The Study of Chinese Online Wine Consumers

China has a higher level of online retail sales than any other global market and therefore may signal trends in the evolution of e-commerce in other markets. Wine is one product where online sales are growing rapidly in China, Therefore the purchasing behaviors of e-commerce wine consumers are gaining great attention.

Generally speaking, wine e-commerce platforms could be classified into three categories: the first one is wine specific e-commerce, like yesmywine, jiumeiwang, pinshang etc.; the second one is an alcohol offering integrated e-commerce platform like jiuxianwang, wangjiuwang, jingdong, T-Mall etc; the third one is winery owned e-commerce platform.

This article is based on the feedback of 2276 wine online consumers collected from 2015 to 2016 using the customer data base of yesmywine, which is the biggest wine specific platform in China and focuses on imported wine. In this article, statistical analyses were used to understand online wine consumers in order to provide insights for the future development of e-commerce wine marketing and sales strategies.

Table 1 profiles online wine consumers by gender, age, price and delivery location (cities/provinces). From table 1, it can be seen that female consumers dominate the online wine shopping, accounting for 80.8% while only 18.7% were males. Wine consumers were predominantly 26-35 years old with a proportion of 41.6%, 22% were 46-55 years old, which was followed closely by the age group of 36-45.

The wines sold on line were predominantly under 100RMB, of which 43.9% were between 50 and 99 and 41.8% were under 50 RMB. The online wine consumers were mainly from the south of China such as Shanghai, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Chongqing. Beijing is only prominent city in Northern China.  In summary, a typical profile of online wine consumers in China reveal the following characteristics: female, 26-35 years old, purchasing wine under 100 RMB, resident in  southern China.

Table 1 Descriptive Analyses

Table 2 shows the factors that influence the purchasing decisions of online wine consumers.  These factors include wine familiarity (previously tasted ), online wine promotion activities, friends recommendation, price, varieties, wine origin (wine region), others’ comments on these wines, wine label design, trophies and the e-commerce platform for wine purchase.

It can be seen from the multiple response consumer results collated in table 2 that all these factors are of comparable importance except for wine label design; and for trophies, both of which are contrary to our expectation.

Price, and online platform are the two factors that influence above 50% of wine purchase decisions of wine consumers. The importance of familiarity, promotion and region of origin are around 45%, among which promotion is actually is mainly price indicator, familiarity and origin is based on trust. Friends’ recommendation, grape varieties and others’ comments are in the middle range of importance. The reason behind the lower than expected trophy factor is most likely due to most Chinese wine consumers not having much wine knowledge to understand wine, let alone comprehend the relevance of the prolific wine shows and trophy awards. The limited wine knowledge explanation may also partly explain why grape varieties, friends’ recommendation and others’ comments are not of much importance since Chinese wine consumers will try new wines from various sources not rely on single source.

Table 2 Factors Influencing Online Wine Purchase (multiple responses)

Table 3 describes the wine consumption occasions of online wine consumers. These wine consumption occasions including home, party (with friends), business, relative (big family gathering) and colleague gathering. It can be seen from table 3 that more than 50% of wine purchased online was consumed at home or with relatives, while only 19.8% is for business purpose and colleague gathering only accounts for 20.3%. This result shows that wine in China is gradually becoming a common daily family drink instead of a luxury product. However this conclusion should be used with care since the data cited here is only for online sales channel wine consumers.

Table 3 Wine Consumption Occasions (multiple responses)

Table 4 shows the reasons that wine consumers drinking wine. These reasons include relaxation, social contacts, health, around influence, special atmosphere created in wine drinking and wine knowledge.  Health and atmosphere overshadowed all the other factors as the most important ones motivating wine drinking. It is not surprising that wine knowledge is the least important factor influencing wine drinking. Compared with a relaxation reason of 26.1%, more people, 39.2%, were using wine as a social tool.

Table 4 Reason for Wine Drinking (multiple responses)

Online wine shopping is becoming a very important factor influencing the wine purchase behaviors of people. Understanding online wine consumer shopping behaviors is of crucial importance in wine marketing.

This article used a data set of 2276 online wine consumers purchasing from a wine specific e-commerce platform in the China market to deepen our understanding of online wine consumer behaviors. The results of the analyses revealed some findings that we may not be aware of or challenge previous beliefs such as the results that trophy and wine label design had only a slight influence on online wine consumer shopping behaviors, also that most wine purchased online was for home consumption etc. These results could assist wine brand owners to design and better target their online wine marketing strategy in the China market. It study also shows that online purchasers are predominantly female, young and purchasing wine less than 100 RMB. This result could assist export wineries in design market segmentation and price marketing strategy.