Wine on the Web in a Global Market: a Comparison of E-commerce Readiness and Use in Australia, California and Germany

Wine is indicative for ongoing globalization, it is a highly differentiated, internationally traded experience product. We chose the wine industries of Australia, California and Germany because there is sufficient variation in the regulatory, economic and technological environments to analyze the determinants of e-commerce diffusion and its impact on agricultural industries. Therefore some developments in the wine industry might be indicative for other agricultural industries that are still at a lower level of the e-commerce diffusion curve. To determine the extent of which wineries and wine market intermediators participate in e-commerce and to also find out what has changed within the last two years we surveyed their websites, first at the end of the year 2000 and again at the beginning of 2003. In this paper we point out the interregional differences and the different developments found, and explain these in the light of the countries’ level of e-commerce readiness, the differing industry structures, sales costs and market intermediation. We find that Australian and California wineries are in leading positions but German wineries are loosing ground. In all of the three countries, the web wine retail industry continues to consolidate as more web retailers exit from the industry.