It's about the bag or box, not what's inside

"The alternative is to pay a one-time small fee to get your QQ avatar professionally Photoshopped with an 'iPhone online' icon and hand-type the 'sent from QQ for iPhone (or iPad)' message each time you start a chat with somebody. Clumsy, but safe, and good bang for your buck."

Still, it seems people have wised up to these tech tricks, too.

Also drying up is demand for empty Chateau Lafite Rothschild bottles, which the report says have sold for anywhere from under 100 yuan to over 2,000.

"There used to be a remarkable number of such bottle sellers on Taobao and a whole swarm of them over the entire Chinese Internet. These bottles are not generally targeted at your everyday consumer but rather at counterfeit wine producers," the report explains.

"A bottle of Chateau Lafite wine, regardless of which label, can easily fetch over 10,000 yuan in China. It's a good deal for these producers, as they only have to spend 2,000 yuan on a genuine bottle, which will make the final product look that much closer to the real thing You can hardly find any Chateau Lafite bottle sellers on Taobao these days, but there still are plenty of them on other websites."

While some of the scarcity is because of shifting Chinese consumption, part of the reason they've become rare on Taobao is that the Rothschild family has been proactively going after vendors.

"This kind of phenomenon shows image is very important to many Chinese," says Dutch Sinologist Manya Koetse.

"Society has become more materialistic. Big brands and expensive wine have become status symbols. It's a sign of China's economic growth."

This progress will continue to change the way online shoppers try to buy face on the Internet, Koetse says.

"It's a phase. Eventually, the contents of a good red wine will become more important to people than the fancy label on the bottle."

Zhang Lei contributed to this story.