Online wine purchasing: A comparison between South Africa and Italy

The purpose of this study is to explore South African and Italian consumers’ attitude towards online wine purchasing. In detail, through the application of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this research intends to explain the antecedents of consumers actual online purchasing of wine in South Africa and in Italy. Two questionnaire-based surveys were conducted, yielding a sample of 190 consumers in South Africa and of 179 in Italy. Data were analyzed through several techniques including t-tests, principal component factor analyses and binary logistic regressions. Overall, the findings show that South African and Italian online wine consumers are more similar than the offline wine consumers. However, perceived usefulness has an impact on the use of the online channel to purchase wine in Italy but not in South Africa, while perceived complexity has an effect in South Africa but not in Italy. This study adopts a convenience sampling technique, suggesting that the used samples are not representative of the whole population. Moreover, TAM offers a simple and clear understanding of the actual use of wine e-commerce but overlooks other potential explanatory factors. Targeting online wine consumers in South Africa and Italy opens up the opportunity for using cross-national highly-standardized product and communication strategies. However, different approaches are required to convert offline wine consumers to online wine consumers in South Africa and in Italy. This is the first cross-national study investigating consumers’ attitude towards online wine purchasing in South Africa and Italy. Moreover, it offers a comparison of online and offline wine consumers in the two countries. In addition, the research offers a new point of view over consumers of Italy and South Africa, two important countries in terms of wine production and consumption, that can be very beneficial for wineries owners and managers.