Wine e-commerce – statistics & facts
Wine e-commerce is a relatively new market that weaves the age-old tradition of winemaking with the tools provided by today’s modern technologies. More conventional sommeliers and wine lovers would argue that e-commerce platforms could never substitute the pleasure associated with entering a wine bar and mulling over the exquisite variety of choice before choosing a bottle to take home. However, the global wine market in the post-pandemic era seems to be defined by a shopping experience touching multiple channels, including out-of-home consumption. Consumers will always go to wine bars, but they may also be tempted by the product range, promotional offers and otherwise difficult to find wine brands and varieties offered exclusively by online retailers.
However, with staggering levels of inflation pushing the brakes on consumption in European economies and beyond, the post-pandemic challenge of online wine retailers becomes two-fold: capitalizing on pandemic gains with the return of on-premise competition, but also maintaining consumer reach in the face of declining consumption.
A burgeoning market bolstered by the pandemic
The wine market was no exception to the switch to digital galvanized by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. On the contrary, many online wine retailers were propelled to significance by the pandemic-induced e-commerce boom. In the United States, the e-commerce share of wine sales went from only 0.3 percent in 2018 to nearly three percent in 2022. The e-commerce channel promises to be lucrative, too. The top five wine and liquor online stores in the U.S. together generated just under one billion dollars in e-commerce net sales in 2023. Similarly, a shift to digital is underway in the United Kingdom, where the online revenue share of the wine market is forecast to reach a solid five percent by 2026.Wine thrives online
For online businesses operating in smaller e-commerce segments, the pandemic created an unprecedented opportunity to forge their way into people’s consumption patterns. Online wine retailers grabbed the opportunity and saw their revenues and consumer reach increase significantly as a result. Totalwine.com saw its e-commerce net sales more than double in the United States, going from an estimated 145 million U.S. dollars in 2019 to more than 330 million U.S. dollars in 2023. Similarly, the global market presence of Naked Wines, spanning three continents, was also reinforced by the pandemic: with approximately 178 million British pounds in sales revenue in 2019, the wine e-commerce company saw its revenues surpass 350 million pounds by 2023. Looking less and less like a small niche market, competition is multiplying in the wine e-commerce market both at the local and global levels. Long-established brick-and-mortar stores and distributors like Germany’s Hawesko and Australia’s Dan Murphy’s are flocking to the digital sphere to sell wine and liquor alongside pure players like Denmark's Vivino and France's Vinatis, which managed to build up successful marketplaces.Looking ahead
With the return of on-premise and the easing of lockdown restrictions, wine e-commerce is catapulted into direct competition with brick-and-mortar stores and establishments offering on-premise experiences. Nevertheless, consumers that switched to digital during the pandemic seem to have maintained the habit of shopping online, at least to a certain extent. Nearly half of French consumers reported purchasing wine online at the height of the pandemic in 2021. While that figure dropped to 33 percent in 2024, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels, showing positive signs that online shopping for wine is here to stay.However, with staggering levels of inflation pushing the brakes on consumption in European economies and beyond, the post-pandemic challenge of online wine retailers becomes two-fold: capitalizing on pandemic gains with the return of on-premise competition, but also maintaining consumer reach in the face of declining consumption.
