Food and Beverages

This paper aims at determining the reasons customers prefer to buy wine online or offline, comprising both m-commerce

(mobile commerce) and e-commerce platforms. It strives to understand the determinants for deciding to buy wine in a

store such as a supermarket, hypermarket, wine store or wine grower selling their wine close to their vineyards versus deciding to buy wine online using the Internet from an e-commerce website or mobile application. Moreover, the goal is to find out about the differences in the behavior of wine buyers in France. The purpose of the study is the examination of consumer preferences and expectations for buying wine either offline or online. To answer our research question, we created an online questionnaire and embedded it in a responsive website in order to maximize the response rate. Various scales from papers published in top journals were used. The questions were devised based on the UTAUT model developed by Venkatesh et al., from this theoretical construct, the following scales were applied: performance expectancy, social influence, facilitation conditions, and attitude toward using technology. To date, no paper has examined the differences between shopping in a retail store versus shopping on an e-commerce website or application while using the construct mentioned above. Hence, our contribution provides preliminary results on wine shopping behavior and reveals what drives consumers to make a decision in favor of buying wine offline or online. The pleasure dimension of in-store shopping is often a priority in customers’ responses. Results reveal that searching for wine on the internet is easy, suggesting that customers may appreciate looking at wine online while buying it offline. This can go through merchandising, whether visual, sound, olfactory, but also by a true vision of the point of sale as a place of life, as a destination in its own right. The price of the delivery when buying wine online represents another barrier to consider, especially with a population greater than 25-years old used to not paying for delivery. Recommendations from cavists, wine growers or specialists of wine strongly influence wine consumers across age demographics. Websites or apps offering advice such as Vivino may help increase online wine sales. The quality of being user-friendly represents the most important variable when selling wine online as it positions consumers in a better situation to buy. Gender does not influence the act of buying wine online because males and females act the same when they want to buy wine, either online or offline. As written in this paper, this is a pre-test enabling us to conduct another survey with complete scales.