WeChat e-commerce is growing rapidly, annual transaction value is about 25.6 trillion yen

WeChat continues to grow its shopping ambitions as it’s been 10 years as a social networking app. This Chinese messaging app mediated an annual transaction value of 1.6 trillion yuan (about 25.62 trillion yen). Through a third-party service, the Mini-Program, which runs on the SuperAppli, users can buy clothes, order food, and call a taxi.

That’s twice the transaction value of the 2019 mini-program. The networking giant announced this at its annual conference for business partners and ecosystem developers. WeChat is usually held in Guangzhou, the hometown of southern China, but in 2021 it was held online for a pandemic.

Alibaba’s biggest competitor, e-commerce startup Pinduoduo, recorded a total of $ 214.7 billion in transactions in the third quarter.

In early 2017, WeChat introduced a mini-program in what was seen as a challenge to Apple’s App Store, turning messaging apps into an online infrastructure that sustains people’s lives over time. It hasn’t been revealed recently how many third-party light apps WeChat hosts, but by 2018, that number had reached one million, accounting for half of the App Store at the time.

From Tencent’s strategic point of view, the growth of transactions based on mini-programs will help further drive the company’s goal of strengthening its fintech business. Digital payments are an important source of revenue for the company’s fintech business.

Most of WeChat’s mini-programs are games, with more than 500 million monthly users due to an increase in female and middle-aged users and players living in Tier 3 cities in China, WeChat said.

The virtual conference also unveiled a series of milestones from China’s largest messaging app, which had more than 1.2 billion monthly active users in 2020.

Of the monthly users, 500 million used the WeChat search feature. China’s Internet is divided into several walled gardens managed by giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, often blocking the services of competitors. When users search on WeChat, they get information that isn’t really open web, but is published in messaging apps and Tencent’s allies such as Sogou, Pinduoduo, and Zhihu.

According to WeChat, 240 million people use “payment scores.” When this feature debuted in 2019, there was speculation that it would indicate that WeChat had entered consumer credit finance and joined the government’s Social Credit system. WeChat was an event in 2021 and repeated that we didn’t score either.

Similar to Ant Group’s sesame score, WeChat’s rating system acts like a loyalty program “designed to build trust between sellers and users.” For example, a person who reaches a certain score can be exempt from deposits or delay payment when using the services of a vendor on WeChat. According to WeChat, this score allowed users to avoid deposits of more than $ 30 billion annually.

The corporate version of WeChat has more than 130 million active users. Operated by its biggest rival Alibaba, Dingtalk reached 155 million daily active users in March 2020.

The all-day event ended with the long-awaited appearance of WeChat creator Allen Zhang. Mr. Chan spent a very long time talking about WeChat’s early short video features, which are somewhat similar to the Snap story. He didn’t disclose the performance of the short video because “the public relations team doesn’t allow it,” but said, “if we set our goals, that must be achieved.”

Chan also announced that the WeChat team is considering input tools for users. Given Tencent’s huge scale, this is a small project, but it reflects Chan’s belief in “privacy protection.” Despite the general public’s skepticism about WeChat’s handling of user data.

“Analyzing a user’s chat history can generate a lot of advertising revenue for the company, but we don’t do that. WeChat values ​​user privacy,” Chan claims. did.

“But why now on WeChat. Why are we still see ads related to what we say? There are many other channels for processing information, not just WeChat. So our technical team said,’On our own. Try creating an input tool. ”