WeChat e-commerce refuses to pop the champagne early

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

At the beginning of 2025, the e-commerce industry ignited a new battle of "gift-giving," with Tencent firing the first shot and its big brother Taobao quickly entering the fray.

The launch of the "gift-giving" feature is Tencent's first move to spark market discussion after more than two years of re-engaging in e-commerce. Many have compared this feature to WeChat red envelopes, suggesting that Tencent's social e-commerce is on the brink of explosion.

However, both Tencent and WeChat have refused to pop the champagne early.

A representative from WeChat's small store stated on January 9, "After the launch of the 'gift-giving' feature, the external hype has been overwhelming, with some data and conclusions even exceeding our own understanding."

Tencent also doused cold water on the capital market. According to documents from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Tencent has recently significantly reduced its holdings in Weimeng Group, a "WeChat small store concept stock," with its shareholding ratio dropping from 8.39% at the beginning of the year to 2.94%. This move has raised investor suspicions about whether "Weimeng's valuation is too high or if Tencent is not optimistic about the WeChat small store business."

Last year, Tencent's approach to redoing e-commerce underwent a significant change, with the video account small store upgraded to WeChat small store, indicating that Tencent's main battlefield in e-commerce has shifted from video accounts to the entire WeChat ecosystem.

After years of ups and downs in the e-commerce industry, Tencent, which firmly holds the top position in domestic social media, hopes to leverage WeChat's powerful capabilities to establish a larger, more meaningful, and higher potential e-commerce platform that differs from traditional shelf e-commerce and live-streaming e-commerce.

However, everything is just getting started, and it remains uncertain whether Tencent, often questioned for its "lack of e-commerce genes," can carve out a new territory in the already saturated e-commerce industry.

Strike

Backed by WeChat's super traffic pool with over 1.3 billion monthly active users, the "gift-giving" feature of WeChat small store, just entering gray testing, has already stirred up significant waves.

The overseas team at CITIC Securities pointed out that WeChat continuously cultivates users' shopping habits within its ecosystem, relying on its mature social network, which has important strategic significance for unlocking WeChat e-commerce GMV potential.

Analysts from China Merchants Securities indicated that the blue envelope is expected to open a new model of social e-commerce fission. Founder Securities further believes that the gift-giving feature is similar to the WeChat red envelope experience, and the online implementation of this "gift-giving" social function, combined with the upcoming New Year and Spring Festival, is likely to trigger a trend of online gifting.

A circulated summary of a WeChat e-commerce communication meeting shows that the WeChat gift feature is part of a larger planning for WeChat e-commerce. Within less than a week of its external launch, the whitelist monthly users have exceeded 300 million, reaching over 40 million cumulative users, with an expected daily GMV of over 300 million yuan around the Spring Festival.

However, Zhang Jun, Tencent's General Manager of Market Public Relations, quickly debunked this in his social media circle, stating, "Why do some people always prefer to believe in what they hear rather than what they don't? We haven't set ourselves a grand plan; we just want to do some practical things. Please, everyone, don't set a business plan for us." According to Wall Street News, last November, at Tencent's anniversary celebration, Zhang Xiaolong, President of the WeChat Business Group, first described his vision for the future of e-commerce to all Tencent employees: product information should become an atomic trading component that can freely circulate within WeChat.

At the same time, Zhang Xiaolong mentioned that WeChat can provide good content services, and if products are also content, then WeChat can also handle products, not just for transactions, but with the goal of creating an ecosystem.

With the overall direction set, how to achieve the circulation of WeChat stores across the WeChat ecosystem has become an important goal for the current WeChat team.

Encouraging more merchants to link their mini-programs to WeChat stores is one of the key topics at this year's WeChat Open Class focused on WeChat stores.

On January 9th, a lecturer at the WeChat Open Class introduced that merchants can continue to position their mini-programs as their brand's official website, retaining their marketing capabilities and after-sales services on the mini-programs, but they encourage merchants to use WeChat stores to provide a unified trading experience for users.

WeChat e-commerce has offered real monetary incentives. Wall Street News learned that for the GMV of settlement orders generated by mini-programs redirecting to WeChat stores, on the basis of reducing the commission to 1% for the merchants on those orders, WeChat will return a portion of the commission to merchants in the form of e-commerce growth cards, while the remaining portion of the commission will be returned in cash to the developers of the mini-program.

At the same time, the WeChat team will link many scenarios through WeChat stores to bring more incremental business scale to merchants.

The "Send Gifts" feature of WeChat stores, which underwent a gray test in December last year, is one of the new attempts in this context.

Currently, "Send Gifts" seems more like a megaphone for WeChat stores and the entire WeChat e-commerce. While allowing product information to circulate within social relationships, it more directly tells consumers and merchants that WeChat can now shop and sell, rather than pursuing rapid short-term growth in GMV and other data.

Reform

Two years ago, Ma Huateng stated that video accounts are the hope of the entire Tencent, revealing Tencent's ambition to re-energize e-commerce, with Zhang Xiaolong's team at the core of the WeChat business ecosystem once again in the spotlight.

Tencent's ambitions are significant. In August last year, Tencent President Liu Chiping stated that live-streaming e-commerce can grow quickly, but there will subsequently be a very natural growth ceiling. However, if an e-commerce ecosystem can be established within WeChat in a systematic way, utilizing all sources of power within WeChat, a larger, more meaningful, and higher-ceilinged e-commerce ecosystem can be built.

Clearly, Tencent now wants to create an e-commerce ecosystem that differs from simple live-streaming e-commerce, with greater imagination than video account e-commerce.

For Tencent, which is focusing on WeChat e-commerce, "Send Gifts" can be considered a successful attempt to break the circle.

Through this new feature, the dissemination path of products within the WeChat ecosystem has undergone an interesting change—previously, merchants could only promote products through paid search and advertising, which had high cold-start costs. But with the launch of the "Send Gifts" feature, merchants can promote gifts and products through the dissemination and endorsement of social relationships, creating a chain reaction From upgrading from video account stores to WeChat stores, Tencent's e-commerce business has clearly embarked on a path with greater imaginative potential.

Exclusive data obtained by Wall Street Insights shows that over the past year, the sales scale of WeChat stores has rapidly grown to a new high, with GMV reaching 1.92 times that of 2023, order quantity at 2.25 times, and monthly active products at 1.7 times, with growth rates basically in line with 2023. According to market news, the GMV of video account e-commerce is around 100 billion yuan in 2023.

Although the scale of WeChat stores still has a significant gap compared to other mainstream e-commerce platforms that often reach trillions, Tencent's financial report indicates that the GMV of mini-programs reached 2 trillion yuan in the third quarter of last year, which includes e-commerce transaction scale. It is believed that as WeChat stores convert more mini-program merchants and leverage social play, they can quickly gain more incremental growth.

E-commerce giant Alibaba has also sensed a sense of crisis.

On January 8, Taobao launched a new feature "Gift" for all users. The products available for "Gift" basically cover the entire Taobao product pool. After successfully placing an order, users can forward the link and code to friends, with "WeChat" prioritized as a forwarding channel. To encourage users to try this feature, some products on Taobao offer an 85% discount when choosing the gift option.

Ten years ago, WeChat's red envelope feature staged a payment battle that Jack Ma described as "like the Pearl Harbor attack," where "one WeChat red envelope surpassed what Alipay achieved in eight years," successfully breaking into the mobile payment field that was almost monopolized by Alipay, allowing WeChat Pay to rapidly achieve widespread adoption.

Now with the arrival of the "blue envelope," Taobao cannot afford to relax, as any misstep could lead to Tencent capturing more market share.

However, for Tencent to replicate the success of the red envelope and rely on the blue envelope to drive the large-scale adoption of WeChat e-commerce is not easy. Currently, the e-commerce infrastructure of WeChat and the richness of merchants are still not mature enough, making it difficult for the "blue envelope" to generate the same social viral effect as the WeChat red envelope did back then.

E-commerce is the most enticing piece of cake in the internet sector. During the years when Jack Ma led Alibaba to great profits, Pony Ma often felt envious, but Tencent's attempts with Paipai, QQ Mall, and QQ Shopping failed to establish a foothold in the market, earning only a reputation of "fighting repeatedly and failing."

Today, the e-commerce industry not only has giants like Alibaba and JD.com, but also strong contenders like Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Kuaishou have emerged. If Tencent wants to achieve a turnaround in the e-commerce field, it can only choose a different path.

The greatest charm of the internet industry lies in its unpredictability; no one can be the eternal king.

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