How WeChat, an IM app, makes e-Commerce possible
Nov 15th, 2013 by michellecheung2
On November 11, Tencent’s (the mainland’s largest listed internet company) 51buy website offered the usual extensive sales on Single’s Day, one of China’s biggest online shopping festivals. This year, Tencent executed an integrated campaign between the 51buy website and Tencent’s WeChat mobile app, a popular instant messaging application in China (See picture below for growth of WeChat users) The target segment of this campaign was residents in big urban cities in China – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The result was of the roughly 600,000 51buy orders made on Singles Day, orders via WeChat exceeded 80,000 (~ 13.33%). That translates to over HK$637m of sales made in a single day by this free instant messaging mobile application, which made Tencent a risk to Alibaba who is currently a leader in the e-commerce sector in China.
In comparison to other methods of shopping online, customers can purchase their preferred products faster on WeChat. It is because there is no online shopping cart in which the users need to add the items into before “checking out”, so it makes the whole purchasing process more efficient and straight forward in users’ perspective. Also, users don’t need to click the third-party payment links like what most e-commerce platforms have. Instead, users only need to register their bank cards with WeChat to complete the transactions.
I believe that simplifying the online shopping process is crucial in improving the total shopping experience of consumers when they shop via their mobile devices because ultimately, “Shopping habits in the mobile space are different from the PC space,” Song Yang, Tencent’s deputy general manager for e-commerce. The objective of improving user experience is what make Tencent successful and catch up with rival Alibaba.