We’re buying more and more of our wine online as millennials learn to drink wine
Don’t drink and… click? Britons are ignoring this advice, it seems. Online sales of wine are going through the roof, as the country’s millennials are growing up and learning to appreciate the taste of a nice bottle of plonk.
E-commerce is driving nearly all of wine retail’s growth, according to Rabobank’s latest Wine Quarterly report.
Total wine sales grew 3.5 per cent over the first quarter of 2015, but online sales outstripped this growth more than three times over, increasing 11 per cent during the same period.
This is unsurprising, perhaps, after Britain was recently crowned the e-commerce capital of Europe. We’re buying everything else online (and increasingly, doing our shopping on our phones), so why not booze, too?
Read more: Clicks vs bricks is gone: Even savvy e-commerce firms need to do both
But tech-savvy millennials finally learning to drink wine are the reason sales are up so much right now. At least according to Rabobank, which highlights the UK’s 18-29-year-olds as an “increasingly wine-drinking demographic” and a key reason for online sales growth.
As e-commerce grows, the report suggests wine retailers must find a way of standing out in the crowd online:
Most wine marketers are still in the early stages of developing an online strategy.
They are struggling to find ways of standing our in a crowded playing field, avoiding channel conflict and effectively integrating process with their social media presence.