With more than 800 million users, We Chat is one of the most preferred social media messaging platforms for the Chinese. Though it resembles WhatsApp, Line, and Viber, it offers a lot more than just a messaging app. The designer of We Chat Tencent added many more features that businesses have been leveraging aggressively since 2014.

Though there are many social media sites like Renren, Pengyou, Douban, Youku, Jiepang, Sina Weibo, and Tencent Weibo in China, if your goal is to sell to China online, WeChat is one main channel you should not ignore. As you move ahead in this post, you will soon realize why we stress on this.

Why should you focus on selling on WeChat?

WeChat has immense popularity among the Chinese. Its main features being customer service and sharing of information within the groups, Chinese are increasingly doing their purchases on this platform for years. WeChat is more social in its features compared to Weibo. On WeChat people can form groups of up to 100 members with like interests.

A special feature that makes it easy for businesses to sell to China Online through WeChat is users can directly buy the products without needing to log out from their accounts. The database of users and their wallet amounts are streamlined for an easy purchase experience. This makes it comfortable for users to directly buy from the WeChat account as and when they see an advert about a product.

Four Effective Strategies to Sell to China Online using WeChat

Here are four simple and effective strategies to sell to China online using WeChat.

Promotional Posts

Businesses can let their customers know about their new launches, promotions, and offers through promotional posts on their business accounts. Examples of such businesses that made a boost in sales through WeChat promotional posts include the popular pizza and fast-food chain McDonald’s. The promotional campaigns can include articles, short messages along visual impact content.

Moment Ads

Moments on WeChat are akin to Stories on Facebook. Users can share it with their connections and friends. Businesses can use this feature to share photos and articles related to promotions. Successful campaigns that leveraged this Moment Ads feature include short videos, articles, and ads. However, brands have to pay WeChat for featuring their ads. This is a well-received way on WeChat and the ROI is proven in many cases in the past.

Account Ads

Account ads are those that appear at the bottom of the articles on WeChat. They are one of the most preferred ways to sell products on WeChat. The response is good for this strategy and many products including baby products to cosmetics have boosted their sales via these account ads.

Selling by directly creating an online store

On We Chat, businesses can create their online stores. The process may need time like many e-commerce platforms in China. But an advantage with this strategy is businesses can directly interact with their customers. This idea also removes the barriers of the complex arrangement of groups in WeChat where businesses cannot reach a huge number of audiences at once unlike on Facebook or Twitter.

Additionally, if you are keen to make the maximum use of WeChat, you should also explore Strategic Partnerships. Here, brands that are tied with the WeChat creators can gain upper hand in reaching more users through their partnership. However, since 2014, WeChat has eased its restrictions and now many brands are using this partnership feature to boost their sales.

With this, brands can get featured on WeChat wallets too thus attracting more reach and user base. Starbucks and Mobik are examples of some brands that explored the maximum potential of this feature.

Conclusion

WeChat offers immense potential to get closer to the target audience in realizing your dreams of selling in China online. An important aspect that you must understand here is to maintain frequent and immediate response to the audience’s queries and comments to sustain their confidence and increase your reach. On social media, it is the mouth of the word, that helps in widening one’s presence and by maintaining a proper communication with the audience, it is possible to gain the best from WeChat.

Branding is about how others identify a business, product, or service. It is also attached to emotions and perception a product or service invokes along with its business logo, symbol, and name. Branding is the message you send to your consumers via various design elements, products, and the overall marketing efforts. So, a lot of efforts need to go into creating a brand. In this regard; hiring the services of a branding agency can prove to be quite useful.

Here are four things a branding agency can do for your business.

1. Expertise

Branding work requires the efforts of several types of specialists. It is not the job involving one person. When you hire a branding agency, you will get the benefit of their entire team. It might consist of graphic designers, researchers, copywriters, marketing experts, and even analysts.
If you hire branding experts, you will have to spend considerably on their recruitment and training. You may still not find the right personnel even after spending significant time and money into the process. Instead; you can simplify the process and hire the services of a branding agency.

Use keywords such as Branding Agencies Philadelphia (search query with location) to find relevant companies in your area. You can visit the agencies’ websites to know more about them and hire the right agency as per your requirements.

2. Experience

A good branding agency will come with the benefit of sufficient (if not extensive) industry experience. With experience comes a refinement of strategies. Experienced teams know the best ways to formulate and execute plans and to avoid snags. They are used to research and competitive analyses before making new strategies. They also have the benefit of their collective experience. So, they can brainstorm and come up with the best possible scenarios for your branding efforts.
An experienced branding agency will know how to study your competitors’ businesses and avoid strategies that might collide or not work. They will know how to conduct relevant research to help with your branding efforts. So, it is best to hire a branding agency with good industry experience.

3. Creativity

A branding agency’s work relies heavily on creativity. Designers, copywriters, and marketers are often creative people who bring a fresh perspective to tried-and-tested ideas. They are also the ones to create new and unique branding elements for their clients.

A branding agency works with different clients. They jump from one project to another; often working simultaneously on different plans for one or different clients. It keeps them on their toes and their creativity agile. An in-house branding team, on the other hand, can become stagnant with the same ideas and products. Working on the same product can lead to burnout and it can be difficult to come up with good concepts. It can be hard to come up with new concepts even if you manage to find a stellar branding team.

You can hire the best marketing or branding experts. But creativity is something that is inherent in designers and writers. Branding agencies ensure that they hire the best talent. So, they are meticulous with their recruitment processes and don’t hold back when creating their teams. They will also assign the best personnel to each project depending on different requirements.

4. Value

Branding gives a business more industry leverage. It brings in newer opportunities from investors. It helps open up new avenues of business. If your branding is solid, you might enter new markets more easily. But for branding to be robust, it requires potent efforts. Only an expert, experienced, and creative team of branding experts can make that happen.

Branding also brings in new customers. Sturdy branding efforts bring more recognition to a business. It creates a sense of familiarity for your prospects and they are more likely to choose you over another brand for the same product or service category.

A well-established brand continues to increase in value via increased customer acquisition, improved sales, and thus a solid bottom line – year after year.

All this is only possible via healthy branding efforts. When you hire a good branding agency, you get the afore-mentioned benefits of expertise, experience, and creativity. You also get a team ready to take on new branding challenges.

As Sallie Krawcheck rightly puts it, Networking is the number one unwritten rule of business success. It is the network that is worth it when it comes to an entrepreneurial journey. Conferences offer an excellent opportunity to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs.

What are the marketing conferences?

Marketing conferences are events that bring together professionals and experts in a given business or industry into one dais. They are often the best alternatives to digital marketing platforms where there is stiff competition to fall into the eyes of a wider audience even through paid efforts.

The main highlight that draws the attention of everyone towards marketing conferences is the speaker(s) who are presiding them and the theme around which the event is revolving. For instance, a China marketing conference in London can give you a chance to meet the bigwigs of the industry in both countries. You can also learn many insights about the business strategies related to both nations.

How marketing conferences boost your networking?

Right from putting you amidst the best of the minds in the industry to opening doors for new business ideas, marketing conferences help in many ways for any professional or entrepreneur.

Build long-lasting relationships

In personal meetings always can make an easy impact than virtual ones. Marketing conferences present an opportunity to achieve this with ease. They help you build a long and quality contact list that works wonders for your business and profession.

Tip to gain quality contacts through marketing conference:

Approaching others at any marketing event should be done strategically. A hard-selling approach is never welcomed by anyone. Remember that everyone is there to sell their product and are keen on expanding their business.

Instead of asking, “ Will you be interested in buying my services?”, you should try to mingle with them directly and get to know their thoughts and interests. It is a great way to form your first impression on them that will eventually lead to a stronger professional relationship.

Prove your expertise

Imagine you are a speaker at China marketing conference in London. Obviously, you shall have to make your homework by digging deep into your area of expertise and gathering industry insights to share on the bigger platform. All such efforts boost your subject while also giving you a chance to prove your expertise in front of everyone.

By acting as an active participant in a marketing conference, you own a chance to attract the attention of thought leaders of your industry easily.

Tip to prove your expertise through marketing conference:

Marketing conferences do keep happening at any given moment. The trend of virtual marketing conferences is on the rise too. It is good to attend a profitable marketing conference even if it is virtual than to not attend any.

However, the key to establishing your expertise lies in choosing the right marketing conference. By attending one that is not saturated with other marketers, which offers international exposure and is hosted by a reputed organization, you are already halfway through your journey into emerging as a more successful entrepreneur.

Get in touch with influencers

Marketing conferences pave the easiest way to meet influencers in person. You can listen to their thoughts, understand their style, and may also even get a chance to use their influence to promote your business. Remember that it is often not easy to interact with influencers otherwise either through a digital medium or in person.

Tip to use gain more from influencers you meet at the marketing conference:

Marketing conferences might bring together many influencers onto a single stage. You have to make sure that you choose one who can establish your brand more effectively. Check their followers’ interests and analyze if they are into your target customer group.

Researching before about the influencers and speakers ahead can provide many useful details. All these efforts will help you to find an influencer that fits your business needs and form a long-lasting bond with them.

Wrapping up

Marketing conferences hold immense potential to boost the network of both businesses and individuals alike. The success rate depends on choosing the right marketing conference, preparing well ahead to establish your expertise, developing the knack to approach the contacts, and leveraging the power of influencers to your best.

WeChat Shop provides businesses an excellent opportunity to sell their products to millions of users across China. Once you open a WeChat Store through a service account, you can maneuver the creative space and consequently interact with your customers directly. In fact, brands can get customer behavioral data easily through their official account, enabling them to manage relationships with customers better.

What is a WeChat Shop?

WeChat shop is a mobile website that can be accessed from the WeChat Official Account’s menu. The users of WeChat can access the WeChat store and with the help of WeChat Payment can make one-click-payment.

Though WeChat emerged in 2011 primarily as a messaging application, over the years it has added functions such as WeChat Pay, facility to purchase tickets, book appointments, order food/taxis, and many more.

You, as a business entity, can use WeChat to sell as well as engage with your customers or followers. This super-app platform, which is deeply embedded in the daily lives of the Chinese, had a reach of around 1 billion daily users, as of January 2019.

With easy to share social attributes, WeChat has become the go-to platform for businesses of all sizes. In fact, WeChat eCommerce has come up as a booming brand multi-channel strategy. Opening a WeChat Store has become an excellent growth strategy for the brands. To increase their reach, influence, brand awareness, and traffic, more and more brands are now using the WeChat platform.

To build a long-term relationship with their customers, brands can focus on specific target audiences, understand their needs better, and learn about their desires.

Key Statistics of WeChat

● User Statistics:

WeChat was launched in 2011 by Tencent as a social media and chatting platform. Its user increased from a mere 50 million in Q1 2012 to 1.17 billion in Q1 2020.

● Usage Statistics

a. While in November 2016, around 30 billion messages were sent by the users, the number inflated to 45 billion by January 2019. This means 15 billion additional messages were sent on WeChat in less than 2-years.

b. Daily transactions of WeChat mini-programs increased from a mere 16 million in January 2015 to 1.1 billion in January 2019.

c. In January 2020, WeChat became the tenth most downloaded app in China.

● User Demographics

The most dominant age group on WeChat in 2015 was 18-25 years. However, it shifted to the 26-35 age group by 2017. Notably, the 36-50 age group is also not far away from 18-25-year-olds.

All these statistics point to the fact that there is a huge market waiting for businesses to explore. If you are a business entity, set up a WeChat shop and expand your business exponentially.

How does WeChat Shop Work?

WeChat store works in the following way:

Step #1: The interface is easy to use. Get started by simply uploading information, images, and discounts on your products.

Step #2: WeChat Shop owners have to connect their bank accounts for receiving payments directly from the Chinese customers. They will pay in RMB and you’ll receive it anywhere in the world in terms of USD, HKD, AUD, or NZD currencies.

Step #3: Traffic to the store can be generated by using a network of Key Opinion Leaders, CPC platforms, and affiliate programs.

Step #4: Chinese customers place their orders through their smartphone on your WeChat Shop and make payment by using either WeChat payment or Alipay.

Bottomline

A WeChat shop can be designed with the use of 3rd party WeChat eCommerce platforms: Weidian (Free), WalkTheChat (15-day Free Trial), Youzan, JD.COM, and Lewaimai. These platforms provide a clean design and multiple payment options.

Once you have created your own WeChat store, you can list your products, receive payments, offer incentives and coupons, use translation services, track followers through analytics, hosting services, create own pages to introduce your brand, and convert in-store visitors into followers.

With such a huge market waiting to be explored along with a wide range of facilities available on WeChat, businesses should set up their own WeChat Shop and boost their bottom line.

Do you have any questions about the WeChat shop or how to set it up? Please feel free to leave your comments below.

Marketing conferences need intense preparation. As the end goal is in no way smaller. Any company expects a boost in its business and at least the clientele number at the end of a marketing conference. It is justifiable considering the time, effort, and money spent on its planning and implementation.

When planned properly and executed marketing conferences can work wonders for a brand.

As we move ahead, let us delve into how a China marketing conference in London can lead you to better strategies.

Understand the local market and customers

Marketing conferences are now born on social media first before they take a physical shape. And yes, it is necessary to consider the proportion of the customers that are online.

While researching for organizing a marketing conference, you will get a chance to study the demographics of the customers in a particular location. This in turn helps you with assessing your chances of becoming a hit in the market. You can assess many metrics related to the target market including:

• Is your product as per the interests of the targeted customers?

• Are your marketing strategies in line with their age and other preferences?

• How are the users reacting to your competitor’s products?

Create a brand presence

Marketing conferences help build the brand feel of a company. After all, only brands that can spend on conferences mean they have an established base in the market. Thus, a well-organized marketing conference helps to solidify this brand base much better.

Social media promotions that happen before the events are another easier way to boost the brand and take it closer to the audience. By planning creative, engaging, and conversational promotions, a brand can draw attention to its marketing conference.

This takes effort, careful planning, and intensive research. Staying online on social media does not mean scattering into all the channels possible. It involves working with planning where the customers are located and drawing their attention towards the upcoming China marketing conference in London.

Scope to widen the prospect customer database

Marketing conferences are often attended by hundreds of participants. Not everyone might be interested to become a customer. But the chance to widen the prospect customer database is also cannot be ignored.

The details of attendees to the China marketing conference in London can be useful for future marketing strategies. With their consent, you could add their details to your database and keep sending them marketing information, the release of new products, discounts, and offers, etc. Thus, a marketing conference helps in increasing the chances of your success ratio in converting strangers to your customers.

Leveraging the fame of the speakers

Marketing conferences often draw an audience because of the speaker’s popularity. When leveraged in a creative way, this can be used to convert unknown strangers into our prospective customers.

You could use social media to draw attention to the marketing conference by using specially made posts designed on the speaker. Asking the speaker to share the details of the event and encourage participation is also a wise idea.

After the event, you might as well encourage the audience to pose questions to the speaker via social media, yes up to a limited time. This also gives a chance to those audiences who might have missed the conference but keen on what the speaker talked about and are ready to grab the insights.

You could use such user details to share about your products, launches, and other marketing activities.

Working on feedback

At the end of the marketing conference, the feedback that your attendees leave help in a bigger way than you imagined to revamp your product design or services style. When taking the feedback positively, there is always a scope for improvement for any brand.

Added to this, the feedback from the audience who attended the events might create a lot of impacts as they have seen what you shared and what your ideas are from up close.

Conclusion

Marketing conferences hold invaluable power when it comes to framing better strategies for a business. Right from understanding the target customers to widening the customer base, a marketing conference holds immense potential to expand the brand’s market. The feedback and the speaker’s power are also to be leveraged to their maximum to obtain the fullest benefits of the marketing conference.

According to the latest statistics, China has around 883 + million Internet users and soon to have 1.14 billion Internet users by 2025. Search engine marketing is must to connect with the Chinese audience in a faster way. Here we have discussed how an agency offering search engine marketing in China (adstochina.westwin.com/search-engine-marketing-China) can help you achieve marketing goals.

Unique Chinese Digital Landscape

The Chinese digital landscape is unique. The search engine category is dominated by Baidu which holds 76.05% search engine market share in China. The social media platforms popular in China are also different. The social media landscape is dominated by local players like Weibo, Yoku, and WeChat.

If you want to develop a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy for China, you need to work with an expert consultant who knows the Chinese digital landscape well. Here are a few ways search engine marketing can help

Help Appear on Top in Search Results on Baidu

Baidu is home to millions of websites including mobile website pages. The competition for top rank is intense and not easy to achieve success. You need to select the right target keywords to reach your audience. Keyword research is the first step of an SEO campaign. It uses your knowledge about your industry and target audience to determine the right terms for the marketing campaign. The right search engine marketing solution would help you appear on top of search results on Baidu.

Baidu SEM campaign can help address potential clients directly by using combinations of right keywords, demographic criteria, and even the exact time and day of the week. For businesses, the ability to show your ads to Chinese audiences who are interested in your products and services can greatly help in achieving marketing goals.

The demographic targeting allows businesses to minimize their spending while segmenting marketing campaigns geographically and customizing them to connect with local clients.

Deliver Qualified Leads

Search engine marketing includes organic SEO that boosts traffic and generates qualified leads. When you optimize your website for the right keywords you get high-quality leads and higher conversions. Baidu SEM focuses on getting basics right. It allows you to localize your ads for greater efficacy.

By partnering with the right agency offering search engine marketing in China, you can tailor your ads to suit the local market and trends.

Develop Brand Awareness

The primary objective of any marketing campaign is to develop and enhance brand awareness. When a business uses Baidu paid search their ads are displayed in front of the Chinese audience that uses target keywords. This can be helpful for a business that does not have a strong online presence on the Baidu search engine. Baidu SEM can help increase brand awareness much more quickly than any organic SEO strategy.

Right Market Analysis

A well designed SEM campaign on Baidu works like a mini market analysis that can help you understand customer preferences. The data collected from the Baidu SEM campaign can be used by companies to make favorable changes to their products and services that will increase their demand.

Reach Customers Instantly

The objective of every marketing campaign is to reach customers. Traditional marketing campaigns can take a long time to show results. Baidu SEM uses a potent combination of organic SEO strategy and paid ads to reach customers instantly. Businesses with higher marketing budgets can invest in paid search to display their ads right in front of prospective customers. This can lead to quicker conversions and businesses can experience growth in revenue generation in a short time.

Run Ad Experiments

Marketing campaign success depends on the optimization of ads. Baidu SEM offers analytical tools that allow you to analyze the effectiveness of ads in driving traffic to your website. The analytical tools allow you to run ad experiments to find out the most effective ads.

Partnering with the right agency offering search engine marketing in China will allow you to test a wide variety of ads and select the ones that help achieve marketing goals.

To sum up, a search engine marketing solution includes the best of organic SEO and paid search for helping your business achieve short-term and long-term marketing goals. And by choosing the right SEM partner, you can stay ahead of your competitors.

WeChat e-Commerce – Very Effective

The purchasing power of China is equally significant as the industrial production capacity of China. Almost everywhere in the world, one will be able to see the products manufactured in China, and practically, this speaks about the industrial and commercial capacity of China. Equally important is the purchasing power of the country. Because of the thick population, the country has rich potential as far as the purchasing capacity is concerned. Businesses across the globe value this high consumer strength and are very much eager to enter the Chinese market. To make your entry into the Chinese market winning, you must plan the promotional campaigns prudently and must implement them perfectly. WeChat is a prime medium through which businesses can communicate with their customers effectively. Here pops up the practical significance of WeChat E-commerce.

What You Need to Know about the WeChat e-Commerce Platform

WeChat is the prime social media site in China and thus a fitting place to perform your promotional activities. A well-planned advertorial campaign that you do through this channel will make your brand name float everywhere in the country. As millions of people and that too from all customer segments visit the site daily, your message will travel across the country. Therefore, without any doubt, one can say that WeChat e-Commerce is one of the best promotional activities that you can carry out in China. This platform is a handy channel through which businesses can interact with their present and prospective customers. The participation of millions of people is a unique feature of WeChat, and this will, in turn, help you to spread the news as regards your products or services to the required audience without any loss of time. The functionality of WeChat is quite perfect and swift, and this will be advantageous to you as you will get the related-dividends on the dot. It will be easy to enter into the particular customer segment where you want to propagate about your products or services.

Besides, you will be able to use different styles of ads that will precisely fill the bill for the customer segment that you aim to bring into your fold. Through WeChat, it will be possible to spread your message across these segments by using distinct possibilities such as visuals, texts, or videos. You can use these possibilities precisely in line with the practical requirement, and whatever methods you choose, you are sure to reap profits. Another great feature is the incorporation of payment options. You can incorporate cross-country payment options, and this will be very much convenient for the clients who are in different countries.

Practically, you will be able to open three distinctive types of accounts; subscription account, service account, and enterprise account. That said, it is of high importance that you must handover the task of WeChat e-Commerce to a specialized digital marketing company. With the practical experience they possess, such an agency will be able to guide you professionally so that your WeChat activities become successful. This online platform gives the option to incorporate Chinese payment options. As the Chinese people regard their customs and manners with passion, this will be of great significance, through which you can attract the attention of the local people to the site. Besides, if you give all the required information in the local language, Mandarin, then that will be all the more impressive. However, the prime thing that you must do well in advance to your Chinese market entry is to hire the professional expertise of an SEO company that has hands-on experience in doing the digital marketing tasks in China. Experience is the main thing that makes any task winning, and hence, the SEO Company that you hire must have successfully done WeChat e-Commerce activities.

Select a Professional Company

Though you may find a plethora of SEO companies, you must select a professionally capable company for carrying out the WeChat e-Commerce tasks. The best way for this is to compare the quality of services, the swiftness of actions, the customer service, and the pricing of a few companies. This process will give you the option to choose the best specialized SEO Company.

Are you planning on expanding your business in China? The country has become an attractive destination for foreign businesses, given the enormous potential of its eCommerce market. The largest in the world currently, with a $1.95 trillion volume, it also has some of the most visited online retailers in the world eCommerce landscape such as the Alibaba Group’s Tmall China, NetEase’s Kaola, JD.com, and Xiao Hong Shu.

Over 80% of the retail eCommerce sales come from e-shoppers who browse products on their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices and use Alipay, WeChat Pay, UnionPay, and other mobile payment apps to make their purchases. Foreign luxury and branded items, especially high-fashion clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, electronics, and household products, are very popular with Chinese consumers. The booming cross-border eCommerce sector offers plenty of scope for small and large foreign businesses.

They must, however, overcome linguistic and cultural issues that can often create roadblocks in doing business. Chinese is not an easy language to master and many small enterprises don’t have the budget to hire a multilingual staff. They can, however, benefit greatly from working with a China eCommerce agency.

Services provided by eCommerce agencies

Along with improving your business communications with much-needed Chinese language skills, such agencies can guide you in multiple ways. They can help you to navigate through the Chinese eCommerce space, to promote your brand to the right target audience, and to manage your marketing and advertising campaigns. Let’s look at some of the specific services that a China eCommerce agency can provide for your business.

It can help you plan your eCommerce strategy

The China eCommerce agency will discuss your business model and business goals with you to plan your marketplace entry. They will research your competitors in the industry as well as your target audience. By gathering and analyzing competitor and consumer insights, they will help you formulate a multi-channel eCommerce strategy.

It can design and set up your eCommerce website

While partnering with the big Chinese online retailers can help popularize your brand with local consumers, you also need to have your retail platform to distinguish your brand from your competitors and to sell your products directly to your customers. The China eCommerce agency will collect consumer data and use that information to come up with relevant user experience (UX) designs and to create a high-level user interface (UI). They will set up an eCommerce website and test it to make sure it is appealing and user friendly.

It can set up and operate your eCommerce store

It will assist you in designing, developing, and setting up your eCommerce store, and help with the management of the online store’s operations. The China eCommerce agency will also undertake the promotion of the store to bring in more traffic and new customers. Additionally, it will help with providing quick and reliable customer service, leading to more customer satisfaction and retention.

It can assist you with eCommerce marketing

The China eCommerce agency will handle search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and social media marketing for your brand. It will build relationships with key opinion leaders (KOLs) and key opinion consumers (KOCs) and get them to review and recommend your products to their followers. It will regularly audit your web analytics to monitor how much traffic you are getting, which content is getting the most clicks, which products are the most popular, and so on. The information will help you to refine your marketing strategy to increase your sales.

It can help develop cross-border eCommerce solutions

As the China eCommerce agency will have experience with B2C, B2B, and C2C international trade, they can help you with everything from acquiring a Chinese business license to organizing direct shipping to getting customs clearance. They can help you find trading opportunities with Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, VIP.com, Pinduoduo, WeChat Stores, Kaola, and other cross border eCommerce platforms.

It can help integrate payment gateways

After browsing through your online store, Chinese customers will be more likely to buy your products if you have an easy to use payment system. By integrating payment systems that they are familiar with, such as Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay, you will see an increase in your sales revenue.

WeChat started out as a messaging app. But soon it encompassed social media. However, the core of the WeChat business model today is eCommerce. WeChat shop is a website/product page that you can create within the WeChat app. WeChat users can access your website and pay for the product/s from within the app.

Features of WeChat Shops

WeChat shops come with many features which make them one of the top draws in the Chinese eCommerce landscape.

With the help of WeChat payment, customers can pay for a product from within the WeChat app itself with ‘one click payment’.

With automatic phone number and address collection, you can access the phone number and address of the user on whose name the WeChat account is registered (requires user approval).

WeChat shops or stores are easy to share with friends and family through WeChat. They are therefore the right tool for viral campaigns, group buying, etc.

You can also re-target users based on their WeChat shop behavior with WeChat ads or WeChat messages from your official WeChat account.

Opening a WeChat Shop

You can develop your WeChat shop from scratch. However, most brands and companies rely on third-party WeChat shop providers to open a WeChat shop.

However, to open a WeChat shop, you need to first open a verified WeChat account.

If you are an overseas company, you can open a WeChat service official account.

If you don’t have a Chinese business license, there are two ways to open this account.

One, you can borrow the license of a business partner or use a third party agent. Two, you can apply for an official account directly through Tencent, WeChat’s parent company by paying a fee.

Once you have opened a WeChat shop, the next thing to do is to design the shop and upload the products. Use more images than text because Chinese characters make it hard to load pages.

You can connect your corporate bank account with WeChat to receive cross border payments directly from Chinese customers. Chinese users can pay in RMB and you can collect payments in USD, HKD, AUD, NZD from anywhere in the world.

Generating traffic to your WeChat shop

WeChat is not search engine based. So, you need to help your customers find your WeChat shop. Below are a few options to drive traffic to your WeChat shop:

WeChat Influencers

If your brand is new to China, you can take the help of Chinese bloggers and influencers to drive traffic to your WeChat shop. The endorsement of influencers can help you gain initial momentum. Due to the nature of the Chinese market, influencers have much more power in China than they do in the west.

A WeChat shop allows you to easily create a link from an influencer campaign to a product page. This enables a high conversion rate. Brands which steadily invest in influencer campaigns, therefore get a good ROI.

WeChat Display Advertising

WeChat display advertising is very effective in driving traffic to your WeChat shop. Here we will discuss two types of WeChat display advertising formats-WeChat Moments ads and WeChat banner ads.

WeChat Moments ads are displayed on the social timeline of the user. ‘Moments’ on WeChat are like ‘Newsfeed’ on Facebook. Once a WeChat Moments ad is approved, it will remain on the WeChat network for 48 hours. If the user ignores the ad or opts out of it, the ad will be removed within 6 hours. If the user clicks on the ad, the possibility that his or her friends will also get to see the ad increases. Therefore WeChat Moments ads are extremely visible and a powerful branding tool.

WeChat banner ads are like banners on websites. Only a WeChat banner ad is displayed at the bottom of an article written by another WeChat official account. They are more affordable than WeChat Moments ads.

Difference between a WeChat shop and a WeChat Mini-program

A WeChat Mini-program is a sub-app within the WeChat app. It can provide eCommerce services or other kinds of functionalities. A WeChat shop refers to any eCommerce experience optimized for WeChat. It could be a simple website/product page or it could be a WeChat Mini-program.

Do you have any questions about WeChat Shop?