E-commerce and Italian Wine: can they match successfully? - A Mystery Shopping analysis

Abstract

Italian Wine, distinctive product of made in Italy, and e-commerce are two topics that are assuming increasingly relevance in the last period. This thesis proposes a Mystery Shopping analysis to establish to what extent this distribution channel is exploited by wineries. The research starts from a description of international trends like globalization and technological innovations and their impact on economy. Successively the reader can find specific information about Italian wine, both from supply and demand side. Particular attention has been paid to changes in consumers’ habits and to the fact clients are assuming growing importance from a managerial point of view (Customer Satisfaction Management). After that, we have considered a representative sample of e-commerce web sites, where a foreign client can buy Italian wine. To simplify the analysis, we supposed to be an English-speaking client who is going to buy “Prosecco”. In order to evaluate the quality of these e-commerce sites we selected from literature about twenty parameters which level of importance has been establish by millennials cyber-consumers through an on-line survey. Finally, Mystery Shopper technique has been used to investigate to what extent these parameters were developed in the selected web-sites.