WeChat racks up $250 billion in transactions in 2020 | WARC | The Feed

WeChat racks up $250 billion in transactions in 2020

Products worth almost $250 billion were sold last year through WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, more than double the year before.

Transactions were via WeChat’s “mini programs”, which allow brands to sell services and products directly to app users, TechCrunch reports.

The details

• Interest in the use of mini programs shot up as brands looked to e-commerce to counter the drop in sales when physical stores closed during the pandemic.
• Mini programs have now expanded to cover a wide range of WeChat users’ everyday needs, with transportation, department store shopping and sporting goods especially popular.
• The number of active daily users was over 400 million by December last year, the company says, up from 300 million the year before. WeChat has 1.2 billion monthly active users.
• The number of mini programs used by each user was up 25% during the year. 

The context

The numbers signal Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, is a growing challenger to the e-commerce sector’s well-established giants, which include Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.