Just imagine doing everything with one single app. Waking up and reading the news from your favourite newspaper, checking out social moments, grab a breakfast and pay by scanning the vendors QR code, order a taxi, chat with friends, order Nikes or a new laptop, making a reservation for dinner and splitting the bill by using just one single app. WeChat makes it possible to do all of the above and even more!
While such an app sounds very futuristic, WeChat has become already one of the most popular social communication app around the world with more than 800 million active users within and outside China. WeChat was launched just 5 years ago by Chinese investment company Tencent, fourth largest internet company in the world (after Google, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook).
WeChat’s pioneering model is an apps-within-an-app model. Millions of so called lightweight apps live inside WeChat, it’s much like the same as webpages on the internet. Google Chrome is the app and webpages are the lightweight apps. Here’s an example for ordering a taxi using WeChat. People can order a taxi via the wallet menu and can easily pay by scanning QR codes. WeChat is simply linking users from the wallet menu to webpages from within the app. In case of the taxi, Dididache (a Chinese ride-sharing service) is providing the actual service. This service is actually quite popular with over 22 millions booked taxis in 2015.
So why has WeChat become so popular over the last 5 years? First of all, I think that WeChat’s payment system is the cornerstone of its business model and its success. The payment process is flawless. It takes only 30 seconds to order and pay goods. While normal payment could rack up to several minutes through the time you spent on searching online, opening a mobile web browser entering your information to paypal or ideal all the time while opening several tabs. WeChat makes life much more convenient . Secondly the mobile commerce market grew rapidly over the past years. In 2015 mobile commerce was already 50% of total e-commerce market, with projections of mobile commerce payments of 71.5% of all e-commerce. Combining the flawless payment system en China’s growing mobile commerce market WeChat became one of the biggest platforms of the world.
WeChat already exists in most countries (also the Netherlands) but not all the functions like the wallet and ordering a taxi are in app. But WeChat recently stated that it will expand their market to western nations.
So do you think WeChat will become a success in the Netherlands?
When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China
‘In China you have to use it’: How WeChat is powering a mobile commerce boom
Dear Ruben, thank you for your blog! Personally I believe this app can also become a great success in western countries. It takes away the need for a phone full of different kind of apps.
However there are two important points that I think will be able to temper with the success of WeChat here in Europe.
First of all there is the deadly competition from WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Skype. Although WeChat combines the features of this apps, these apps are already used by almost all the people in our social environment. To even tempt this people to try WeChat while there are just perfectly satisfied with the other apps is a big threshold to overcome.
Secondly, with all this extra options and data input from users comes the concern for privacy and security. With payment options build in, the app security will be a very important factor. I think that people are feeling safer using a separate bank application and having a lot of accounts for different kind of apps. If your WeChat account is being hacked, they will have a lot more personal data than with any other application. Finally concerning the privacy, I believe that a lot of people is the western countries will question the privacy of such an app which guides his traffic through China. China is not known as the best country in the world when it comes to privacy rights. Although one can question the privacy of WhatsApp which goes through America with its own NSA scandals.
That being said I think that this app has the potential to break through in Europe, but regarding the points I just discussed it will, in my opinion, take some time before it has found solid ground here.
Hi Ruben, you wrote a very interesting blog and thanks for that! Before I read your blog post I wasn’t aware of the existence of these kinds of apps, where users can do almost everything they want to on their mobile device. As I found it very interesting to read and became excited to use WeChat by reading this, I believe that others might be as well. So the first thing I thought was that this app will succeed in the Netherlands. However, when I did some research on the internet I found a rather interesting article and it included the following: Facebook is creating a similar B2C mobile app with its Messenger platform. Facebook is already widely in use across the world, especially in the Western world, so I think with their strong position they have got a huge advantage compared to WeChat which is mostly used in China at the moment. When Facebook succeeds in creating an equivalent app, they will easily have more users right away, where WeChat first has to gain brand awareness and trust from potential users in Western Europe.
Concluding, if Facebook succeeds in creating such an app with their Messenger platform, I believe that WeChat will fail in Western Europe.
Crighton, C (2016). The apps-within-an-app business model as taught by the Chinese master, WeChat. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wechat-apps-within-an-app-business-model-taught-chinese-crighton [Accessed 07 October 2016].
Hi Ruben! Thank you for your comprehensive post. I come from China, it’s nice to see that an app from my home country is catching attention in the western world. And of course, like the article said I have to use wechat, not only in china but also in Netherlands. To be honest, I use wechat much more often than sum of Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp in Netherlands. You might wonder why i still use it so often when the wallet, taxi, and e-commerce functions are not available anymore. The first reason is to get connect with my families and friends who are living in China. But it’s not the most important reason, because there are many alternatives such as whatsapp(it is available in china, but rare chinese use it), FaceTime and iMessage by apple, Weibo(a chinese version of Facebook, if you ever heard). What drive me to open wechat every day is neither the commerce function nor the chats (I contact my family once a week on average).
The most valuable functions for me in wechat are the moment and subscription channels. What is “Moment”? In moment, you can find your friends’ latest post, and you can like and comment under their post, which allows users to share their own events and easily keep track of their friends’ recent events. You might think it the same with Facebook. But there is actually a huge difference from Facebook, which makes me appreciate wechat more. Unlike Facebook-a public network where you can find anyone with necessary informations, wechat is a closed network where you only share your personal stories and posts with close friends and families. And the comments under your posts can only be seen by joined friends. For example, a friend A comment under you post, your friend B can not see A’s post if A and B are not friend on wechat. It’s more like a closed Facebook group where you share posts with friends and don’t need to worry some inappropriate posts will be seen by your further employer.
Second, the subscriptions are the public business channels that you have substituted by yourself. They are merged as one entry in the chatting page. You can open them as you start a conversation with one of your contacts. These public channels update articles to their followers. You can share the article in your moment or unfollow them whenever you want. It is amazing because you can follow any topic you are interested and share it with your friends (there must be some common interests between you and your friends right.), and you can unfollow them at anytime when you find the quality of the article drops. It works better than any of existing new web I have used. So the public channel publisher try to stably deliver articles in good quality to remain and increase their followers. So far, I didn’t find any other communication app that provide so many functions.
Like what previous comments said, the most important factor for a communication app is the user base. I want to point out another weakness of wechat in western basing on what I have discussed above. Wechat has a English interface now, but many werstern users are still not active wechat users. They usually just use it as a tool to connect with their chinese friend, which is similar to how I use Facebook. I mostly use it for events, and group assignments, and second hand markets. And likewise, Facebook also has a chinese interface. So the paint here is, the content and network on the app is the most important factor that make a communication app competitive. If Wechat wants to be success in western market, it has to deliver abundant western-based contents on it’s competitive advantage platforms–the moments and the subscriptions.