The popularity of B2C consumer e-commerce platforms dedicated entirely to wine and spirits is one major trend that is helping wine sales take off in China. For Western wine brands, the ability to ship directly to consumers without the need to develop complex distribution strategies for retail and restaurant channels has opened up entirely new business opportunities. Chinese wine lovers now can order their favourite wines online the same way they might order clothing or household goods. And, in many cases, these B2C platforms now offer same-day delivery to consumers in major Chinese cities.

YesMyWine

One of the most popular direct-to-consumer platforms is Chinese B2B website YesMyWine, which originally launched in November 2008. The company made headlines in 2014 when it announced that it had sold over 7 million bottles of wine online in one year. According to some estimates, YesMyWine now has 6.6 million members, making it a powerful platform for any wine brand attempting to reach the Chinese wine consumer.

What makes YesMyWine particularly unique is how close it remains to the consumer, making it particularly nimble in spotting how new trends are influencing purchasing habits. For example, back in 2014, the company already saw how trends like mobile were going to transform the wine buying experience. By 2015, visits to YesMyWine.com from mobile and desktop had equalized.

YesMyWine continues to push forward with innovative ideas for expansion. As e-commerce giants like Tmall and JD.com have expanded their own online wine sales, YesMyWine began to operate storefronts on these e-commerce platforms. And YesMyWine has been at the forefront of creating O2O (Online to Offline) business models for the wine industry. In one type of partnership relationship, restaurants looking to increase the size, scope and quality of their wine offerings can now set up dedicated sales counters where customers can purchase bottles, all of them sourced from YesMyWine. According to company executives, over 1,000 restaurants in Shanghai have signed up for this O2O model, a sign of the growing sophistication of Chinese wine consumers, who are finally warming up to the idea of food-wine pairings.

According to YesMyWine executives, the philosophy of the company is, “Education first, sales follow.” What this means in practical terms is that the YesMyWine.com website is filled with educational videos, customer reviews and tasting notes, and members of wine communities that often meet in the real world for tastings and other events. The ideal YesMyWine.com consumer is a young Chinese millennial and a member of the upwardly mobile middle class in one of China’s mega-cities.

Vinehoo

Another major player in the Chinese DTC market is Vinehoo.com, which originally launched in 2004 as a forum for wine fans. The Managing Director of Vinehoo.com, Oliver Zhou, is one of the most influential voices within the Chinese wine industry and was named by Meininger at the end of 2018 as one of the Key Opinion Leaders for Chinese wine.

Notably, Vinehoo has played an important role in educating Chinese wine drinkers about foreign wine, especially bottles from premium foreign producers. As Zhou has noted in interviews, big e-commerce giants such as JD.com focus primarily on price-sensitive and entry-level wine consumers, whereas Vinehoo focuses on more sophisticated wine drinkers willing to pay a premium for the very best wines. Vinehoo, for example, now organizes “flash sales” of premium wine for its members, giving them access to incredible markdowns on the types of wines that appeal to true wine connoisseurs.

Moreover, Vinehoo has also been able to create DTC wine experiences for foreign brands looking to tap into the e-commerce wine trend. Vinehoo, for example, partnered with Wine Australia to operate a Tmall store for Australian wineries. This gives Australian wine brands a way to access the Chinese market, without the need to set up their own e-commerce operation. Customers shopping for Australian wines on Tmall will likely run across the Wine Australia storefront on the platform, making it easy to learn about different brands, grape varietals and wine regions before making the ultimate purchase.

WeChat Wine

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rapid growth of Chinese social media has also created direct-to-consumer wine opportunities via mobile devices. One way to see how this dynamic is playing out is with WeChat Wine, which is an innovative way to connect Chinese wine drinkers on WeChat with premium Australian vineyards looking to sell into the Chinese market. Australia is now the No. 2 wine exporter to China, trailing only France, so it’s natural that Australian wineries are looking for ways to reach a wider and wider segment of the population, without having to invest in a lot of costly infrastructures.

With WeChat Wine, Australian vineyards can get their own storefront page on WeChat, giving them access to nearly 700 million active WeChat users. Not all of those WeChat users are wine drinkers, of course, but the current estimate is that there are 48 million regular wine drinkers in China now, including 23 million who purchase at least one bottle of imported wine per month. Once the storefront has been set up, Australian wineries have a very convenient way to handle direct shipments of wine to China. WeChat Wine handles all the back-end logistics, processes all the payments, and also creates the type of Chinese-language interface required to succeed in China.

Other players in the DTC wine market

One new entrant in the Chinese wine market is the website Lady Penguin, which really functions as a combination of an online community for wine enthusiasts, an e-commerce platform, a social media hub and a wine club. The site is the creation of one of China’s top Key Opinion Leaders, Wang Shenghan (“Drunk Mother Goose”), who has parlayed her own phenomenal success across Chinese social media into micro-celebrity success within China’s wine industry. Her candid online wine reviews for Weibo, for example, now attract tens of thousands of views. To understand how and why the DTC wine model has become so popular in China, it is important to see how all the various elements of an online presence can be combined into a very powerful tool for recommending wines to wine enthusiasts.

And other entrants are coming up with unique twists on the DTC and O2O business model. 1919 Wines & Spirits, for example, is perhaps the best example of an online e-commerce platform that is also backed up with nearly 1,000 brick-and-mortar storefronts across China. When customers order wine online, they can either have it delivered to their home, or they can pick it up at one of the convenient nearby locations of 1919. The name of the company is a reference to the fact that any Chinese wine drinker is just 19 minutes away from picking up a bottle of wine.

Going forward, it’s easy to see how the blurring of the line between social media commerce, mobile commerce, and traditional e-commerce will lead to even more exciting opportunities for wine brands to access the DTC consumer wine market.