Scale of online wine sales in China

As of August 2016, China has approximately 21 million wine buyers online, making it the world’s largest and fastest-growing e-commerce market for wine, and the channel is becoming increasingly important for Chinese wine drinkers. The internet has surpassed hypermarkets and department stores to become the second most popular channel to buy wine. Online sales makes up for 5% of total wine sales globally. But in China, online sales is 20% of total wine imports.

Two major Chinese players in the online wine sales are Alibaba (through Tmall) and JD.com. Tmall's newly launched Vinyard Direct Program is a channel for overseas chateaux and producers to launch sell directly to consumers in China. JD.com, on the other hand, works both as an importer to buy wines from abroad and sell it directly and as a ‘shopping mall’ for wine merchants to host their own shops. It had sold 400m yuan (US$61.5m) of wine direct to consumers as an importer in 2015 and expect to triple the sales in 2016. Sales on its "shopping mall" also expect to triple in 2016 to hit 1.5bn yuan. The growth room is still tremendous - only 3-4% of JD.com's registered customer currently buy wine through the website.

Source:
1. Wine Intelligence (http://www.wineintelligence.com/the-future-is-now/)
2. Decanter China (https://www.decanterchina.com/en/knowledge/people/importers/jd-com-mapping-the-landscape-of-online-wine-sales-in-china-part-i)