WeShop Available for Public Beta

WeShop, “Micro Choose” in Chinese language sense, is a mobile marketplace embedded in WeChat powered by mini programs, has been released for public beta in the first week of this March.

It is a joint venture by JD.com and online fashion retailer Meili, WeShop has reportedly got over 50,000 merchants and local Chinese on board on the platform. It is regarded as a strategic move to make online shopping more fun, exciting and fulfilling for Chinese consumers. It brings innovative social e-commerce features to shoppers and a vast set of tools to businesses that want to reach customers through more effective Chinese social media marketing

JD.com, the leading Chinese online retailer, had been added onto WeChat in 2014 as the “Shopping” channel under the Discover tab, and now the new venture powered by WeChat’s mini programs is strengthening JD’s current prioritized position on WeChat, helping merchants to reach a broader customer base. Users can easily get access to WeShop by entering the “Shopping” channel and tapping the “WeShop” button in the Chinese version of the app.

WeShop has yet made available the direct purchase or shopping features, while shoppers can directly communicate with the merchants by tapping on the chat button on the bottom of the merchant page, or even add the merchants as friends on WeChat.

The new JV is believed to amalgamate JD’s advantages in customer service, logistics, retail infrastructure and its quality/authenticity control with Meili’s social commerce leadership in female shopping landscape.

“The new platform will change the way that sellers target consumers and serve a wide range of underserviced consumers in China,” said Chen Qi, the CEO founder of Meili Inc., who has been named the chairman of the new joint venture.

WeShop has so far seen a significant number of local merchants, especially SMEs. While JD.com remain its main platform at JD.com, JD certainly is not afraid of making efforts to sell on WeChat. WeShop’s ambition is to revolutionize “social commerce” by removing the barrier for both merchants and consumers. A good chunk of the trade volume is expected to come from JD’s WeChat shopping entry point.

About Meili Inc.

Established in mid-2016, Meili Inc. primarily targets female customers, and includes several different platforms under it, including MOGU Street and Meilishuo, among other popular shopping sites. As the leader in Chinese social commerce, Meili Inc. is experienced in integrating community, content and e-commerce and has already leveraged this strength to achieve significant success within the WeChat ecosystem in the last year.

WeChatApply is specialized in building mini program and mobile e-commerce solution. If you have, come on to chat with us to find out more information to help extend your access to China’s rapid-evolving mobile shopping market.

Article Sourced from Timmy Chen, 2 March 2018 Technode

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

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From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years

In China, more than 80 percent of smartphone owners are actively using this mobile App WeChat. That’s almost a billion of users; more than the population of the US, Russia and the UK combined.

At its start, WeChat was just a replicate of WhatsApp Messenger with push-to-talk feature, also known as walkie-talkie. But now it has evolved as a mixture of WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Apple Pay and many other apps that westerners are familiar with.

As this “king of Apps” in China near its seventh birthday, its developers are considering the app’s future: In addition to copying and mixing, they are trying to create something new.

Cross-platform for the win

The App was launched on iOS in early 2011, and ported to Android right afterwards. At first look, it looked just like WhatsApp with its somehow similar green icon and user-friendly interface.

But under the hood it was carefully crafted to penetrate the Chinese market. Most Chinese phone players didn’t need to register for an account to use WeChat. They can sign in with their mobile phone numbers or other social media accounts.

It sounds very normal to people nowadays. But at a time when mobile operators asked extra charge for inter-operator texting, it was a killer function.

Cross-operator availability is the key for WeChat’s initial success. It’s huge for the App’s developer, Tencent, whose desktop-dominating messenger QQ had a struggle in the rising mobile market.

Tencent buried their company name deep inside WeChat. A lot of users were not even aware they were still on Tencent. The ad-free experience was also very different from previous Tencent software.

WeChat also provided location-based service, enabling users to find other nearby users. The App was called a “one-night-stand tool” for a while.

People-to-people, money-to-money

WeChat succeeded in gathering mobile users, but it needed more to keep them following.

In April 2012, Tencent introduced social networking to WeChat. It works mostly like Instagram. You share your photos on your stream and watch others’ stream at the same time.

It’s still one of the most popular ways to share photos with friends in China. Other ways to enhance communication include a sticker shop copied from famous Asian chatting App Line and a “game center” for users to compare their mobile game scores.

These features helped WeChat to reach 200-million-user milestone in the same year. But Tencent wanted even more. If you get tired of sharing photos with friends, you can share it with everyone by making your account public like a blog.

WeChat’s enormous users attracted salesmen, who used public accounts to distribute coupons with potential customers. The method was so widely-used that Tencent eventually added online payment to WeChat in 2014, igniting the wildfire of person-to-person wholesale model in China.

Small change indicates big confidence – WeChat used a Nasa satellite photo of the blue planet with Africa the Human’s origin. After Sep 2017, WeChat quietly changed the photo to an APAC centered view taken by a China’s own geostationary orbit satellite.

This move threatened Alibaba, who owns Taobao, the largest online shopping platform in China back then. Alibaba founder Jack Ma started to fight back by building his own messenger Apps, but none of them have come near where WeChat has gone.

At the same time, WeChat Pay cut a big chunk off from Jack Ma’s decade-lasting online payment empire. According to data company iResearch, the market share of Tencent’s payment platform in China rose from 10 percent in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017, while Alipay shrank from 80 to 54 percent during the same time.

Kill other Apps

As WeChat became a must-have for Chinese mobile users, Tencent went on to stabilize its monopoly by merging even more features into the App, including car hailing, hospital appointment, civil service and many, many more.

In 2016, head of the WeChat team Zhang Xiaolong announced a new plan to make all other mobile Apps unnecessary.

Dubbed as “Mini Program,” Zhang created an App store inside the WeChat App.

For the phone users who do not want to install too many Apps, this is absolutely good news. Open WeChat and you have everything at hand.

Demonstration of WeChat’s Mini Program. Users can access mini-apps by swiping down the recent conversation list. The mini-app is listed in system multitasking UI as a standalone app.

Any App maker can share WeChat’s vast fan base, WeChat Apply team believes the Mini Program is a game changer and has passed its initial stage and in 2018 it will become widespread a lot more.

So after seven years of development, what will the Chinese App market dominator do in the future? Stay focused on WeChat Apply to for more updates about the WeChat annual gathering.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.

WeChat, owned by Tencent and known as Weixin in China, will total 494.3 million users in China in 2017, according to WeChatApply’s latest forecast.

Adoption of the platform is widespread among smartphone users, with an estimated 79.1% of handset owners accessing the app regularly in 2017. China’s mobile audience is very likely to communicate via WeChat; some 84.5%* of mobile phone users are expected to access the platform.

While any thought of WeChat as simply a communication tool , would be far from accurate. Users will spend more than one hour and half a day using WeChat this year, according to Tencent. In addition to messaging features like texting, video conferencing, as well as photo and video sharing, the app’s more advanced functions are primarily responsible for driving engagement. Give donations, Share Red Pocket money, online shopping, booking ride services, food ordering, checking your facilities bills and pay those bills, login third party platform using WeChat logins, etc. have made the platform an essential daily ecosystem for consumers breathe and live in China. It becomes people’s natural habit to browse through WeChat’s friends moments or digesting WeChat Official Account’s social posts while standing in life, seating on trains, waiting for food, etc.

Additionally, an April 2017 study from China Channel found that 83% of WeChat users access it for work and business purposes.

With WeChat’s large presence in China, WeChatApply expects 40%of the population (1.379 billion in 2016) and every 6 out of 10 Chinese internet users to regularly use the platform this year.

Tencent first launched WeChat in India five years ago, marking its first foray into international markets. So far, WeChat has done well in markets with a large population of expats from China, or with large populations of Chinese-speaking people, such as in US, Canada, Australia, Europe and South America. WeChat has effectively penetrated into its global market by introducing its Payment Solution WeChat Pay as the door opener to the non Chinese markets.

On the contrary, more and more overseas B2C, B2B businesses, education organizations, tourism groups, even government organizations are realizing the importance of the unique Chinese characteristics of social economy and are seizing the market entry opportunity provided by WeChat to target Chinese audience. For example, Study Adelaide, Tourism Australia, Macquarie University, City of Melbourne Council, Westpac and countless others have recently applied and set up their WeChat official account on which they build their Chinese language marketing content and strategy. Interested to learn more about how to get started? Seek advice from our professional team at WeChatApply, the official WeChat authorized partner looking after Asia Pacific and Oceania region.

*Data sources eMarketer post written by Corey McNair on 13 July 2017

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

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