Today’s Chinese wine consumers are seconds away from connecting with wine merchants. The country has 710m online shoppers, of which 707m are mobile shoppers as of March 2020, a growth that has been accelerated by the pandemic, according to CNNIC.

China’s most popular social media app WeChat, owned and developed by tech giant Tencent, today has 1.15bn monthly active users (in a country of 1.4bn people). Sina Weibo, similar to Facebook, has over 400m monthly active users. Bytedance, the parent company that owns TikTok (or Douyin in Chinese), has some 800m users worldwide. Its competitor Kuaishou, another homegrown video streaming app, has 400m monthly active users.

This comprehensive network of Chinese-language social media platforms is intrinsically woven into the country’s leading e-commerce platforms, Alibaba-owned Tmall.com, Tencent-owned JD.com, and Pinduoduo. The three platforms combined would take up close to 90% of China’s overall e-commerce market. The country’s mammoth e-commerce market also spawned a unique and effective selling channel – livestreaming. Alibaba, by far the country’s largest e-commerce operator, and JD.com dominate the livestreaming market with 80% market share.