Wechat Business

Wechat payment has become increasingly popular with different consumption patterns. A lot of merchants take a fancy to this opportunity and sell their own products through the Wechat app. Products related to Beauty and Baby take up 71% of all sales volume(Youzan, August 2016). Many official accounts use a third-party Wechat shop platform to open stores, about 14% of the top 5000 Wechat Official Accounts have Wechat shops and the sales are very high. Wechat shop platforms are the easiest approach to advertise their products anytime. Therefore, many private businesses are appearing on the Wechat shop platform. The model of these private business is posting some pictures or information of products on “Moments” and developing more agents to build a large clientele.

   Many people browse and post on the function of “Moments”, and about 61.4% people pay more attention to friends’ personal life-style post. As for these private businesses, they need to post an enormous amount of pictures and news on the “Moments” repeatedly. However, there are 61.4% of users check moments each time they open Wechat and 61% of Wechat users open Wechat more than 10 times per day(2016 Trending Report On Wechat Lifestyle, 2016).This disturbing action of “flood the screen” results in people removing the friendship. Moreover, few illegal businesses sell counterfeit or “three no” products at Wechat shop platform. Because the Wechat market channel is difficult to supervise, they want to make exorbitant profits through the illegal business. When consumers find themselves cheated facts, they cannot find the manufacturer to receive compensation easily. Customers are not guaranteed basically, so the Wechat market cannot be totally trusted by people. The merchants can only use  pictures to illustrate their product; however, a lot of customers cannot trust their products by these pictures which may be changed by Photoshop. Wechat shop is a convenient market for merchants because it is easy to start and at low cost. Nonetheless, businesses need to develop more and more customer groups constantly. This is the only approach to make profits at Wechat market. Tencent is the company running the Wechat app. The company announced that about 3,000 public fake accounts will be shut down. The company is having difficulty completely removing the illegal businesses; lawbreakers can create a new account at any time.

Although Wechat can bring a part of benefits for merchants at Wechat market, it is difficult to maximize the benefits. Wechat Multi-level marketing still cannot replace the sales market and it is difficult to make people trust it totally.


References:
1. Angela, Doland.( Aug 24, 2015) Applications of Mobile Social Media: Wechat Among Academic Libraries in China. Vol.41(1), pp. 21-30