How WeChat is shaking up the shopping experience in China

We’ve written a lot about WeChat’s stickers and gaming and other social features; but one thing often overlooked is how the popular messaging app is changing the face of shopping and retailing. While WeChat has global ambitions, for now this relates to WeChat’s China-based users.

One feature that many don’t utilize in WeChat is its support for shopping loyalty/members’ cards. These give you access to immediate discounts or long-term perks from store chains, with the virtual card kept safe inside your WeChat account. The cards are free to use, and they pop up automatically when you follow brands that support them. There are big names like McDonalds, Watsons, and Pacific Coffee making use of these cards in WeChat already.

Tencent (HKG:0700), the maker of WeChat, has a directory of restaurant and mall chains that have members’ cards ready for use in WeChat. Focusing on smaller businesses around me, I see there are 30 such restaurants offering them right now in Shanghai.

This isn’t a new WeChat feature, but it’s one that could change the face of retailing, shopping, and social marketing – and maybe even mobile payments – in China in years to come.

To test this out, I added a restaurant called Babela’s Kitchen on WeChat. It’s the restaurant chain’s corporate account, which is sort of like a Facebook brand page. After hitting ‘follow’ (see below) the first thing that happens is a member’s card slides forward:

The first of the two buttons under the card gives me details about the benefits available, while the second takes me to a list of that chain’s locations. If you tap on a store, WeChat app brings up a map, using the Street View-style feature of Tencent’s Soso maps:

Buried feature

That’s all pretty useful. It’s also great for brands, bridging the gap between social marketing and actual engagement with paying customers. But there’s one major issue for regular folks – the rather feature-bloated WeChat has buried these shopping cards so deep in the app it’s a surprise that anyone has ever found them.

After launching the WeChat app, it takes a further five clicks to reach a shopping card. The volume of clicks is nothing compared to the labyrinthine trail to find it: you hit ‘contacts’ then ‘official accounts’, ‘Babela’ (or whatever the retailer is called), the top-right button that looks like a person, then finally hit ‘shopping card’. It’s a terrible UI/UX set-up. But, wait, it gets worse. I have a card for a coffee chain, but that’s stored under the ‘services’ pane in WeChat, not under ‘official accounts’. So if you look in the wrong place, it could take you seven clicks to find a particular card.

Despite this problem, this is a WeChat feature to watch. Shopping loyalty apps made by startups often fail to take off because it’s tough to persuade people to download a bunch of apps for separate retailers. Most people – quite rightfully – think screw that and don’t bother using them. Virtual store cards will only take off once a major app – one that people already have – implements them in an easy and fun way.

But retailers are going to hate this…

A lot more to come