HOW TO FOSTER WINE ONLINE PURCHASING BEHAVIOR? EMPIRICAL EVIDENCES FROM ITALY

Over the last decade, e-commerce platforms for goods and services have been widely explored by the marketing literature. Coherently, e-commerce is emerging as a relevant distribution channel also in the wine industry. This notwithstanding, wine ecommerce platforms show a slower growth rate whether compared to other goods and services categories – such as electronic and digital products. This is particularly true in Italy where the total volume of e-commerce sales in the food and drink sector are less than 1% of the total online sales. Therefore, it is important to investigate the underlying mechanisms explaining consumers’ positive and negative intentions to purchase wine online. This will in fact allow both theoretical and practical insights to wine industry marketers. Hence, this study proposes and empirically tests a conceptual model concerning the antecedents of consumers’ intention to purchase wine online. Specifically, the objective is to identify the differences that are specific to the context of the wine buying process. The 5 steps of the purchasing process – need perception, pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase, intention of repatronage – are analyzed through eleven determinants such as risk aversion, convenience propensity, product information availability, degree of independence in purchasing, shopping enjoyment, channel layout, shipping conditions, loyalty intention, and free-riding behavior. Data were collected from a sample of Italian 570 online consumers who habitually purchase wine online. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for testing the hypothesized relationships. Results show that product information availability and convenience propensity significantly influence the digital channel selection and, consequently, loyalty and patronage intention. Building on these results, the present study suggests that wine industry should focus more on digital channels’ layout in order to better stimulate consumers’ loyalty and intention to provide positive feedbacks. Yet, it also emerged how this kind of channel is useful at most when targeting price sensitive consumers. Theoretical and practical implications are thus provided along with suggestions for future research in the marketing literature.