How Wine Brands Are Leveraging Douyin’s 750 Million Daily Users to Boost Sales

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, commands an unparalleled audience, making it a powerhouse in driving digital sales across countless categories—including wine.

With its vast and vibrant user engagement, Douyin not only shapes trends but also transforms them into substantial commercial successes. How, then, do wine merchants harness this platform’s colossal influence to amplify their sales? What specific strategies propel their wines into the carts of millions? The report delves into Douyin’s dynamic marketplace to shine a light on how wine brands can leverage the platform for sales.

750 Million Daily Active Users

As a leading social media platform in China, Douyin boasts an impressive 750 million daily active users. In comparison, Taobao, China’s biggest e-commerce platform, had a daily active user count of approximately 377.9 million in March—only about half of Douyin’s user base. Even during the peak shopping period of China’s major e-commerce festival “Singles Day” from October 31 to November 3, 2023, Taobao’s daily active users exceeded 500 million for four consecutive days, yet still fell short of Douyin’s numbers, highlighting Douyin’s significantly higher user engagement compared to traditional e-commerce giants.

Douyin also seamlessly integrates shopping and social networking. In addition to being a short video platform, it also features a marketplace within the same app, including alcoholic beverage sales. According to the “2023 Douyin Platform Alcohol Industry Report” released by a third party, in 2023, there were 416,000 alcoholic drinks products for sale on Douyin, accounting for just 0.107% of all products on the platform. Moreover, there were over 2.071 million livestreaming sessions related to alcohol in the past year. Though the report did not disclose wine sales revenue, its sales in the Douyin marketplace grew by 35.57% in revenue and 29.91% in volume, according to the report.

This explains why major brands and wine companies have already had a presence on Douyin, including popular Australian wine brand Penfolds, France’s DBR Lafite, ASC Fine Wines, Lady Penguin, and Pinshanghui.

Content Matters

Douyin’s marketplace is similar to many other online platforms in China, with nothing new in terms of interface or operation. However, customer acquisition channels on Douyin’s marketplace vary greatly from traditional e-commerce platforms.

According to Zhou Yuan, the China representative for the Georgian wine brand Ranina, there are three main customer acquisition channels on Douyin: the marketplace itself, short videos, and livestreaming, with livestreaming having the largest capacity, followed by short videos.

Yuan Xu, the founder of Miss Yuan’s Sweet Wine Store, one of China’s top selling online wine merchants specializing in sweet wine, echoed Zhou’s view. Although Douyin’s marketplace also has traffic from searches, users are more accustomed to discovering and purchasing products through short videos and livestreaming, she added. This contrasts sharply with traditional e-commerce platforms like Taobao, which primarily rely on search for sales volume.

“This is why, although it is also an e-commerce platform, selling on Douyin places higher demands on the content creation capabilities of operators, requiring skills in editing, photography, directing, streaming control, and traffic investment, which involve significant human resources and costs,” said Yuan.

Miss Yuan’s Sweet Wine Store has been a top wine seller on Taobao for years. With the rise of Douyin, Yuan also attempted to sell products on Douyin, but she eventually abandoned this channel due to the high costs of content production.

However, the market has seen the emergence of many professional content operation agencies and accounts. Products can be linked to popular accounts for sales, reducing costs compared to independent operation and often yielding better results. When collaborating with moderately popular Douyin Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), commissions generally range from 10-15% of sales.

Additionally, content creation on Douyin is notorious for its many “unwritten rules,” where one can easily be subjected to restricted account traffic or suspension without warning. The commonly recognized taboos when promoting alcoholic products include not violating advertising laws, such as claiming health benefits of alcoholic beverages, and not depicting drinking actions.

Interestingly, Douyin’s marketplace also seems to be trying to boost sales in the search domain, becoming a “traditional e-commerce.” In April, the Douyin Mall app was launched on Android systems. Last year, Douyin also created its own Douyin Supermarket.

Is there an influx of low-quality wines?

Douyin’s wine market is saturated with strikingly low-priced offerings. Our findings show wines listed at RMB 88.8 for a set of six, wines priced at RMB 9.9 a bottle, and bundle sales of RMB 159 for eight bottles, making affordability a clear selling point on the platform. However, this focus on low cost comes with its challenges.

During livestreaming sessions, instances of false advertising and misrepresentation are rampant. Features like heavy bottles, deep indentations, winery owner signatures, and excessive packaging are often misrepresented as indicators of luxury wines. Hosts have been caught falsely labeling counterfeit products as prestigious brands like Lafite or Penfolds, or misleadingly advertising locally bottled wines as imported.

Such unregulated and misleading promotions have consistently attracted criticism from industry insiders. Despite Douyin’s efforts to clean up its marketplace, significant challenges remain. In our research for this article, we found no products with overtly copied packaging or names when searching for “Lafite” and “Penfolds” on Douyin. However, while some high-volume, domestically bottled wines were accurately labeled as “Made in China,” other discrepancies persist, with some wines still erroneously marketed as imported. There are also wines bearing striking resemblances to existing brands.

This ongoing pattern of deception not only misleads consumers but also risks damaging Douyin’s reputation in the wine market. The prevalence of low-end, incorrectly marketed wines raises concerns about the platform’s ability to attract and maintain a more discerning wine clientele, potentially limiting its market reach to only those seeking budget-friendly options.

Slow Sales for Premium Wines

This ecosystem that heavily skews towards low-end wines meant slow sales for premium wines. For example, the Shenzhen-based wine company Pinshanghui, which distributes DBR Lafite and Montes on Douyin, has only three products with significant sales on its Douyin homepage, Pinshanghui Wine Shop. The top-selling product reached a modest total of 3,347 bottles. Sales for other offerings typically hover in the low hundreds or even tens.

A visit to Pinshanghui Wine Shop’s homepage during its “14th Anniversary Celebration” livestream highlights the issue: only 41 viewers tuned in. This lack of engagement is mirrored at the New Zealand National Wine Shop, the official account for New Zealand WineGrowers. Here, despite a few products breaking the thousand sales mark—such as a set of three New Zealand dry whites—the livestream sessions attracted a meager seven viewers.

Zhou Yuan of Ranina points out that Douyin’s user base has a strong preference for low-priced wines, which poses a significant barrier to selling premium products. Additionally, the success of sales on Douyin heavily depends on the host’s popularity. A striking example of this is NBA star James Harden’s appearance in a livestream hosted by the popular influencer Crazy Brother Yang last August, where they sold 16,000 bottles of wine in just 10 seconds. However, securing such influential personalities comes at a high cost, with fees for product link placements potentially running into hundreds of thousands of RMB.

Despite these challenges, Zhou maintains a positive outlook on the opportunities Douyin presents due to its massive traffic. “Even so, because of Douyin’s high traffic, people are still willing to join and seek opportunities. In fact, many wines wouldn’t sell much on platforms like Taobao Tmall either, due to the wine category not being mainstream enough. It’s not entirely the platform’s fault,” Zhou said.