronic invoices, which is increasingly important for compliance in Germany.

PayPal Express Checkout
A custom payment plugin for a fast, low-friction express checkout — essential for a shop where purchase decisions are spontaneous and offers are time-critical.

Refer-a-Friend
A custom referral plugin. You refer topdrop to a friend, the friend receives a voucher — and if they place an order, the referrer receives a voucher too. A perfect fit for a product people love to talk about.

Newsletter (RapidMail)
An integration with RapidMail so subscribers are informed the moment a new wine goes online — the heartbeat of the "one offer at a time" model.

Order Overview in the Admin UI
A plugin that extends the product detail view in the Vendure Admin UI with an order overview, so the topdrop team can see at a glance how the current offer is performing.

Flash Messages / Toasts
A storefront notification plugin to inform visitors in real time about special offers and time-critical news.

The remarkable thing: none of this required us to fork or patch Vendure. Every feature lives in its own plugin, built on Vendure's extension points — custom entities, GraphQL API extensions, event subscribers and Admin UI extensions.

LEAN & POWERFUL

How did you build the storefront application?

JB: The storefront is built with Next.js and communicates with Vendure's GraphQL Shop API. Since the entire shop revolves around a single hero product, we were able to design a very focused, fast and emotional storefront: the current wine takes center stage, with in-depth storytelling about its origin and character, while the checkout is kept as short as possible.

Next.js gives us the performance and SEO benefits of server-side rendering, and the GraphQL API made the data integration straightforward — the Vendure documentation covered everything we needed.

Your closing thoughts.

JB: Topdrop has since become immensely successful — not just in terms of revenue, but also in the rush for particularly sought-after wines and during seasonal peaks like Black Friday, Christmas or Easter. Even under this high traffic, the shop stays stable and performant, which is crucial for a model with only one purchasable product: when a coveted offer goes online, it's often a matter of seconds.

Vendure has proven to be the ideal foundation for a business model that no standard shop system could have supported without extensive workarounds. The plugin architecture allowed us to turn an unconventional idea — one wine, one price, one chance — into a lean, maintainable platform that has been running in production since the days of the Vendure 1.0 beta and reliably withstands load spikes.