WeChat helps Tencent make over HK$637m in Single's Day sales

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An integrated sales campaign that let smartphone users purchase goods via WeChat helped Tencent's profits on China's biggest online sales day

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Tencent allowed 51buy customers to purchase products through their WeChat accounts for the first time. Photo: SCMP Pictures

Jeremy Blum

Published: 6:30pm, 13 Nov 2013Updated: 7:39pm, 13 Nov 2013

Tencent, the mainland’s largest listed internet company, racked in millions of yuan this week partly through the nimble use of mobile e-commerce, allowing users of its popular WeChat messaging software to make fast purchases through their smartphones.

On November 11, Tencent’s 51buy website offered the usual extensive sales that have become the norm on Single’s Day, one of China’s biggest online shopping festivals.

Sometimes referred to as “Double 11” day, Single’s Day brought over 500 million yuan (HK$637 million) in profit to Tencent this year, partly thanks to an integrated campaign between the 51buy website and Tencent’s WeChat mobile app.

The campaign allowed smartphone owners to view and order products available on 51buy with relative ease through WeChat’s menus, and was aimed at residents in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

Despite these city restrictions, of the roughly 600,000 51buy orders made on Singles Day, orders via WeChat exceeded 80,000. Members of China’s online community have labeled the process a low-key success, even going so far as to call it Tencent’s “secret weapon”.

Others speculated that the ubiquitous nature of WeChat and the ease of shopping it provided was one edge that Tencent had over its chief rival Alibaba, which organised the majority of its Singles Day promotions through the online websites Tmall.com and Taobao.com, generating over 35 billion yuan (HK$46 billion) in revenue.

Tmall.com and Taobao.com both have mobile versions, but neither enjoy the popularity of WeChat, which boasts nearly 300 million monthly active users.