WeStore is fully open to enterprises, businesses, and individuals. The individual only needs the Chinese identity card information to be able to open the shop directly.

After binding the bank card, the withdrawal can be completed. It supports the sale of first-hand and second-hand goods. One WeChat account can launch one WeStore store for individuals only.

Businesses can only open stores by uploading business licenses, operator information, settlement bank account information, and filling in the nickname/category of the WeStore mini programs. One WeChat account can support the opening of three WeStore business stores.

Personal stores manage the backend through the mobile terminal – WeStore Assistants; enterprises and individual businesses will manage it through a desktop computer.

Value-added service providers can directly join the developers’ program, and more service types will be gradually open. At present, the WeStore service market has opened up commodity management services such as one-click moving, product bulk management, and cross-platform management, as well as order logistics management services such as batch order processing, batch printing, and logistics.

The ability of fast building a mini store mainly meets the needs of small businesses without development ability. Businesses with personalized development needs or existing e-commerce mini programs can directly access the open components of WeStores.

At the same time, WeChat’s official team will continue to iterate and open the interface and function of components to help businesses realize personalized development while reducing development costs.

Businesses can click the button below to apply for the internal test, access to the small store open components, and enjoy the relevant services and capabilities provided by the small store.

WeChat’s WeStore looks like a simple and quick way to set up a mobile store. The Enterprise version also supports up to 500 users to co-manage the store. Merchants can set different access levels for different employees.

WeChat expanding e-commerce reach with mini program integration on JD, Xiaohongshu

It also support WeStores to buy delivery insurance for users.

If the user needs to return and exchange the goods after purchasing in the WeChat shop, the deliver insurance will compensate for the logistics expenses caused by the return and exchange, and help the businesses improve the transaction conversion rate and the user’s shopping experience.

Transaction guarantee certification is another important feature on WeStore. It aims to help users find more stores with good service and bring more exposure opportunities for high-quality stores. If the service of the WeStore shop is up to standard, it can be certified automatically.

Burberry launched its first luxury social retail store, empowered by WeChat

WeStore started testing in 2020

Some WeChat Official Accounts received the invitation to try WeStore (Weixin Xiaodian) in June 2020. The invitation shows that this is a mini program for selling products that can be launched with one click and operated independently.

After opening, businesses can quickly start live streaming and sell products on WeStore. Speculations from China internet show this might be building a foundation for WeChat Channel Account (short videos).

WeChat hasn’t made Channels (Video Accounts) publicly available. This obviously carries Tencent’s hope for a share in China’s short video market as it restricts the videos to be within one minute. Check out this demo video if you are not familiar with WeChat Channels:

There’s no data yet about the user base or engagement on Channels; if taking off, it will be very powerful when combined with WeStore creating an additional e-commerce sales channel with short videos:

9 Brands’ great results from WeChat Mini Program live streaming campaigns

WeStore is a SaaS mobile store building tool created by the Mini Program team to help businesses quickly launch a mobile store. Currently, the online functions include:

• Basic store opening and operation capabilities, including product management, store operation, live broadcast management, fund management, etc.
• Good shopping experience capabilities on the user end, including product details page, shelf tools, live streaming plug-ins, etc

Currently, some third-party “shopping malls” are widely adopted and help the WeChat Official Account to build shops. They can also directly provide the supply chain, product details page, and so on, which greatly reduces the difficulties of running content e-commerce.

In comparison, this WeStore currently provides limited features. But, launching and managing a store with this mini-program is completely free and WeChat is constantly improving it.

WeChat Mini Programs overview

Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have long been technically ready for their staff to work outside the office. But, remote working to the majority workforces in China remains new and uncomfortable.

As China continues to fight the coronavirus, remote working is no longer an option but a necessity for many. Communication and collaboration platforms are essential to remote workers; Alibaba’s DingTalk, a.k.a. Dingding in the Chinese version, has seen a spike in demand in China.

It has surpassed social messaging apps in popularity on Apple’s App Store for the first time as companies tell employees to work remotely due to the novel coronavirus epidemic.

DingTalk responded quickly to release free solutions for workers staying home including contacts management, attendance, video conferencing, cloud drive, group streaming, task coordination, and etc. It even offers a beauty touch-up for those who do not have time to dress up before making a video call.

DingTalk has set up a special 24-hour team as the number of users rose to about 200 million, according to Daily Economic News. The interests over both DingTalk and WeChat Work (separate app from Tencent that integrates with consumer app WeChat) have skyrocketed as indicated by the search data from Baidu:

Enterprise version of WeChat, or WeChat Work launched in 2016, has also seen fast growth over the past two weeks. It allows up to 300 people to join video calls while DingTalk allows up to 16 people. Tencent also offers Tencent Docs for online document collaborations while Alibaba offers Yuque (technically by Ant Financial team but used by all Alibaba teams).

Huawei also promoted their teamwork platform WeLink and Kingsoft’s WPS office software suite also has some popularity in China for their collaborative online work. Both provide their services for free. WeLink is more focused on security considering the nature of Huawei’s business.

Feishu, a team collaboration software from ByteDance, is also offering SMEs the business version for free for three years.

NASDAQ listed Zoom Video Communications is benefiting from the coronavirus outbreak. And, it also wants to help Chinese businesses:

But, the dedicated domain doesn’t have a fully localized Chinese page. Even the sign-up page is in English. Nonetheless, Zoom has some level of awareness in China; some MNC and technology companies like ByteDance use Zoom.

Baidu is also offering its solution Baidu Hi; but, it doesn’t seem to be seriously promoted at the moment. DingTalk is a winner; and, WeChat Work and Feiyu both saw some traction.

Continue reading Acquire, convert, and retain customers through WeChat Ads + WeChat Work or check out Rocky’s China Digital Trends podasts via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Google Play  or Spotify.

In the recent “Double 11 2019” shopping festival in China, Apple’s official flagship store on Tmall “Singles Day” transaction exceeded 7 times of last year’s full day sales in just 10 minutes. iPhone 11 broke 100 million yuan in sales in 1 minute.

Related: Double 11 Festival statistics 2019

This year is Apple’s first participation in the Tmall “Double 11” promotion. The official Weibo of the Tmall spokesman said that during this year’s “Double 11”, Apple’s official flagship store participated in the Tmall “Double 11” 2019 platform subsidy, the highest straight off 1,111 yuan (about US$158).

On November 9, Tmall announced an additional budget of 100 million yuan to subsidize Apple’s official products.

On the “Double 11” day, Apple’s official flagship store, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Airpods and other in-store products, participated in the 24-month interest-free installment payment, iPhone 11 buyers could save 300 yuan after the receipt of the coupon and Airpods Pro 60 yuan off. In this way, Airpods cost less than 3 yuan a day; and, iPhone 11 less than 8 dollars a day.

JD (Jingdong) also introduced a super-billion subsidy (10 billion yuan).

After entering the corresponding interface of JD platform, users could receive corresponding coupons. Among them, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max offered 3,000 for over 8,000 yuan spend, or 1,800 yuan off 3,000 yuan spend.

iPhone 11 Pro / Pro Max offered 500 yuan discount for over 8,000 yuan spend , iPhone 11 300 yuan off 5,000 yuan spend. At the same time, the purchase of some iPhones could enjoy 12-month interest-free installment plan applying JD Credit Coupons.

According to the “Double 11” report data released by Jingdong, Apple’s sales ranked first on November 11th. At the same time, Apple was also the cumulative best-selling brand from November 1st to 11th, followed by Huawei, Honor (Huawei), Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo.

The fast rising social e-commerce platform Pinduoduo also provided heavy subsidies for iPhone buyers.

iPhone demand is strong in China. From a note to clients by UBS:

Monthly government data suggests overall iPhone demand in China was strong in the month of September, up ~230% vs. ~110% monthly growth last September. This is wholly consistent with recent procurement data/estimates from the UBS Asia Hardware team.

In the week ahead of this year’s Double 11 (4 Nov – 10 Nov), iPhone was ranked first by search volume on Baidu in the smartphone category, followed by Huawei and Xiaomi. iPhone’s media coverage was ranked second after Huawei in the same period according to data from Baidu.

In preparation for the “Double 11”, Changshuo Technology, an Apple foundry in Pudong, Shanghai, worked overtime to ensure the “Double 11” supply of the iPhone 11.

The level of marketing and advertisement put into new products by Apple is probably the largest.

In my visits to several tier-2 to tier-3 cities in China, iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and iWatch video ads were all over Chinese digital media across both desktop and mobile. Review articles on WeChat content network (Official Accounts) and Weibo were hard to miss.

Top Mini-Programs in Oct 2019; China’s mini-apps war led by online shopping

Audi launched its video ad campaign on WeChat Moments earlier today. What’s interesting is that the video played is an Infiniti ad.

Based on discussion from a WeChat Group of advertising professionals, Audi’s spending 30 million yuan working with Tencent Social Ads.

Tencent Ads has issued an apology and shared that the wrong ad creative launched at 9 am today was taken offline at 10:30 am. It was caused by an automobile service company’s careless mistake.

The ad generated 3,959 impressions with a total spend of 202 yuan according to Tencent. But the media coverage about this incident is growing; good news for both Audi and Infiniti.

Based on the provided figure, the CPM is roughly 51 yuan (US$7.2) and Audi’s campaign most likely targets lower-tier cities. As Beijing and Shanghai targeted video ads on WeChat Moments cost about 100-300 yuan on CPM.

And, some influencers are making fun of Audi on China’s social media, which drives more free coverage.

Shuangye, a Weibo influencer with over 1 million followers, published a post, “Audi is indeed a generous company, spending money in WeChat Moments for Infiniti China…”

Some companies are taking advantage of this incident, like Volvo:

#Audi Infiniti# has become a hot topic on Weibo with over 3.4 million views as of writing this post. But neither Audi nor Infiniti has responded yet. It’s a good opportunity for Audi to generate good awareness for its Q8 though the value from from the incident far exceeds Audi’s 200 yuan spent.

Fake fans and manipulations on China social media

Update: Infiniti responded in the evening via its Weibo account:

Mini programs competition is heating up with ByteDance building its own ecosystem on its leading apps short-video TikTok and news Toutiao. With Alipay and Baidu following closely, WeChat is stepping up its Mini Program game by going beyond the WeChat interface and partnering with hardware vendors like Samsung.

WeChat and Samsung announced their partnership last week with two additional WeChat Mini Program shortcuts on Samsung smartphones outside the WeChat interface. Users can either swipe right or pull left on the home screen to display the shortcuts to WeChat mini-programs.

Since January of this year, Samsung has already pre-installed this cooperation feature in the S8/S9/S10 series models and Note8 and Note9 series models in China. In the future, Samsung will do so in the flagship Note10 series models and continue to pre-install this function in subsequent new models.

Leading Chinese internet companies are building their own ecosystem with Tencent’s WeChat, Alibaba’s Alipay, and Baidu’s smart program in the leading positions. See the top mini-programs in the first half of 2019 and a quick comparison of WeChat, Alipay, and Baidu.

Is Mini Programs challenging the native mobile apps?

WeChat, widely known in the global media as a super app, covers many aspects and functions beyond instant messaging and social networking. With Mini-Programs launched in early 2017, the imagination of what a mobile user can do on WeChat is infinite.

Can it replace mobile apps?

If a mobile app offers very simple functionality, a WeChat mini program works well as it can be instantly launched. Users don’t have as much hesitation to try a mini-program as they download, register, and try a mobile app. The conversion rate is much higher.

Most mini-programs don’t have complex functionalities due to its light nature. Under the current technology infrastructure, it’s not likely to see very popular mini-programs with complex functions and many features. Businesses should keep this in mind while crafting its platform and acquisition strategies to make their mini-program complement their mobile app in acquisitions.

3 Trends of WeChat Mini-Programs

Vlog has become the new theme of user growth competition on several video platforms in China. One of the new players who recently joined the arena is iQiyi.

iQiyi, whose main content is professional copyright videos such as movies, TV dramas and variety shows, has recently launched a Vlog application called “iQiyi Suike”, which is obviously intended to share a piece of vlog market with the leaders such as Kwai, TikTok, Bilibili, Weibo, etc.

Vlog can be regarded as a kind of “video log” with popular themes of travel, food, pets and so on. Its production is relatively simple, the creator uses the camera to record what he sees and thinks in his daily life, and then through later editing, with music, text or stickers, can produce a Vlog.

Usually, it’s a little longer than the 15-second short video on TikTok, and a little shorter than the professional copyright content on iQiyi. It’s a little more delicate than the food broadcasting on Kwai.

In order to encourage users to create Vlogs, the design of iQiyi Suike App is very simple, with only three interfaces: main feed, publishing, and personal homepage. There is no search function for vloggers or content, nor any categories of bloggers or content. Users can get content by pulling down feed pages and triggering updates.

Several video platforms have started promoting vlog since the second half of 2018. Bilibili’s vlog content upload has increased by 7.6 times in April 2019, compared with April 2018, according to 36Kr.

This month, Kwai began to test the long video, limiting the video length to more than 57 seconds, less than 10 minutes. A month ago, its competitor TikTok also started internally testing videos of up to 15 minutes long. In April, TikTok opened the limit for 15 seconds longer short videos, and the original Vlog with a duration of more than 30 seconds can participate in the “Vlog Billion Incubation Plan”.

Xigua, another video platform under the same company Bytedance as TikTok, also launched their campaigns to support vlogger this month. In comparison, Weibo’s vlogger growth mainly focuses on celebrities.

From Baidu search trend shown below, we can see a surge of interest in vlog since the second half of 2018:

However, Vlog’s current penetration rate is still very low. Nearly 60% of the users surveyed, conducted by Tencent’s Penguin Intelligence, have never heard of Vlog, and 70% of users claim to have never seen Vlog. Vlog users are currently mainly high-education female, concentrated in the first- and second-tier cities. The main platforms are Weibo and TikTok.

42% of Weibo Vlog users are post-95s (those born between 1995 and 2000) in Q1 2019, followed by post-90s (22%) and post-00s (20%), according to Eefung Software. The number of views on Weibo topic #VLOG# is 4.57 billion, and the number of users in related discussions is nearly five million.

Weibo Vloggers with over 1-million followers only account for 0.4% of the total; and, those with 10,000 or fewer followers account for 96%, according to Eefung data. The top topics covered by Weibo Vloggers are food, travel, celebrity, entertainment, and humor.

Marketing: Short Videos or Vlog?

Vlog contents, compared with seconds-length short videos on platforms like TikTok, are more difficult to create. Technical hindrance is not the real obstacle to its growth; video platforms will make it easier and more convenient for vloggers. However, high-quality vlogs take both delicate planning and good storytelling skills, which is much more challenging than creating short videos. It’s far behind short videos in terms of both quantity and quality.

Vlog is rising and trending, definitely worth marketers’ attention and experiments. The nature of vlogs is “log”, which can be easily boring, while the short videos focus on just eye-catching moments. So, it can’t be any serious threat to the popular short video content for reaching the mass audience but a very good complement to overall content mix.

To get you some sense what it could potentially do for marketing, take a look at the three videos below:

Vlog for Apple iPad Pro

In addition to feeling the atmosphere of the launch conference, experiencing the magnetic features of the new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, they also incorporate many daily elements of New York’s food and lifestyle in vlog and present the experience content of the conference from the perspective of life.

Vlog for LV Exhibition

Louis Vuitton held a large exhibition and invited some top vloggers. The look and feel of the scene were presented in different Vlog styles. Among them, LV also provides vloggers with branded products such as clothing, shoes, handbags, and ornaments, which were also recorded in the vlogs.

Hyatt Presidential Suite

A couple on Weibo, boy Sid is Chinese, girl Kat is from the United States. In this vlog, they received an invitation from Grand Hyatt Xi’an to experience the 31,000-yuan presidential suite. With the arrangement of the hotel, Kat and Sid followed the timetable and introduced the hotel’s room profile, double room spa service, and an Italian restaurant.

The most important thing about Vlogger sharing life is to resonate with free expression to attract people in the same circle. Compared with traditional TVC or celebrity endorsement ads, Vlog gives the audience a smaller sense of distance and is more realistic, in addition to its much lower production cost.

How a popular vlog celebrity in China expanded from online to offline retail

Live video broadcasting has proven to be a fun, engaging way to connect with followers and grow the audience. 78% of online viewers are watching video on Facebook Live as of 2018. In China, live streaming has stepped up the game and become a useful tool to drive e-commerce traffic and sales.

Audiences are quite active in live streaming in China, which makes it a good channel for marketing. 50.5% of them would make comments, over 40% of them would like it, reward hosts (free-to-play), and share videos to others, according to a study by iResearch.

86% of users thought positively about live streaming marketing. Among them, those younger than 24 years are more likely to be attracted by new products release and buyer’s sharing.

In 2018, Taobao’s live broadcasting platform Taobao Live delivered more than 100 billion yuan sales of products, a year-on-year growth rate of nearly 400% according to Alibaba.

A total number of 81 live rooms on Taobao Live reached 100 million yuan sales; a total of 5 organizations broke 1 billion yuan sales. Taobao Live aims to deliver 500 billion yuan sales in the next three years.

80% of the broadcasters are female. The number of Taobao Live broadcasters with a monthly income of over one million yuan has exceeded 100 people.

Meet Viya, a top broadcaster on Taobao Live

Viya used to be a small star in the entertainment industry. She, born in the “fashion family”, circled back to the apparel industry while working as a model and operating offline apparel stores. In 2011, she saw the business opportunity and closed all offline stores and moved to the Taobao platform.

Her fifth year on Taobao, 2015, had a total sales of over 10 million yuan on Double 11 but suffered a net loss of three million yuan.

In May 2016, Viya started the first live broadcast on Taobao. She managed to close 20 thousand sales orders by one live broadcast in the second month.

And, her live broadcast on October 10, 2017, made her a top sales girl.

This very broadcast helped drive 70 million yuan (US$10.6 million) sales to a Taobao store who has zero followers. It started at 7 pm until 40 minutes past midnight and attracted over 1.53 million viewers with 12.3 million likes.

She broke her record in last year’s Tmall Double 11 with over 300 million yuan in sales.

Live video broadcasting is now a critical part of a successful e-commerce operation on Alibaba’s e-commerce ecosystem. Many stores have hired a team of broadcasters with many simultaneous broadcasts of different products.

There is now a group of online shoppers who don’t check out the product details pages. They just watch live video broadcast and place orders.

Said Mr. Zheng during my interview with him, an e-commerce business owner in south China.

Related: Top 20 Chinese video mobile apps in overseas market

E-Commerce Live Broadcasting in WeChat Ecosystem

Tencent launched a live broadcasting tool for WeChat Official Account (OA) in March 2019, currently supporting audio and video broadcast. Influencing WeChat OA can utilize their fanbase on WeChat, in combination with quality live broadcasts, to drive e-commerce sales.

A fashion digital media Ta Du (She Reads) did a live broadcast e-commerce show in April for two hours. It attracted 11,951 viewers and received 1,228 orders with a conversion rate of 18.32% according to 36Kr.

This broadcast utilized both a mobile app and a WeChat mini-program. It started from the mobile app to generate a mini-program card or embeddable code for an official account article. Users can click on that to book, watch, and interact.

Tencent Live serves WeChat’s Official Account. The mobile app can be used to create and operate live broadcasting while the mini-program client serves users for booking, watching, and interacting with the live video broadcasts.

It’s in testing and not available yet in the App Store. WeChat Official Account (OA) owners can get the app download link from Tencent Live Assistant WeChat OA and apply for an account before being able to test it. With about 1.1 billion monthly active users, WeChat could be potentially a massive platform for e-commerce sellers.

Related: How to use live streaming for successful marketing in China in 2018

Other e-commerce live video broadcasting platforms

Some other leading e-commerce platforms in China run their own live video broadcasting channels as well, including Jingdong, Vipshop, Mogujie, etc.

Seeing over 500 million live broadcasting users in China, businesses can also utilize independent popular live video broadcasting platforms and social media to drive brand awareness and product promotions.

Tik Tok has been testing e-commerce integration for over a year, starting from a Taobao e-commerce traffic driver to building its e-commerce ecosystem.

Kuaishou, another top short video platform in China, has integrated with multiple e-commerce platforms including Taobao, Tmall, Youzan, etc. Sellers can drive the traffic directly to the online store and complete the purchase.

Others you could consider include Weibo Live, Momo, Douyu, YY, etc.

If you haven’t started, you should focus on one platform, build your success, and expand from there. Different platforms could have very different demographic users; so, make sure you conduct your research and identify the channels with users meeting your audience profiles.

E-Commerce Live Broadcasting

Live video broadcasting for e-commerce is now a game for professional operations. Broadcasters are carefully tested, selected and trained with a mix of celebrities, Taobao owners, and the professionally trained.

Alibaba recently launched a tool to enable broadcasters to select products from 12 pools of 5 industry categories and about 130 thousand products. Broadcasters can either broadcast anywhere after receiving a product sample or visit the Taobao with additional services.

It appears easier than it actually is when it comes to driving e-commerce sales with live video broadcasting. Merchants must figure out the whole process including personas analysis, products selection, post-sales service, delivery, logistics, etc.

Delivering quality products with a relatively lower price is the key. You need to develop demographic and psychographic profiles of your fans to select the right product. Another critical factor for a successful live broadcast is the content.

Live video broadcasting is a valuable channel that consumer brands should tap on. Working with one of the influencer broadcasters whose fans match the same profile of your audience is a quick way to get started. Alternatively, you can outsource to companies who specialize in this area.

5 consumption trends of post-90s on Tmall Global

The number of China internet users exceeded 801 million with a penetration rate of 57.7% according to the latest data from CNNIC. Live broadcasting, short videos, and personalized content will continue to be essential parts of digital marketing strategies in 2019.

1. User Attention Highly Distracted

On average, each user installs 44.2 mobile apps in China as of Q2 2018. Fifty-nine apps have exceeded 100 million user base. The number of WeChat Official Accounts is over 3.5 million according to data from iResearch.

2. Increased Difficulty in Competition

The Chinese population has been more diverse with multiple segmentations including Gen-Z, post-90s (people born in and after 1990 and before 2000), new middle-class, the town youth (those living in tier-3 and lower tier cities between 18 and 30 years old), etc.

80% of marketing resources are in the hands of the top 20%.

3. Rising News Feed Advertisement

China’s online advertising revenues are estimated to reach 491.4 billion yuan with a growth rate of 31%, which is about one-tenth of China’s internet economy (4.73 trillion yuan) according to iResearch.

Mobile advertising accounts for about 70% of China’s online advertising market and is estimated to increase to 77.6% in 2018 and 82.8% in 2019.

Mobile news feed ads grow further this year accounting for nearly 24% of the total, compared with search 31.7%, e-commerce ads 19.5%, and 11.4% from display ads.

China’s native ads market totals 242 billion yuan in 2018 based on iResearch’s estimate, accounting for 49.2% of the entire online ads market with strong growth of 40.9%. It’s estimated to further grow to 53.5% in 2019.

4. More Diverse Marketing Channels

The growth and development of online videos, news, live broadcasting, OTT, and online marketing have led to multiple advertisement formats. Search remains a critical channel on desktop while social and videos play an important role on mobile.

Online video ads market is now worth 45.93 billion yuan; OTT over 4 billion yuan; news ads 42.47 billion yuan; and, online live broadcast marketing 3.4 billion yuan.

Many marketers have seen and enjoyed the power of content marketing and social media marketing in 2018, either following and utilizing the trending topics or making new ones. Mobile apps in short video market worth your attention are Kuaishou, Tik Tok (Douyin), and Miaopai.

Verified organization accounts (companies, government agencies, and media) on Tik Tok exceeded 12 thousand. Short video has seen massive adoptions by marketers in China as one of the essential online marketing channels.

The e-commerce giants Taobao, Tmall, and JD.com have cooperated with at least 10 short video platforms so far. The video view of short video at Taobao and Tmall exceed 100 million, closely followed by JD.com.

5. Influencer marketing

More online celebrities may emerge and some can have a high impact on driving brand awareness and sales, especially in social and live broadcasting e-commerce. Many brands would increase their investment in key opinion leaders (KOL) in 2019, who often create very relevant and quality content.

6. Technologies

The adoption of AI has increased the efficiency of China’s marketing industry by 20% according to iResearch. Advertisers and marketers’ adoption of technologies will extend from adtech to martech. IoT could potentially enhance the user experience. And, advanced speech and facial recognition, AR, and VR will drive higher engagement and deliver better user experiences.

7. More Personalized Social Content

Top technology companies in China, such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD, has been tracking integrating various channels and delivering to users more personalized content. WeChat’s recent update also shows Tencent’s efforts in personalized and social content.

Read more: China mobile short-video app market 2018; Tik Tok vs. Kuaishou

WeChat is testing a new feature allowing users to find nearby restaurants according to Yiou News. This feature locates on the top level menu, in parallel with WeChat Moments, People Nearby, Mini-Programs, etc.

Some WeChat users discovered “Nearby Restaurants” feature in Plugins of Settings (previously WeChat Lab; left picture of the screen capture below) according to Yiou. The testing is currently only limited to Guangzhou.

WeChat has been providing Food feature for a while with Mini-Programs, which is under “Mini-Programs > Nearby Mini-Programs”. However, users can’t get much information about the restaurants as no information such as ratings or reviews is available.

The new “Nearby Restaurants” feature in WeChat looks like a challenge to Meituan Dianping, one of China’s leading e-commerce platform for local lifestyle services that went public in Hong Kong in September 2018. Meituan’s annual transacting users increased by 30.3% to 382.3 million as of September 2018.

With its strong social feature and large user base, this Nearby Restaurants could become an essential part of WeChat ecosystem. It can target and hurt Meituan Dianping if it chooses to do so. But, it’s not clear yet.

Tencent is Meituan Dianping’s largest shareholder holding close to 20% of its shares:

Meituan Dianping has well utilized Tencent’s WeChat ecosystem, especially WeChat Pay and Mini-Programs. And, it owns several ones in the top WeChat Mini-Programs.

Would Tencent create another Meituan Dianping? Theoretically, it’s one possibility. Alternatively, Tencent could also work with it integrating its restaurants’ data while enhancing it with high social engagement and complementing its e-commerce offerings.

WeChat is at least not an immediate threat to Meituan. Its current strong competitors include Alibaba’s Koubei and Ele.me.

Also read: WeChat launched its own version of “Facebook Stories”

WeChat launched Search and Top Stories sections in the updated WeChat iOS 6.5.8. These two sections are not yet available for Android smartphone users.

The search results include articles from WeChat Official Accounts and WeChat Moments. However, some keywords could trigger “Current Events” category, which includes external news sources. According to WeChat, these external news sources are articles shared on WeChat.

Tencent set up a search application department under WeChat Business Unit last month. This new feature is the latest outcome. And, that’s not all. WeChat users can also now search the conversations inside the chats and filter by dates, images and video, file, URL, music, and group members.

This is a very useful feature as many users share files, images, and URLs with each other on WeChat, which can be more easily accessed with this new feature. The bad news is that it’s right now only available on the recently updated WeChat iOS version.

WeChat Top Stories is a section for personalized article recommendations. The algorithm includes factors such as followed Official Accounts, friends’ sharing in Moments, geographic locations, content quality, user experience, and etc.

Both Search and Top Stories are not really new features but an indication of the importance of search and content on WeChat. WeChat Search is not ready to take on Baidu in China’s mobile search market. But, it shows more potential what WeChat could bring to Tencent’s revenue growth in the future with its 938 million MAU and developing AI technologies.

A quick & easy retail solution on WeChat Mini-Program

Launched in January 2017, WeChat Mini-Program (WMP) has definitely attracted a lot of attentions. The highest penetrations come from mobile payment and online video categories.

WeChat Mini-Program has high penetrations in mobile payment, online videos, maps and navigation, e-commerce, online music, group buying, and Weibo according to data from QuestMobile.

Its daily active users growth is much faster since the last week of March 2017. QuestMobile’s research shows increased number of apps used and WeChat Pay usage frequency after using WMP. But, it might be too early to link that to the use of Min-Programs.

However, the growth looks reasonable since WeChat team launched a series of new policies since last week of March to boost the adoption of its Mini-Program including:

• Opening up the application of this mini-apps to individual developers
• Allowing WeChat Mini-Program to be launched from the menu of WeChat Official Accounts
• Allowing the launch Mini-Program from the regular / existing 2D code
• Supporting third-party platforms to develop and manage Mini-Programs (good news for agencies)
• Providing new data APIs on users’ visit trend, geo-location, retentions, and page stats
• Increasing Mini-Program size from 1M to 2M
• Enabling each Official Account to be linked to 3 mini-programs of different parties or 10 programs by the same developer; each mini-program can also link up to 3 official accounts
• Allowing adding mini-programs in the main content of WeChat Official Account articles
• Allowing the same name as the Official Account
• Upgrading the retail management feature of Official Accounts to Mini-Program

Huge Potential in Retail

Migrating the retail store feature of an Official Account to a mini-program doesn’t at the moment offer too much additional values. Instead of sitting on a menu item of one WeChat Official Account, it is now under Mini-Program.

However, since the retail store mini-program does not require coding capability, it could potentially be adopted by a large number of small retailers who can’t afford to develop their own light-weight retail WeChat Mini-Program.

The question now is, what is Tencent’s next move for this? Adding valuable features will no doubt make it more attractive to retailers which can further push the mini-program adoptions to an exponential growth.

A threat to Apple or the mobile app ecosystem?

WeChat Mini-Program is introduced as a lightweight app on top of WeChat infrastructure. Users don’t need to download, install, or register to run the applications programmed inside the Mini-Program framework. In comparison, a mobile app can be designed with complex features and functions.

The size of each mini-program is restricted to 2M while the average file size is 38MB for iOS mobile apps and 15MB for Android mobile apps.

At the moment, WeChat Mini-Program does not look like a serious threat to Apple; but, it potentially can be. Tencent must be very carefully on how they expand the functions and features, especially those involving monetary transactions. The existence of WeChat app, mother of all mini-programs, depends on Apple’s iOS ecosystem.

Mini-Programs could be good news for some mobile apps who are NOT well known or attractive enough. Some of the top reasons Chinese mobile users don’t install certain mobile apps include the concern of limited smartphone storage and the inconvenience and data cost of downloading and installation.

WeChat Mini-Program very likely has a higher adoption rate than a mobile app with the same function. For companies promoting a new app could take advantage of this such as developing a lighter version with a key feature of the mobile app as a strategic first step for user acquisitions.

WeChat has included external sources in in-app search results pages (SERP) while it previously only searches chats, WeChat Moments, and Official Accounts. Some users start to see a “news” section in the WeChat SERP which includes external news sources.

The search box is on top of WeChat main user interfaces (Chats; Contacts; Discover); I conducted a search for “Jay Chou”, a very famous Taiwanese celebrity, and saw the following results:

WeChat groups search results in sections (left): emoji, WeChat Moments, music (songs shared in WeChat Moments in the last 30 days), and related articles (center). The related articles have now included external sources other than official accounts articles such as the one on the right of the screen capture.

Related: Use WeChat Index to monitor the trend on WeChat

Most are articles from Official Accounts; and, I found two external sources Zhihu and Sogou Baike. It can’t be certain whether they are included previously not part of ongoing update as Tencent merged its search engine Soso with Sogou in 2013 and funded the Q&A platform Zhihu.

Currently, not all users see external sources or the new “news” section in the search results on WeChat. Even one can see that section with one keyword, not all search terms can trigger the display of the news section. This feature seems still under testing.

WeChat opens external web pages directly; and, in most cases, the loading speed and user experience are not as good as those from Official Accounts. If Tencent is to include external sources to WeChat search, it could benefit by adopting a similar approach as Facebook’s Instant Articles, Google’s AMP, or Baidu’s MIP.

Tencent reported 889 million monthly active (MAU) users on WeChat in Q4 2016, which makes WeChat potentially a serious player and a challenger to Baidu in China’s mobile search market.

Baidu has 78% market share by total revenues in China’s search engine market in 2016. This market will grow from 76.1 billion yuan (US$11.05 bn) to 113.4 billion yuan (US$16.47 bn) in 2019. A huge MAU doesn’t necessarily equal to a good deal of search volumes.

Can WeChat seriously challenge Baidu’s mobile search? Not in the near future. A huge WeChat MAU doesn’t necessarily equal to a good deal of search volumes. And, the quality of the mobile search algorithm and experiences are not something Tencent can easily beat.

Update (24 Apr 2017): Tencent has set up search application department under  WeChat Business Unit, according to Leiphone and confirmed by Tencent. The search application department is responsible for WeChat’s search business, reading recommendation business, AI technology realization, WeChat data platform development, and data capabilities.

Continue to read→ Top WeChat stats and trends 2016

Baidu announced the drop of its separate news source database due to “technology upgrade on timeliness content identification”.

The best source websites in the original news source library will be invited to join the Webmasters VIP Club, who have the opportunity to be given priority listing in the time-sensitive search results. Those not in VIP Club still have chances to be shown in the timeliness results.

Those not in VIP Club still have chances to be shown in the timeliness results. Baidu’s Webmasters VIP Club is now limited to news sites and will roll out invitations to other categories of websites in the future.

Benefits of Baidu Webmasters VIP Club

After the recent upgrade to its VIP Club for Webmasters, Baidu no longer limits the access to the large websites. Vertical websites with quality and original content will gradually have opportunities to apply for access. The VIP Club provides:

• Priority request management
• Notifications on website problems
• Opportunities to make changes before being penalized
• Access to new tools
• Offline events

Currently, webmasters can register and get access to Baidu Webmasters, a platform similar to Google Webmasters that users and add websites, submit sitemaps, diagnose indexing problems, and etc.

This VIP Club looks like a stepped up efforts for quality content from Baidu and premium search console with additional benefits for webmasters and offline training.

Also read: A Quick Guide for Baidu Mobile SEO

Tencent has recently confirmed the ongoing testing of a paid subscription platform for WeChat Official Accounts, which will soon be launched.

So far the only official ways of monetization for WeChat Official Accounts are through advertisement and monetary rewards by other users.

China used to be a market where internet users expect almost all digital products to be free, from software to music, movies, e-books, and etc. Now, more and more China internet users pay for online video subscriptions, digital music, and other digital content. 70% respondents paid for online learning in 2016 compared with only 26% a year ago.

Weibo is already offering a paid subscription feature that users can apply to their created content on Weibo platform. Weibo also recently launched Weibo Ask in December 2016, where one user can ask another user a question and get the answer after making payment. Other users interested in the answer can also pay to see the content, with which the person asking the question could make some money.

Zhihu, a popular Q&A website launched in 2011 with quality content and highly educated users, launched Zhihu Live last year, an audio Q&A product that has a similar business model to Weibo Ask.

Qin Chao, a former Facebook employee, sold 98 yuan tickets for a “How to find a job in Silicon Valley” course to Chinese online users on Zhihu Live. It attracted 465 participants. This one session got him an income of 45,472 yuan (US$6,617) in about one hour. His total number of 9 Zhihu Live sessions attracted 4,418 users to participate.

Ximalaya FM, a popular audio sharing mobile app in China, also offers users paid audios across varieties of categories. One column teaching people “how to speak” had first day sales of over 5 million yuan.

A new mobile app Dedao was launched by famous Luogic Show; it saw over 1 million downloads in 2016. It provides paid digital business content. Li Xiang Business Internal Reference sells as much as 199 yuan per year and is even recommended by Jack Ma. Total sales of subscriptions on Dedao is about 140 million yuan according to Sina Tech.

China online users’ willingness to pay for content and knowledge is changing, from being reluctant to pay to be willing to pay for high-quality content. Their information selection is more mature from aimlessly accepting pushed information to proactively obtaining knowledge.

Continue to read Report: Chinese Consumers Paying for Digital Knowledge 2017

Also read: WeChat Official Accounts marketing insights 2016

Mobile users are sometimes forced to initiate or download an app to continue viewing further content while visiting a web page via search engine, which can be quite annoying to users. 

Take one of the popular audio sharing platform Ximalaya as an example:

When a user enters the website via mobile search, it interrupts the user journey and forces the users to download or use the mobile app. Baidu mobile search will significantly lower the rankings of such pages; so, companies should avoid implementing such practices.

Optimizing for Baidu Mobile Search

Domains and servers. Baidu recommends simple and short domain names as they are easier for remember. Businesses should select stable and good performing servers. Baidu also recommends fully-responsive HTML5 designs to build websites. Keep in mind that page loading speed is a very important ranking factor.

Machine readable. Baidu crawls, processes, and indexes mobile web pages via Baiduspider2.0. Currently, Baiduspider can only understand text content and may have difficulty extracting content and links from flash, images, ajax, iframe, and javascript. Use “alt” tag on images.

Flat structure. Baidu recommends mobile sites should have a clear structure and shallow link depth, which allow users to quickly obtain useful information and search engines to quickly understand the structure level. Tree structures are recommended in three levels: homepage » category » details page.

Linking. The ideal site structure is flat tree structure, from the home page to the content page level as little depth as possible. Every page should link to the upper-level page, the next level page, and pages with related content. Important web pages should be near the home page.

In addition, breadcrumb navigation is also important to have for mobile websites.

External links are important for mobile page rankings, including links from PC only pages to mobile pages. Be reminded poor quality external links have a negative impact on your Baidu rankings. You can use Baidu Webmasters to analyze the external links.

URL structure. If your website designs different pages specifically for mobile users, Baidu recommends the use of mobile home page with m.a.com/3g.a.com/wap.a.com (the use of subdirectory such as www.a.com/m/ is not recommended), category pages with m.a.com/n1/、m.a.com/n2/ (it’s better if n1 and n2 can be directly accessed). Details pages should have simple and shorter URLs with few parameters. Different pages with the same content should use 301 Redirect to one unique URL.

Anchor text. The simpler the description of the anchor text is written, the easier it is for the user to understand the purpose of the page. The user discovers that your page is a link from other pages, and the anchor text is the only introduction Baiduspider understands the page.

Anchor text must be accurate; and, incorrect descriptions could get your page penalized.

Tools. You can use Baidu Webmasters to submit a mobile sitemap, check mobile indexing status, and submit 404 removed pages.

If Baidu could not locate proper mobile pages, it will create a transformed mobile page for better user experience. However, it’s not as good as fully responsive HTML5 designed web pages.

Page Title. You should have unique and relevant title for each mobile page, limited to 17 Chinese characters. If more than 17 characters in title, it will be forced to two rows or removed when it’s over 24 characters. Keep the most important words in the beginning of the title. If your brand is well known in China, keep your brand in the title.

Meta data.

Having a unique “description” tag for each page is important. You should also use “applicable-device” tag to inform Baidu of your website mobile adaption status:

• If your web pages are only good for desktop browsing, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”pc”>
• If your web pages are only good for mobile devices, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”mobile”>
• If your website uses fully-responsive design, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”pc,mobile”>

For local content, you can use geo meta tag; for example, if your website targets users in Beijing, you can use “location” meta tag:

<meta name=”location” content=”province=北京;city=北京; coord=116.306522891,40.0555055968″>

Coord is the latitude and longitude coordinates of the page information.

Content design. Baidu recommends 14pt font size for main content (no smaller than 10px), and line spacing of (0.42~0.6)*font size (no lower than 0.2*font size).

If the main content contains multiple images, the images should be set to uniform width and positions. When the content contains multiple text links, the recommended font size is 14px and 13px for the vertical spacing. If the font size is 16px, the vertical spacing recommended is 14px. The clickable text links area is no smaller than 40px

Related post: Baidu version of Google AMP

WeChat’s been testing WeChat Mini Program (mini apps) for a while, a new ecosystem for creating light apps on top of WeChat; it’s expected to launch on 9 January 2017.

WeChat is positioned as a tool instead of a platform according to Zhang Xiaolong, who invented WeChat. An important feature of this “tool” is to improve efficiency and expects users to use it and leave.

WeChat Mini-Program are light programs that do not require download or installation; users can access the apps anytime and anywhere. Users can scan a QR code to launch and use the application although search capability is added but limited. Users can simply leave the application after use without the need to uninstall.

WeChat Mini-Program can not be used to design mobile gaming apps.

Social Sharing of WeChat Mini-Program

Moments is the center of WeChat social networking activities. However, Mini-Program can NOT be shared in WeChat Moments but only WeChat chats and groups. The design purpose of the sharing feature is mainly for collaborations.

The sharing feature is on a page level. That means a user can share the app and a specific information from the app to the WeChat Groups.

How does Mini-Program differ from Official Accounts?

WeChat Official Account is based on subscription and updates push. The focus of businesses’ official accounts is to grow subscribers and followers and keep them engaged via daily or weekly updates. Users must subscribe to obtain the content or application from official accounts. Based on WeChat shared information, users just need to scan the QR code to launch any WeChat Mini-Program without any more actions required.

Users of any WeChat Official Accounts are their followers and fans; but, this relationship does not exist between users and WeChat Mini-Program.

Once users follow a WeChat Official Account, they will receive push notifications of updates. But, this type of “push” notification is not enabled upon Mini-Program access. If the user performs a specific action inside Mini-Program, app owners can send notifications to the user via the Mini-Program.

WeChat has designed connections between this two types of systems. Users of an Official Account are able to see and access the available Mini-Program designed by the same company.

The key differences between WeChat Mini-Program and mobile apps.

As mentioned just now, the use of WeChat Mini-Program do not require download or installation; and, users can simply leave it without the need to uninstall them as they do with mobile apps.

A central location with all WeChat Mini-Program, like a mobile app store, does not exist. A user can not locate any Mini-Program on WeChat unless he launched the apps before. And, 2D code is the entry point of users to WeChat Mini-Program.

Mini-Programs are more efficient for users and more cost efficient (about 20% of the development cost of mobile apps) for businesses with limited capability compared with native mobile apps.

Related Post: Top WeChat Stats and Trends in 2016

Hongbao is an attractive tactic and often effective one for China internet companies to grow user base and engagement. And, it is one must-have activity among China internet users during Chinese New Year festival. Facing the coming Chinese New Year, Alipay is launching a special Hongbao campaign utilizing Augmented Reality to make it more interesting and engaging.

The concept of the campaign is simple. Users can “hide” a hongbao anywhere, like in the office or living room, and share the clue in images to their families and friends in social media such as Alipay friends circle, Weibo, WeChat and QQ. Other users can use the clue and get the hongbao by using Alipay to scan if they get it right.

The AR Hongbao is not only for users but also available for brands to engage users during the Chinese New Year festival. Coca-Cola has become the first brand to test run the AR Hongbao campaign with Alipay.

Alipay and Taobao launched password hongbao campaign before, in which users can get the hongbao if they can enter the right password. This AR hongbao campaign is similar with a twist using AR and LBS technologies.

Stephen Hawking published his first post on his verified Weibo account on the morning of 12 April 2016 recalling his deep friendship with China and hoping to share more about his life and work.

Right after publishing the first post, Mr. Hawking’s fans on Weibo is growing exponentially and exceeded 780 thousand in 3 hours. That particular one Weibo post attracted 140,00 re-posts, 130,000 comments, and over a quarter million likes. Mr. Hawkings got ONE MILLION fans on Weibo in less than 5 hours!

At the time of writing this post, Mr. Hawking’s first Weibo post received 370,404 retweets, 398,312 comments and close to ONE MILLION likes! His Weibo account has over 3 million fans, following no one at the moment.

Weibo had over 271 million monthly active users in March 2016 according to Quest Mobile, comparing with 707 million WeChat users.

This fast growth of online fans is not much a special case; and, many foreign marketers are aware of. However, many are blindsided by the popularity of WeChat (Weixin) in China. Most marketing directors and c-level executives from large corporations I talked to during the past year somehow have a perception that Weibo is dead; and, they lost interest utilizing this platform promoting their brand and products but WeChat.

The key is to understand the unique essential feature of the social networks.

WeChat is no doubt a more engaging platform compared to Weibo, considering the fact that most users’ friends on WeChat are their real life friends, colleagues and business associates. But, it is much of a closed social network; the main social networking feature is WeChat Moments. One could not even see all comments left on his/her friends Moments postings but only those comments left by common friends.

For companies to build a fan base on WeChat, WeChat Official Account is the right “weapon”. Major objectives of companies’ official accounts are customer marketing, products launch and O2O transformation. You can read more here and here.

Download: WeChat Online Marketing Guide

Weibo, in comparison, is much more of a open and public social network despite its lower level of engagement. It delivers reach. In general, it takes less efforts and much less time to reach the same number of user base on Weibo than WeChat. You can find out more about Weibo users here.

Understand what you are doing and where you are going first.

I had a quick consulting session in Shanghai this March at a Fortune 500 American company in B2B area on WeChat marketing. The person in charge wanted to develop a WeChat official account, just like many other companies. What was missing is the lack of social media strategy; and, personas development is a critical part of that, without which all efforts to put into WeChat official account development, content creation and engagement fans would lead to nowhere near that company’s bottom line.

On China social media, it’s important to understand the essential unique features of each platform, based on which you should develop a strategy that you can tie to your business long-term success.

Read more on Weibo and WeChat here.

Double 11 (Nov 11), the largest online shopping day by total transactions, received over 10 billion yuan sales on Tmall only 12 minutes and 28 seconds after it started since midnight in 2015.

China online shoppers are often “well prepared” before November 11, having grabbed coupon, red envelopes and added favorite products to shopping carts. It only took Tmall one minute and twelve seconds to exceed 1 billion yuan (US$157 million) in total transaction value this year, less than twelve and half minutes to see a total transaction of over 10 billion yuan (US$1.57 billion), over 74% from mobile.

Here is a more detailed transaction record on Tmall for Double 11 2015:

• 00:00:00, 11 Nov: Double 11 shopping festival started
• 00:01:12, 1 billion yuan
• 00:05:00, 4 billion yuan (it took Tmall 2 hours in 2014 Double 11 to exceed 2 billion yuan)
• 00:06:00, 5.5 billion yuan
• 00:07:00, 6.77 billion yuan
• 00:08:00, 7.9 bln yuan
• 00:10:00, 8.556 bln yuan
• 00:12:28, 10 bln yuan (in 2014, it took 38 minutes to reach the same value), mobile accounted for 74.83%
• 00:20:00, 14.6 bln yuan
• 00:25:00, 17 bln yuan
• 00:33:00, 20 bln yuan
• 00:40:00, 21.5 bln yuan
• 00:45:00, 22.5 bln yuan
• 00:50:00, 23.3 bln yuan
• 01:00:00, 24.77 bln yuan
• 01:01:00, 25 bln yuan
• 01:14:00, 30 bln yuan
• 01:30:00, 31.7 bln yuan
• 01:50:00, 33 bln yuan
• 09:52:00, 50 bln yuan
• 12:00:00, 57.6 bln yuan; mobile 71.53%
• 16:00:00, 68.48 bln yuan (US$10.76 billion)
• 16:30:00, 69.6 bln yuan; mobile 69%
• 17:00:00, 70.8 bln yuan; mobile 69%
• 18:32:00, 74 bln yuan; mobile 69%
• 21:00:00, 80 bln yuan; mobile 68%

Tmall total transaction value on Double 11 2015 is expected to reach one hundred billion yuan, double of that in 2014.

Update: The total online retail transactions on Double 11 2015 in China reached 122.937 billion yuan (US$19.34 billion).  The total single day’s transaction value on Tmall on reached 91.217 billion yuan (US$14.34 billion), 74% of total; 68.67% came from mobile. On average, Alibaba processed 85,900 transactions per second.

Top 10 Export Countries by Total GMV on Tmall

1. the U.S.
2. Japan
3. Korea
4. Germany
5. Australia
6. Thailand
7. U.K.
8. New Zealand
9. France
10. Italy

Top 10 Regions by Total GMV on Tmall

1. Guangdong
2. Zhejiang
3. Jiangsu
4. Shanghai
5. Beijing
6. Shandong
7. Sichuan
8. Hubei
9. Henan
10. Fujian

Find out Top Tmall Stores on Double 11 2015

Read more: Preference of China Double 11 Online Shoppers

“2015 Let Hongbao Fly” campaign, jointly started by Weibo and Alipay, indicates the start of virtual Hongbao (or Red Envelope) war for Chinese New Year 2015.

In Chinese and other Asian culture, a red envelope or hongbao is a monetary gift which is given during holidays or special occasions such as weddings, the birth of a baby or graduation. In China, sometimes giving away hongbao becomes an economic burden. Anyway, who wouldn’t like to receive some?

Weibo has launched virtual cash hongbao for the first time this year. The netizens can not only directly win cash in Weibo Hongbao, but also contribute cash to the hongbao of their idols, and enjoy the chance to jointly give away hongbao.

The new way of giving away Hongbao has fully stimulated the netizens’ participation enthusiasm, demonstrated by the fact that 5,490,000 virtual red envelopes are all given away in only 8 hours. As expected, the virtual hongbao worth over one billion yuan will be released during the campaign.

Chinese Weibo users who win in Weibo Hongbao can withdraw cash and trasnfer to the associated Alipay account. It is virtual hongbao, yet it’s real money. As of 16:00, February 2, over 5,490,000 virtual red envelopes have been issued via Weibo.

The netizens can also top up their idols’ virtual red envelope with money on Weibo and enjoy the possibility to be known by millions of other fans who later manage to win those hongbao which are shown “jointly issued by … and …”. This greatly stimulates the fans’ enthusiasm. Within less than 10 hours after the start of the activity, more than 6600 fans have contributed to the hongbao of Wang Junkai who is a member of tfboys. Sina Weibo also set up a the most wealthy hongbao list.

This year’s hongbao campaign expanded cooperation with traditional enterprise integrating online and offline sources. Users can win red envelope via code scanning on China high-speed trains, airports and shopping malls, in addition to Weibo. During Chinese New Year Gala, Weibo will give away about hundreds of millions worth of hongbao jointly with Alipay, MICOE (a solar technology company) and other enterprises.

To many companies, it’s a good way for fans engagement and more importantly grow fans at acceptable cost. It also provides a good marketing platform for companies on Spring Festival. The companies can contribute to the celebrities’ hongbao with money and give away jointly with celebrities, which is good to enhance their brand awareness.

Traditional companies can integrate online and offline marketing resources through the activity of “Let Hongbao Fly”. At present, MICOE has started “MICOE’s Red Envelope Present” campaign train sponsorship painted with their brands and 2D code. Users can scan and win red envelope with each one at a maximum value of 5,000 yuan and a total worth of over 250 million yuan.

Weibo’s “Let Hongbao Fly” campaign 2015, launched on 2 Feb 2015, has generated 4.39 billion views and nearly 55 million discussions in less than three days.

Also read: WeChat Testing Ads in Moments News Feed

Some WeChat users started seeing ads on their Moments news stream today, similar to Facebook’s ads in mobile news feed.

WeChats in Moments news feed is tagged with grey color text “Promotion”

Tencent previously launched news feed ads in QQ and QZone with success; now WeChat news feed is logically the next gold mine for Tencent considering its 468 million monthly active users as of the of Q3 2014 and that each WeChat user on average reads 5.86 articles per day with 80% on WeChat Moments.

This might be a bad news for those already utilizing WeChat as mobile sales channel selling products, who are called “micro-sellers” in China, as their activities might be banned once WeChat officially launch Moments news feed ads. Even so, will they stop sharing Paipai micro-store product link in Moments considering Paipai is now managed by Jingdong who’s Tencent’s strategic parter?

Tencent already integrated their ads on WeChat official accounts back in September 2014 allowing advertisers to drive app downloads, grow WeChat followers, and drive traffic to external websites. More on WeChat official account development in 2014 here.

According to news from Sohu, the internal evaluation of WeChat Moments ads is RMB10 billion. It’s currently being tested. WeChat business unit proposed to launch their own ad system which was rejected by Tencent senior management.

Only fortune 500 brands will be accepted in the first phase of Moments ads testing according to multiple Chinese news. And, a WeChat user on average will see no more than four promoted posts per day.

Update: according to Weibo user Fenng who often leaks valid information, the starting ad budget is RMB5 million with CPM of RMB40; Moments Ads can reach 100 million accounts in one day. The targeting options only include geographic location, education level, and age. CPM goes up to RMB140 if a key city like Beijing is targeted; sharing option will charge extra 20%. The ad is displayed as from a WeChat official account.

Update 2 (22 Jan 2015): according to a document from WeChat ad team, Moments ad allows up to 50 advertisers only and minimum budget is RMB10 million at the moment. CPM is RMB 40 if no targeting is used; or RMB 140 if Beijing or Shanghai is targeted.

For CIW Premium subscribers, you can download CIW E-Book “WeChat Mobile Advertising Guide” for free here.

Related: 11 Charts to Show How Companies Use Wechat Official Accounts

Instead of duplicating Double 11 shopping festival on a different date, this year’s Double 12 focused on off-line retail sales led by Alipay. 

Double 11 (Nov 11) and Double 12 (Dec 12) are the two popular online shopping campaigns in China. This year, discounts and products promotions are extended offline purchase, which motivated a lot of elderly consumers in China. Take a look at the photos below and get a sense of how successful the offline campaign was:

The attractive offers and promotions are available when you pay with Alipay. Unlike online product promotions, you can see, touch and get a real sense of the discounted goods. There were some who were outside the supermarket helping the elderly smartphone users to set up mobile payment gateway, charging five yuan per set-up.

However, Alipay’s co-promotion with retailers agitated some shoppers as they need to queue for a few hours just buy some regular goods. With thousands of shoppers trying to access to data network and free Wi-fi, the transaction is much slower than it usually is if not failing to connect, making the shopping experience much worse. Some shoppers abandoned the order as the promotion expired at 10pm:

Nonetheless, Alipay secured tens of millions of mobile app activation on one single day according to news on Weibo; in addition, it cultivates the mobile shopping habits among the elderly.

From online side, mobile shopping continued to rise representing 45.8% of total Taobao transactions on Dec 12 2014, comparing with 42.6% on Double 11.

Related: Review of Sales Value on Double 11: 2009-2013

Alibaba Group upgraded Taobao Travel and launched an independent travel brand “Qu A” at Alitrip.com today and a corresponding mobile app is also released.

The domain name Alitrip is different from the pinyin or pronunciation of its Chinese brand “Qu A” (去啊) and it’s in English, hard for many Chinese to remember and type; not a very wise choice.

Alitrip.com operates as a platform offering air tickets and accommodation bookings, tickets of attractions, and tour packages, just like Taobao Travel, a travel section of Taobao.com

Alibaba wants to gain more in China’s booming travel market, where 57% Chinese made travel bookings online, by setting up a separate brand for travel. With the established user base on Taobao Travel and its rich resources, it’s promising to see Alitrip very competitive in China online travel market.

Taobao Travel’s half day transaction value reached RMB 157 million on Double 11 (Single’s Day) in 2013. Taobao Travel mobile app is also among the top six mobile app by total number of monthly active users, after Qunar, Ctrip, LY, eLong and Daodao.

Taobao agreed to invest RMB2.81 billion in Beijing Shiji Information Technology Co. Ltd (Shiji Information) who is listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange (code: 002153), a China-based hotel information technology provider, in return for a 15% stake, who has been appointed as the preferred vendor for many International Hotel Groups like Grand Hyatt, Sheraton, Hilton, Shangri-la, Marriott, Peninsula and Accor etc.

Read more: China National Day Travelers’ Insights

Paipai.com, part of Jingdong, is launching micro-shop platform for both business and individual sellers targeting C2C mobile shopping market.

Wechat added a new feature this May for its official account platform to enable verified Wechat Official service accounts, who have integrated Wechat payment, to set up mobile store easily. During the same period, JD.com also integrated its online shopping platform on Wechat. Both don’t seem to catch the individual sellers market; that’s where Paipai’s micro-shop comes in play.

Paipai has been internal testing micro-shop with 5,000 merchants for about one month. According to Ebrun News, 40% of Paipai Micro-shop orders come from Wechat, 20% from mobile QQ, and 40% from other channels including Qzone, Weibo, and forums.

Paipai plans to launch mobile app in late October to enable individuals merchants to set up mobile online stores on smartphones directly.

The cost per user acquisition is much lower on mobile. Paipai knows that; and it enjoyed it. According to Paipai, the CPA of its micro-shop is just between 1 and 2 yuan while it costs no less than 10 yuan on other C2C platforms. The cost per order of Paipai micro-shop is between 7 and 8 yuan comparing with over 30 yuan on other C2C platforms.

The combined MAUs of Weixin (Wechat’s Chinese version) and WeChat were 438 million by end June 2014 according to Tencent’s financial results for Q2 2014. It’s very common to see people utilizing Wechat as a sales tool using his or her own personal Wechat account and selling various products. Though there are a few apps available for individual sellers, Paipai micro-shop will most likely be the most competitive product in the market considering the strategic partnership between Jingdong and Tencent.

Also check out the 7 charts on China mobile shopping apps market.

Alibaba and Jingdong (JD.com) are the two e-commerce giants in China and now both public listed; you may be wondering how one compares with the another. Here is a simple infographic comparing Alibaba and JD.com by numbers.

Also see the comparison of Alibaba with Amazon; or find out their detailed performance in Q2 2014 here and here.

China outbound tourists on average spent RMB 20,000 (US$3,252) during travel per person and shopping is an important part of their spend in oversea trips (57.8%), according to a report released at Beijing Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit, organized by World Tourism Cities Federation (WTCF).

Outbound Chinese Tourists Love Shopping

Chinese tourists came out tops again as the world’s biggest tax free shoppers in 2011 who chalked up more than US$2.3 billion in tax free shopping transactions. Each Chinese shopper’s tax-free average spend more than US$1,041 per person, which was much higher than their Japanese US$681 and Russian (US$461) counterparts.

Australia is the latest country trying to attract well-heeled Chinese travellers, and has launched a new $250 million dollar advertising campaign including new broadcast, print and digital advertising showing key attractions such as the Bungle Bungles, Lizard Island and Uluru. That makes sense as China is now the second most popular source country for visitors to Australia, following New Zealand with 1.2 million trips from across the Tasman in the last financial year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

China outbound travelers spent a total amount of $128.7 billion during their trips overseas in 2013, an increase of 26.8% YoY according to the WTCF report. 43.93% surveyed traveled overseas for the purpose of shopping. On shopping of luxury products, Chinese travelers tend to make the purchase in oversea trips. In addition to Hong Kong and Macau (26%), Europe (23%) and US (10%) became the important destination of Chinese travelers for shopping.

Related: What International Hotels Need to Know About Chinese Travelers

Demographics of Chinese Outbound Travelers

China’s outbound travel market reached 98.19 million person trips in 2013, with an increase of 18% YoY. Primary outbound travelers in China came from Shanghai, Guangdong, and Beijing, followed by coastal provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong. Over 56% are post-80s, followed by post-70s (26.4%) and post-90s (11.3%).

The average monthly income of China’s oversea travelers is RMB 11,512 (US$1,872), which is three times of the average income in mid-size and large-size Chinese cities in 2013. And, the average monthly family income is RMB20,767 (US$3,377).

70% of the Chinese tourists surveyed will arrange oversea trip at least once a year; 37% more than once a year. 87.6% got help from travel agencies for travel planning out of convenience consideration.

Related: Chinese Travel Willingness Report

Chinese Travelers’ Favorite Outbound Destinations

In 2010, 85% of the 2.3 million Chinese outbound tourists in Europe traveled to 4 countries (France, Italy, Germany and the UK); the vast majority of the packages to Europe include France. For the Chinese, Europe’s attractiveness is a result of three factors: the presence of outstanding landscapes and natural sites, the overall hospitality and atmosphere and the variety of cities and places to visit according to a Roland Berger survey.

Cities in Japan and Korea were the most visited among Chinese outbound travelers. In long haul outbound travels, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Washington DC and Los Angeles are the most popular ones. By total spend during outbound trips, these are the top 10:

1. Seoul
2. London
3. Paris
4. Berlin
5. Zurich
6. Athens
7. Barcelona
8. Los Angeles
9. Toronto
10. San Francisco

The main things troubling Chinese travelers are visa application and language barriers. 31% respondents said the service staff at entertainment places could not speak Chinese; 38% compaint about the lack of road signs in Chinese language.

Easier visa approval, streamlining and speeding up procedures will drive more Chinese outbound travelers, said the report. Chinese hope that European countries and the US could set a lower bar for their visa applications; and, Japan and South Korea could provide visa-free trips, visa on arrival or visa-free transit.

Self-guided tours are increasingly popular among Chinese outbound tourists. Some travelers said they preferred trips that helped them learn more about new places. 67.98% of tourists thought tours based on local culture were most appealing.

79.31% of Chinese tourists wanted official Chinese websites for cities or regions. 53.66% said official Chinese would welcome Weibo and Wechat accounts from tourism boards.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of China’s Outbound Tourism

Chinese outbound tourists have been increasing dramatically, in 2004, there were merely 29 million outbound travelers. The rapid development in China in the past decade created a large population of middle class, who held interest for exploring foreign countries. Besides, many European countries and Asian countries simplified Chinese tourism visa procedures, and expected to attract more rich Chinese tourists.

An increasing number of foreign hotels and shops tried everything to cater to Chinese consumers. For example, a world famous department store Harrods in London revealed that it had hired 70 Chinese speaking staff and installed over 100 Unionpay imprinter/POS.

The total number of China’s outbound travelers reached 54.1 million in the first half of 2014, up 18.7%, with a total spend of over USD 70 billion (YoY 20.7%) according to China Tourism Academy. Chinese oversea traveling is expected to grow by 18.2% this year to reach 116 million person-trips spending up by 20% to USD 155 billion.

WTO estimates that 100 million Chinese tourists will travel outside China by 2020.

Continue reading on Chinese Luxury Travelers.

Push Negative Search Results Down

This tactic applies to all search engine negative results management. What you need to do is push up the positive content results on Baidu relevant search queries. The lower the negative listing, the less exposure and damaging it will do as generally speaking, lower positions get lower click through rate and hence less clicks. Your goal is to optimize non-negative content’s rankings on Baidu SERPs. And, the first thing you should do is to identify the relevant keywords which can often be grouped to two categories: generic brand terms, “brand + incident/events” terms. There are many tactics you can implement to push down those negative results; you should consult your agency or internal expert for details. One popular tactic I deployed for clients in the past is to utilize relevant and authoritative online news websites to publish articles on target search queries as Baidu display listings from news websites on top of SERP when the topic is hot.

Remove Negative Results from Baidu

Baidu does deal with fake content and you just need to report the links that contains unreal information defaming your brand or companies. Simply locate the corresponding search result and click on “report” link: Before you click on the “report” link, create one to five screen captures for upload in the coming step. In case the website, who published negative content about your brand or product, updated or removed the unpleasant content; you may want to submit another request to have the cache removed at Baidu user service center: The downside of this strategy is that it takes time for Baidu to process your request. One possible solution is, you try call the customer service and do your best to get it reviewed asap. If you don’t have such problems right now, you should get prepared making a standard response protocol as part of the risk management.

Also read: Why Wechat Marketing Metrics Could All Be Lies

The total number of mainland Chinese cross border online shoppers reached 18 million 78% of which are mobile shoppers; and, China has become the second cross border online shopping destinations in the United States, according to a Nielsen survey, commissioned by PayPal.

Related: Chinese cross-border online shopping insights 2016

Cross-border Online Shopping Trend

The research from Nielsen shows that over 90 million cross-border shoppers across six key markets – the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, mainland China and Brazil – will be spending over USD100 billion on overseas websites this year alone.

One interesting finding from the research: shoppers in of China (and Brazil) proved particularly keen to be protected should something go wrong with a purchase, showing that a perceived lack of security can be a far bigger barrier to a purchase than any country border.

It also revealed the top online shopping destinations in the world:

• USA (45%)
• UK (37%)
• mainland China (26%)
• Hong Kong (25%)
• Canada (18%)
• Australia (16%)
• Germany (14%). But despite the global

Characteristics of China Cross-border Online Shoppers

• There are 18 million online cross-border shoppers in China, 78% are cross-border mobile shoppers
• Chinese cross-border shoppers spent RMB216 billion in 2013 – with up to 35.9 million online cross-border shoppers expected to spend up to RMB1.0 trillion a year by 2018; Chinese mobile shoppers spent $16.7 billion in 2013
• Health and beauty products are a popular purchase for shoppers in China; top five cross-border purchase categories in China over the past 12 months are:
  • clothes, shoes and accessories (RMB22.0 billion)
  • health and beauty products (RMB17.6 billion)
  • computer hardware (RMB13.5 billion)
  • jewellery, gems and watches (RMB13.1 billion)
  • personal electronics (RMB12.9 billion).
• Cross-border online shoppers’ top shopping destinations:  US (84%), Hong Kong (58%), Japan (52%), UK (43%), Australia (39%).
• Geographic proximity plays a part in purchasing decisions; and, mainland Chinese shoppers buy from Hong Kong and Japan
• The average age of cross-border shopper in China are younger among all countries surveyed (25-44 y-o)
• Shoppers in China and Brazil value protection more than their counterparts in the West
• China is the second cross-border online shopping destination (39%)  in the USA after the UK (49%); the second (48%) in Brazil after US (79%); the second (23%) in UK after US (70%); the fourth (17%) in Germany; the third in Australia

Cross-border shopping is expected to grow by 200% in the next five years, with the greatest growth coming from China?

In 2013, the combined cross-border mobile shopping markets of the USA, the UK, Germany, Australia, China and Brazil are already worth $36.4 billion – accounting for more than a third of all cross-border online shopping in these markets.

Where China Cross-border Shoppers Shop

With the launch of Free Trade Zone in Shanghai, a cross-border B2C platform kuajingtong.com was launched at the end of 2013; and, Amazon is also going to build logistics and warehousing centers in the free trade zone.

Kuajingtong is the first cross-border e-commerce platform granted by Chinese government as they supports cross-border shopping. It is supported by Shanghai Customs, Shanghai Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau and State Administration of Foreign Exchange, has the advantage in product authentic guarantee, competitive pricing, transparent taxes, convenient logistics and customer service.

Amazon China will also take advantage of Shanghai’s FTZ to help Chinese shoppers buy in the global market and global shoppers buy from China.

China Cross-Border Payment Status

Current Chinese consumers’ cross-border payment included cross-border online shopping payment, cross-border fund transfer and cross-border offline shopping according to iResearch. Most consumers used cross-border online shopping, with 65.7%.

Data showed that third-party platforms were the most popular method for cross-border money transfer. 50.9% consumers chose third-party platforms to transfer money, while 39.8% chose commercial banks. Only 9.2% would use remittance companies.

18.9% Chinese consumers preferred domestic third-party online payment; 16.6% favored online banks; and 15.5% would choose credit card offline payment.

More than 80% Chinese consumers preferred online payment in cross-border payment.

In this year’s Baidu World conference, Baidu shared some insights on its search trend and latest development related to artificial intelligence, and released a new mobile product called Baidu Zhida.

Baidu Search Update

Robin Li, Baidu co-founder and CEO, estimated searches by voice and images will exceed 50% of total searches in five years in Baidu World 2014 conference, an annual conference organized by Baidu.

He also shared the fact that Baidu mobile search volume exceeded PC volume on weekends and holidays in China; however, the mobile search quality is relatively low and the new user acquisition rate on mobile is less than 50% of that on PC. Mobile brought strong growth to Baidu according to Baidu Q2 finance results.

Baidu put in some hard work to improve mobile search quality recently with the launch of a new algorithm called Ice Bucket Update.

More people are searching for services on Baidu in China; last year, searches related to looking for services increased by 133%, said Robin.

Baidu Zhida: Mobile Solution for Enterprises

A new mobile solution for enterprises is released on Baidu World 2014, Baidu Zhida, which means “direct reach”. Users on Baidu Mobile can simply launch your brand’s  app developed with Baidu Light Apps by typing “@” along with your brand name once you activate your Baidu Zhida service.

According to Baidu, the conversion after using Baidu Zhida is higher on mobile; and, it provides user management and industry templates.

BaiduEye

BaiduEye focus on guesture recognition and image search. The user simply use the finger to circle an item or pick it up and BaiduEye will lock the item for recognition and analysis.

BaiduEye doesn’t have a screen. “Frame” part is used to identify and analyze while the headset on the right is used to give user feedback. In addition, Baidu also revealed a smart device for food safety Baidu Kuaiso.

Baidu launched Open Kitchen project for restaurants whoever participated in will open up their kitchens to internet users, based on Baidu’s video streaming and cloud computing technology.

Last month, one of McDonald’s and KFC’s suppliers was accused of selling rotten meat; Open Kitchen program is helpful for restaurants facing the deteriorating food safety concerns in China.

Taking a closer look at a few participating restaurants, the video quality is good with quite good sound quality, but video doesn’t seem to cover a wide angle of the kitchen (not to mention 360 degree view for real transparency). It is not so transparent. And, the live video streaming only covers a specified time period. Being checked at about eight in the evening, many have already ended the live video steaming.

What’s in it for Baidu?

Besides publicity side of benefits and its contribution to healthy and safe dining in China, the program definitely helps promote Baidu’s video streaming service based on Baidu Cloud.

The hardware supporting this project is also from Baidu called iErmu, currently available on JD.com at RMB388 (US$63). Similar to Dropcam but much cheaper, iErmu comes with supplementing cloud storage service.

Wechat recently started displaying the total number of views and likes for Wechat official account articles; the transparency from Wechat seems to be helpful identifying the true value of a Wechat official account and quality of considering some articles from accounts with hundreds of thousands of fans only have a few hundred views in one day.

But how real are these numbers?

The metrics of “views” and “likes”, soon after Wechat launched, are doubted of its true value as there have been services being offered on Taobao to technically increase the numbers. One “like” often costs less than half yuan; “1,000 views” costs about RMB10.

Tencent claims they have implemented countermeasures with sophisticated algorithms. But can it really prevent the manipulation of Wechat metrics? A well known Chinese blogger Nanqidao did an experiment:

As shown in the screen captures above, the left one, before we bought Wechat “Like” services on Taobao, shows a total number of 1 like and 66 views while the right screen capture shows 53 likes and 1,694 views, less than 30 minutes after he paid for the service. The Wechat account used has only 201 fans as he conducted the test.

What else could be faked on Wechat?

A search on Taobao will find various service offering related to Wechat besides increasing the number of views and likes, such as buying fans, total number of shares, Wechat polls, Wechat participation, public accounts trading, etc. Almost all metrics on Wechat can be faked.

What is hardly to fake is Wechat platform contribution to your revenue, which might be difficult to track except for those who have implemented e-commerce transactions on Wechat.

Don’t get me wrong; the number of views and likes are helpful metrics monitoring the content quality but that can’t be all you measure. You should develop a strategy and tactics, such as connecting a Wechat offer to a offline sale, to measure the true impact of your Wechat marketing to your brand and sales.

Baidu Zhidao is a good channel for driving brand awareness and influence, if meticulously planned and executed. Baidu’s verification program, similar to Weibo’s verified individual with a “V” icon tagged on the user profile, is a good idea for Baidu encouraging more high quality content and higher interactions between “experts” and the users as the verification process requires real name authentications and constant active engagement.

On the other hand, to individuals and brands, it’s a good opportunity to build thought leadership and influential brands with a verified profile which will be authentic and trustworthy.

How to Get Verified as A Baidu Zhidao Expert

The requirement for Baidu verified expert is quite straightforward; as long as you are either a university student good at your specialty or a working professional with more than one year experience, you can apply.

The bad news is, the application requires photocopy of Chinese identity card; so for those who don’t have, you can’t apply to get verified at the moment.

Baidu Zhidao experts will be ranked by industry category based on your online time and then the total number of questions you answer. Higher ranking will get you more exposure on Baidu Zhidao.

In addition, once verified, experts need to login enough online hours and answer fifty questions within one month to reach “Level 1”; failing to reach Level 1 for consecutive three months, verification will be revoked. There are three levels; higher level experts have more privileges.

Should companies get one staff to do this?

Baidu Zhidao also has enterprise account, which you should be aware of. You should develop a tactical plan for Baidu Zhidao Experts and Enterprise based on your social media strategy or overall digital strategy for China.

There is no short answer to the question that you should or should not use Baidu Zhidao expert program. An enterprise account is more authoritative while an expert account is more personal and easier for building connections with fans and experts which directly or indirectly could help your business grow.

Tmall just launched FUN after a month’s testing, a social network inside its mobile client promoting tagged photo sharing.

FUN has three features: recommendations, tags, and followed users.

Recommendation shows shared photo feeds with tags which are displayed once touched upon. Users can click on individual tag to view photo stream under with the same tag. This is where brands and sellers can utilize to share photos with relevant tags and spread the brand or product awareness in Tmall; and at the mean time it drives traffic to Tmall store.

On individual tag page, it shows relevant photos, where users can either follow this tag/brand or “search it” to enter Tmall product search results page.

Users can also follow other users besides following brands/tags on Tmall FUN.

Tmall FUN is definitely a feature worth merchants and brands experimenting on Tmall for driving brand awareness and traffic to Tmall store.

Wall ads in rural areas prove to be a good way of penetrating into lower tier cities; let’s take a look at some of the wall ads of China internet companies.

China smartphone users go to Apple’s Appstore is for iOS device apps download; but, for Android phone users, Google Play is not in play. Instead, there are quite a number of app stores for Android phone apps download. I’m sharing a few top ones in the race based on Analysis international’s data for the first quarter of this year.

Baidu, Qihoo 360 and Tencent are the top three leagues leading the race distributing about 86% mobile apps, followed by Wandoujia and other relatively small app distribution channels.

Baidu and associated platforms: 41%

• Android Market, owned by Baidu, apk.hiapk.com
• Baidu Mobile Assistant, shouji.baidu.com
• 91 Mobile Assistant, zs.91.com (Baidu paid $1.9 billion to buy 91 Wireless last year)
• Baidu Mobile Browser, wuxian.baidu.com/browser/
• Baidu search

360 and its associated platforms: 28%

• 360 Mobile Assistant, zhushou.360.cn
• 360 search
• 360 mobile security, shouji.360.cn
• 360 mobile browser, mse.360.cn

Tencent and its associated channels: 17%

• Tencent’s app store, sj.qq.com
• QQ browser
• Soso search
• Wechat

There are many users in China downloading apps on PC and that’s probably why search plays a role in app distributions.

Sogou has just launched a search feature for Wechat official accounts and articles published via Wechat official accounts.

For Wechat article searches, recent articles seem to have higher rankings on the search results pages. Account verification also seem to influence the ranking in the positive way.

Sora Aoi launched her own product “Spakeys G-Self silk bra” on Weibo with a limited number of 528 sets, each highly-priced at RMB 1,288. This product was launched for a limited time of 5 hours and 28 minutes and all were sold out.

Sora Aoi’s Popularity on Weibo

Sora Aoi is best known in China as a Japanese AV idol who has over 14.9 million fans on Weibo. Within 6 hours since she opened the Weibo account, its total number of followers reached 400 thousand, exceeding that of her Twitter account.

“Bra” is a clever choice of product for the perception of Sora Aoi’s character on China internet.

Pre-launch Campaign on Weibo

A simple post on Weibo was published on 19 May 2014 to “leak” the product idea, mentioning and asking (@) Xiaomi Tech’s founder Lei Jun for the advice of e-commerce strategy.

It was taken by China internet users as a piece of very entertaining news and got re-posted for about 23,730 times. A few reasons behind:

• E-commerce itself is a popular topic on China internet; some experts and celebrities in e-commerce industry shared news and some even provided suggestions
• Underwear designed by AV idol was news worthy and interesting
• The details were not released which got China internet users curious
• Mentioning a celebrity got the news viral; besides the wide exposure on Weibo, many main news media published articles on this news

Pre-sale Publicity on Weibo

As one idea from an e-commerce celebrity fan, Sora Aoi “recruited” 1,000 fans on Weibo to “experience” her own designed G-self underwear. This small campaign not only engaged its fans but also won her product great exposure through Weibo.

It’s a “hot” topic and many regular China internet users re-posted the news and submit their request to experience it. “1,000” quota is very limited considering she has over 14 million fans. And each was carefully selected including some grassroots celebrities and influencers to further push the exposure.

Product Launch Promotion

Spakeys G-Self Bra was not simply launched for purchase. Price tag over RMB 1,000 for underwear may face a lot of difficulties getting sold well on the Internet. But all 528 sets were sold out within planned 5 hours 28 minutes.

Time and quantity limit. The limited number of 528 sets and limited time of 5 hours and 28 minutes are telling the fans to “hurry up”, allowing online users little time to carefully consider and do comparison shopping.

Incentives and sales strategy. The product launch post carefully targets two groups of people, both of whom are very interested in the product: one who can afford and are willing to pay; one can not (or considering the bra too expensive).  For the former group, the sale promotion gave away silk scarf worth over RMB 1,000 to push the sales. For the other group, it encouraged them to share the news by giving away 180 sets to the lucky ones who re-post it.

The whole product launch consisted of several carefully crafted campaigns to promote the high-end underwear brand Spakeys via G-self series bra. It definitely got the awareness and exposure but I don’t think that’s enough for influencing high-end underwear brand. And, the question now is, how and whether or not Spakeys can capture and capitalize on this product launch.

My suspicion for the whole “Sora Aoi” bra campaigns is, it’s more of a marketing promotion than a self-owned product launch. The “Spakeys” brand’s official website spakeys.cn, after whois analysis, is owned by Xianyidai Co., Ltd. which happens to be an underwear company.

This is a deep collaboration between an influencer and a manufacturer, which is a commonly seen business model in China. Live streaming is another popular sales channel in China you could check out.

Do you know that some Chinese who stay up late tend to buy before they sleep; three peak period for women clothing purchase; moms’ mobile shopping starts from midnight; the middle aged often buy collectibles in the afternoon…

I created this infographic based on recently released data from Taobao so that you can get an overall understanding about Taobao shoppers’ habits.

Estee Lauder launched their official online shop on Tmall on 21 May 2014 and the total sales reached about 3 million yuan on the first day according to leaked sales data online.

According to the leaked data on Weibo, Estee Lauder Tmall store had 7,941 transactions on 21 May 2014; with an average customer purchase value of 339 yuan, the estimated total one day revenue is about 2.69 million yuan.

Estee Lauder has about 170 counters in the country, according to annual sales of 3 billion yuan, the average daily sales is 49,019 yuan per store. The one day sales on Tmall is more than one month revenue of one offline store sales.

Burberry also launched their flagship store on Tmall this week with disappointing performance.

Burberry officially launches Tmall flagship store on Apr 23 2014. This is the first time that an international Luxury brand enters into the third-party online shopping platform, which is some quite surprising.

According to its recent sales report of the website, its flagship store on Tmall sold only 132 products in 18 days, including 32 unconditionally returned ones, a high refund rate of 26.4% comparing to the average refund rate of 7.21% of similar products on Tmall.

Previously, Xiu.com and Jingdong mall also sold outdated Burberry bags windbreakers and other products at special offer, but they did not obtain the official authorization or recognition of Burberry. Apart from Burberry company’s official website, the Tmall flagship store is the only sales channel that has been authorized and recognized by Burberry.

Burberry’ commodities can be classified as 3 categories: men’s, women’s and coat, and sub-categories for each. For example, its women’s products include coats, bags, sweaters, scarves, accessories, dresses, make-up, watches, fragrance and so on.

The products sold on the website is the same as those on its official website, and almost all of them are seasonal new arrivals. And the prices are also the same. Burberry’s flagship store on Tmall guarantees that if the purchased goods are in original state and not used, Burberry can provide free return service within 15 days from the date of delivery of the product. However, items purchased from Burberry’s official flagship store on Tmall cannot be returned to its retail stores.

Compared with Burberry’s official website, the information of its flagship store on Tmall such as sales, return and exchange, reivews and other information are open to the public. According to information displayed on the website, it had more than 300 SKUs, and had sold 132 commodities in 18 days, most of which are fragrances priced between 300 to 500 yuan, followed by clothes priced between 2000 to 3000 yuan, such as Polo shirts, jeans and trousers.

It can be seen from the information displayed on the website, the most expensive product that has been sold is a designer leather wallet, priced at 4,200 yuan. And there is no sales record of any coat or bags that are priced at 8,000 yuan.

A yellow diamond-level (one of many Taobao/Tmall ranks for online buyers) buyer makes an anonymous comment: “The packaging is very good, the pants fit perfectly. My size often need to book from the counter, the online shopping saves me a lot of trouble.”

A netizen from Beijing buys a product as a birth gift for his friend, “The perfume I bought from Tmall flagship store is certainly a certified perfume, it is much faster than get the fragrance delivered from the UK than the official website, it only takes three days for me to get it, it is quite convenient.”

Although Burberry flagship store gets high review ratings in the “product match with item description”, “service of the seller” and “seller delivery speed” with average score of 4.9, 4.8, 4.9 respectively, it is higher than the average score of 60%, indicating that it delivered good user experience.

But its “refund rate in the nearest 30 days” makes people feel eye-popping: the number of returns is 32 times, with a refund rate of 26.4%, it is much higher than the average of 7.21%, and it gets 3 complaints.

The high refund rate could be caused by three reasons:

1. The high unit price of products make customers  more demanding and easier for them to feel dissatisfied
2. It is normal if the size of clothes does not meet the size description, making clothes not suitable, so the return probability is high
3. Some customers might purchase more than one items of the same product but with different colors, who would return the undesirable, so that they could take advantage of the free return service

Buying Directly in China v.s. Buying from Overseas Merchants

Luxury products sold at overseas purchasing store is often at least 30% cheaper than that sold in the luxury brand’s official Tmall store. For example, a classic Burberry plaid tote bag is priced at 8,250 yuan at Tmall flagship store, but it only costs 5,600 yuan in a French purchasing store. Despite that it is difficult to distinguish the genuine from the fake ones, but some buyers are willing to try and buy.

Many oversea Chinese, with their connections in China, can easily open oversea purchasing service store on Taobao, making profit from the big price differences between retail prices in China and the oversea ones. This is very common for luxury products, skin care and premium products in China.

At the time of writing this post, I can no longer find Burberry’s Tmall flagship store. It’s easier to blame Taobao for not being the right platform for luxury products than developing the appropriate business, product and marketing strategy for Tmall operations.

The lack of strategy and planning is why Burberry did not perform well on Tmall. I will follow up with another post on whether international brands should sell their product on Tmall or through their own official website.

Update (8 Jul 2014): Burberry has re-launched its flagship store, indicating “upgraded” version. Taobao and Tmall displays total number of sales for each product item but this “upgraded version” has those numbers blocked:

In the first quarter of 2014, China mobile shopping market total transactions reached 78.02 billion yuan (USD 12.53 billion), with an growth of 13% from the previous quarter, an increase of 207% compared with the first quarter in 2013 according to Analysis International.

The overall China mobile shopping market is in rapid development period, mostly driven by merchants’ heavy promoting targeting mobile device users, the more mature mobile shopping habits among China online users, and rapid development of certain mobile apps like taxi app Didi Dache.

Taobao Leading China Mobile Shopping Market

Taobao also dominates China’s mobile shopping market with over 78% market share (by revenue), followed by JD with only 7.2%.

I was asked about Chinese travelers’ interested topics last week speaking at WTM Vision Shanghai conference and I shared twelve topics Chinese travelers are most interested in before and during travelling based on search data from Baidu.

The most searched data (over one third) on Baidu are about travel destination, followed by various destination locations (about 29%), transportation maps (over 13%) and travel guide (10%).

Beside the above four topics, the China online travelers are also interested to find out the following:

5. Tickets of places of interest
6. Reviews
7. Special local products
8. Information of attractions
9. Price
10. Food & restaurants
11. Accommodations
12. Travel agency

As travelers are stepping into travel phase, the interests are more specific. Travel marketers should develop content and campaigns targeting each primary interest.

One of the most popular search queries related to travel in China is “xxx travel guide” especially when free and easy trips are getting more popular among the young generations in China.

It’s difficult to see someone born in 1980s or 1990s traveling without a smartphone nowadays. Have you ever wondered what’s the most popular apps related to “travel guide” in China?

From Analysis International’s data, Mafengwo Travel Guide App ranks the most popular mobile app in travel guide category with over 628 thousand active users in March. 117Go App ranks the number one by total launch times and total usage time respectively.

Over 60% of travel guide app users are between 25 and 35 years old and the largest age group is between 25-30 years old with over 34%.

Baidu used one to three stars, in combination with different colors, to indicate the quality score of keywords; this is often confusing to inexperienced PPC marketers. And, Baidu updated its system recently to show keywords quality from a scale of zero to ten along with five stars, ten being the highest quality as illustrated in the screen capture above.

Let’s take a closer look at what each score means for Baidu PPC keywords:

• 0: equivalent to previous one grey star; this indicates low impression keywords
• 1: equivalent to previous one grey and green star, for keywords with little chance to be displayed on the left side of Baidu SERPs
• 2-10: keywords no less than a score of 2 have chances to be displayed on the left; the higher the score, the better the quality score

The higher the quality score, the more competent the keyword becomes.

What Affects Baidu PPC Quality Score

There are many factors affecting your Baidu keywords quality score; and I’ll share some factors having direct impact on your quality score:

• Click Through Rate, or CTR. This is the most important factor. 
• Relevance of ad copies and landing pages, being the second most important factors
• Account history performance
• The ratio of active keywords in the account
• Account active status duration

Please note that account credibility score doesn’t have any impact on your keywords quality score.

If you need help with your Baidu or other Chinese search engine PPC accounts; you can contact Incitez for a free PPC audit.

As we all know, Taobao is the largest online shopping place in China and its online B2C platform Tmall is often a more efficient and effective platform for merchants to start generating revenue online. We’ve prepared a guide for international brands to understand the cost and what’s needed to open an online shop on Tmall.

You can access this Taobao/Tmall Launch Guide here.

Content marketers and publishers experienced in utilizing third party recommendation engines may be interested to give Baidu Recommendations a try.

Baidu released its content recommendation engine service to its content network publishers around May this year and made it available to the public about one month ago.

According to Baidu, over 1,000 websites have used Baidu Recommendations to boost their traffic and the average increase in traffic is 15%.

It provides three display style (above): pop-up, embedded, slide in.

After selecting the display style, templates will be provided to choose from as shown in the image at the top of this post.

For inbound marketers and content marketers, Baidu Recommendation is worth testing as part of your China content marketing strategy.

After viewing the landing page, I realized Airbnb is likely to fail in its attempt in expanding into Chinese market; let me tell you why.

China is a huge market, not to mention its revenue potential for travel sector. It’s too appealing to be ignored by many internet based businesses such as Airbnb. Yet, it’s not dedicated at all in this one of the most competitive markets in the world.

The banner ad is in traditional Chinese while people use simplified Chinese in China. Though many Chinese won’t have a problem reading traditional Chinese, the non-localized ad make internet users feel disconnected.

Airbnb website does have a Chinese landing page, but some text doesn’t sound native and my guesses they automated it with tools like Google Translate with some possible manual editing.  And, the landing page is not appealing to Chinese internet users at all. It offers login method with Facebook which can’t be accessed in China.

Few friends of mine in China heard of Airbnb and for those who haven’t, what would they do? They would likely to conduct a search if they’re going to do anything at all. Airbnb should be worried about what’s on Baidu search results page of its brand term:

The subdomain, luckily, was indexed and ranked on top of Baidu SERP for this brand term. However, the title and meta description is clearly not optimized for Chinese audience, telling no unique benefits of using Airbnb.

The two listings below its official website about critique about its business model and a robbing incident.

My suggestion for all companies looking forward to expanding their business into China is,

1. Do your research and develop a business/market strategy for this unique market instead of making half dedicated efforts with a campaign on Google Display Network or Baidu PPC
2. Develop an integrated digital strategy for China with help from someone having local expertise in this market, ignoring whatever worked for you in other markets
3. Form a testing strategy. China is a dynamic and competitive market; it’s unlikely you can see results right after launching a campaign

For those not far from Zurich, you can join me in September Connect China conference when I’ll share some insights on China digital strategy.

Conversations in social media contain valuable information and data for marketers; as there are many tools, free and paid in the market, we will share a quick tip on how you can check brand conversation on China’s major micro-blogging platforms using Baidu search.

It’s actually quite straightforward; in simply three steps:

• Enter this URL into your browser address bar: http://www.baidu.com/s?rtt=2&tn=baiduwb&wd=BRAND
• Replace “BRAND” in the URL with your brand name
• Hit “Enter” to see micro-blogging search results on all major platforms (Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Netease Weibo and Sohu Weibo).

Since last Wednesday, Sina Weibo integrated a new module into its content stream to continue its monetization attempt after its promoted Weibo post attempt.

When a Weibo user publishes a post containing link to an individual product page on Taobao, this module will be inserted right below that post showing related product information. Other users will be able to click and find out more details on Taobao.

Top 10 downstream websites on Sina Weibo represent 27.2% of the total, among which Taobao took 8.2% (source: Sina Weibo annual report 2012). So, it makes sense Sina capitalize on this with this partnership. It’s probably charged on a commission model  based on referred traffic or sales; and, the details is not disclosed at the moment.

In addition to a normal version for regular individual users, Sina Weibo has an enterprise version for companies, just like the Facebook Page idea. Sina is also testing a different version for media like this one.

In media edition of Sina Weibo, it has articles section besides the weibo posts stream. The articles are imported from RSS feed and auto-formated and displayed in one of eight available templates.

Weibo posts published via media edition are also displayed differently like this one:

An extra “card” will be displayed below the Weibo post including news thumbnail, headline and a summary. This will no doubt lead to higher click through rate.

This is just a beginning. Sina may launch multiple versions for further attempts on monetization, such as special version for e-commerce platforms like Taobao.