As an important layout of Tencent in the field of e-commerce, WeChat stores are quietly accelerating. According to the financial report for the first quarter of 2025, the transaction volume of WeChat stores increased rapidly year-on-year, showing its potential in the WeChat ecosystem. However, despite the gradual clarification of the positioning of WeChat stores, small and medium-sized merchants still face challenges in finding ecological niches in them. This article will explore the development status of WeChat stores, their operational strategies, and their unique advantages and difficulties in the WeChat ecosystem through real-life cases of several merchants.
After the social dissemination of gifts, the positioning of WeChat stores became clear, and WeChat e-commerce carried Tencent’s mission of once again developing e-commerce, and began to march according to the established route, giving answers one after another.
In the just-released Q1 2025 financial report, Tencent provided more support for WeChat store merchants to expand the brand product library and contribute to the rapid year-on-year growth of WeChat store transaction volume.
Tencent did not disclose the size of the transaction, but mentioned that the GMV of WeChat stores continued to grow rapidly in the fourth quarter of last year.
The slow and stable WeChat store began to speed up.
However, according to feedback from people close to the WeChat ecosystem, KA merchants are still the main force contributing to WeChat market trading. This means that white labels, labels and small and medium-sized businesses still need a long way to find their ecological niche in it.
One of the most intuitive manifestations is that Martin Lau mentioned in many earnings conference calls that WeChat store is a unified platform that connects all parts of the WeChat ecosystem, and the standardized information and data structure enables goods to flow freely in the WeChat ecosystem such as video accounts, mini programs, searches, and enterprise WeChat.
However, in the eyes of those small and medium-sized merchants, what they care about most is the delivery of Channels.
Some time ago, Newberry daybreak visited three merchants in different regions and categories, who previously had online stores on other platforms, and began to enter the video account live broadcast in 2023, hoping to start a new round of business growth.
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They almost collectively said that the perception of adjustments made to the WeChat ecosystem is not strong, and in addition to the intensification of competition due to the influx of more and more merchants, they do not seem to be very interested in the changes in the new system.
This mentality may not be conducive to their long-term operations.
Channels is not the first live streaming field, and the business history before that has been summarized: live broadcast e-commerce can rise quickly, but it will inevitably fall naturally or even withdraw.
This is what latecomers Channels hope to avoid, and it is also the main reason for building an e-commerce system in the larger context of WeChat.
01 Who is doing a WeChat store?
Fang Yuan has been doing live streaming in Yunnan for five years. In August 2023, I learned from a small talk with my peers that a new live broadcast e-commerce platform has grown in the WeChat system. With almost no hesitation, he began to explore the Channels transaction, “The underlying logic is similar, which is to copy the previous method of live streaming.” At that time, it was still called the Channels store.
Fang Yuan cooperates with local mountain suppliers in Yunnan to sell nourishing Chinese medicinal materials such as cordyceps sinensis and ganoderma lucidum. This type of product has a high cost and a high price. In the live broadcast room of the channel, he positioned the products in two price bands, with a unit price of 100~500 yuan being one level and 500~1000 yuan being another level.
In the first live broadcast, Fang Yuan adopted a heavy payment method, investing about 1,000 yuan, broadcasting for two hours, attracting about 6,000 people to watch, and sales of more than 8,000 yuan. insisted on a live broadcast every day, and after more than a month, the turnover of a single live broadcast room reached 15,000 yuan. At the beginning of 2025, this number will stabilize between 5~70,000 yuan, and the audience will be about 10,000 or 20,000 people.
Fang Yuan Video account live broadcast room transaction data Photo courtesy of Fang Yuan
Almost at the same time, there is also Ah Jun from Guangzhou, but the category he is good at is workplace women’s clothing, and it is from the factory’s own brand. His family brand had many offline stores in its early years, but in the past two years, physical stores have shrunk and inventory is backlogged, so it sought online sales. In addition to broadcasting through the channel, he will also send the goods to the talent for distribution.
Ah Jun told Newberry Daybreak that in the initial stage of the number, he mainly relied on the WeChat private domain fan conversion accumulated by the brand, “In the past, when offline stores were stored, the store manager added a lot of customers’ WeChat, and when the video account was launched, the store manager pushed the live broadcast room to these fans. It can be understood that (WeChat) private domain fans are put into the (video account) public domain to monetize.” He revealed that there are two or three thousand WeChat fans accumulated in offline stores.
In the early days, Ah Jun mainly sold its own brand products, with a unit price of 200~500 yuan and monthly sales of about two or three hundred thousand yuan. After that, due to the inventory breakage, the business of WeChat stores slowly decreased.
Last year, he cooperated with external suppliers to open a new WeChat store account and sold women’s clothing on Channels in a small batch of measurements, with a monthly turnover of about 100,000 yuan. In order to reduce the cost pressure caused by inventory, Ah Jun sells as many clothes as he wants.
Once, a piece of clothing sold 30 pieces in half an hour and was out of stock in an instant. However, it takes three or four days for suppliers to replenish supplies, and they can only pass by “explosive models”.
Xiaobu in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province has a multi-channel layout. He sells purple sand teapots in the live broadcast rooms of Douyin, Channels and Facebook accounts, as well as some ceramic tea sets in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province and Wuyishan tea leaves in Fujian, with a unit price of five or six hundred yuan.
When Channels first started in 2023, Xiaobu also used the Douyin live broadcast room to “grasp the rhythm and stir up the atmosphere” to bring goods, superimposing the method of paid streaming and differentiated product selection, and successfully attracted a group of fans. Today, their single live broadcast turnover is stable at more than 200,000 yuan, and the audience exceeds 10,000 people.
Xiaobu shared his experience with Newberry Daybreak, “Channels should pay attention to the freshness of product selection, and the products sold today cannot be sold tomorrow. We prepare some new products every day to increase customer stickiness.”
Entering the game two years ago, the above three merchants occupied a place in the WeChat system based on the live broadcast of Channels. In the second half of 2024, as Tencent thinks clearly about the positioning of WeChat e-commerce and the commercialization action is clear, more and more mature merchants are pouring in, and the competitive atmosphere is getting stronger.
02 Slow heat but stability
WeChat e-commerce, which is mainly based on video accounts, has its own characteristics.
According to past experience, Xiaobu usually has to attract consumers to place orders with a unit price of twenty or thirty yuan a pack of tea in the live broadcast room, low-price promotion, fast-paced delivery, and a single session can often push to a turnover of 700,000 yuan or even more than 1 million yuan. Accompanied by a high return rate, “Sometimes there is a strong sense of forced orders, and there is no room for people to think calmly, and it is easy to return. Many times, they cancel the order before it is shipped.”
Video is another style. “There are many middle-aged and elderly people, and the consumption power is strong, which is very suitable for our category.” Xiaobu told us that the unit price of the same teapot in the live broadcast room of other platforms is two or three hundred yuan, which is almost half of the unit price of the video account.
While the mature group drives the high unit price of customers, it also increases the repurchase rate and reduces the return rate. Xiaobu said bluntly, “Some people can’t even find where to return the goods.”
On top of that, these fans are sticky. As long as the product satisfies him and there is no quality problem, he will repurchase. In addition to teapots, teacups and tea leaves are all products that repeat customers will buy in WeChat stores.
In order to communicate with middle-aged and elderly consumers at the same frequency, Xiaobu’s video account chooses the “little old man” anchor, and the rhythm of the live broadcast is “slowly explained”, with some ancient poems and other traditional cultural content. On Douyin, their anchor is a young girl who also walks in a fast-paced style.
The industry generally believes that Channels users are older, and this was true in the early days. WeChat used to focus on expanding young users. However, according to the feedback of a WeChat service provider, the age of Channels users has shown a diversified state, and even the strongest transaction purchasing power is in the age group of 30-40 years old. If the merchant still has the senses of the middle-aged and elderly group, it may be related to the accuracy of user distribution.
Fangyuan’s Channels store also accurately captures middle-aged and elderly users, and chooses to focus on nourishing and health products. And it resonates with Xiaobu’s operational experience.
In WeChat stores, Fangyuan’s return rate is lower than the industry level. He told Newberry Daybreak that as long as they pay attention to product quality and do a good job in after-sales service, “brothers and sisters” will not return goods easily.
He will also focus on the problem that customers may not be able to find the return entrance, “We will repeatedly emphasize in the live broadcast room that we really need to shoot again. If there is a problem with the arrival and I don’t know how to return it, we will ask the customer service to contact the station and sign for it directly.”
Once, an aunt bought a tonic and received it and found it broken. She contacted the customer service of the WeChat store but did not get a reply, so she sent a private message directly to the video account. Just as Fang Yuan saw the message, he arranged for his colleagues to refund the other party directly.
Fang Yuan explained that in the WeChat store, if the customer’s after-sales problem is not solved, it is easy to affect the reputation, “If someone receives the goods and has a quality problem and does not get a claim, he is likely to go to the live broadcast room to comment, and inadvertently produce a ‘rhythmic’ effect.”
Once the service is in place, these consumers not only rarely return, but also repurchase frequently.
Ah Jun is deeply aware of this. His WeChat store is in the stage of “inventory clearance” and supply chain development, and has not yet invested energy in managing the live streaming business of Channels. Considering the high return rate of women’s clothing categories, he has now abandoned other platforms and focused on WeChat stores.
He said frankly, “WeChat Channels is a slow creature, which may not show explosive power, but it is sustainable.”
03 The distance between 100 billion and trillion
Although WeChat stores have shown sufficient differentiated advantages, it is undeniable that the transaction scale of WeChat e-commerce and other platforms is still not on the same order.
The official did not disclose the transaction scale of the WeChat store, and there are different versions of the data circulating externally. However, the basic argument is that the scale of WeChat stores is still at the level of 100 billion, and most e-commerce companies have already crossed the trillion scale.
The same is true for merchants. The information Xiaobu got is that it is common for the teapot category of Douyin e-commerce to have a single GMV of more than one million yuan, and even the head merchants can reach six or seven million yuan. The turnover of a single live broadcast of Channels is still in the stage of hundreds of thousands of yuan.
The categories of WeChat stores also need to be further enriched.
The 2025 WeChat Open Class PRO pointed out that by the end of 2024, WeChat stores will have the fastest growth rate in categories such as household and daily necessities, and fresh food. The Yucui cultural play and daily FMCG track are still the advantages of the WeChat ecosystem.
The feedback from a WeChat ecological service provider is that the shoes and clothing category is not dominant in the Channels system for the time being, and there is no good feedback on the track that the ecology wants to focus on radiating.
Interestingly, WeChat adheres to the consistent long-termism, just like Ah Jun’s feeling, and the WeChat video account is “very Buddhist”.
In the live broadcast room of Channels, promotional routines such as “forcing orders” are not popular, and merchants may be punished by WeChat officials for “exaggeration”, which will seriously lead to account bans and store closures.
At the beginning of April, Fang Yuan experienced the punishment of a WeChat store ban for 3,650 days, and his registered business licenses were banned, and he could not appeal. “If you accidentally say the wrong thing in the live broadcast room, you may be judged as ‘false propaganda’ and permanently banned from broadcasting, and you will not be given a chance to correct it.” He believes that the penalty mechanism of WeChat stores is too strict, and many merchants have been affected. Today, he has re-registered his small store and video account, operating from scratch, and his sales have decreased significantly.
Xiaobu also experienced the punishment of being banned from the live broadcast room of Channels for one day, just because they put on the wrong product, but it was unblocked the next day. He pointed out that WeChat stores are easy to be banned, and the management is stricter, so don’t use too many exaggerated routines.
All this may be related to WeChat’s genes.
According to LatePost, Zhang Xiaolong did not set clear goals for the e-commerce business, but told the team to do it slowly and polish the product first. A WeChat person described the current infrastructure of WeChat stores as equivalent to the level of Douyin when it first started in 2021. At present, Channels has only opened 2%~3% of its traffic to commercial content, which is about 1/10 of Douyin.
Ah Jun, Fang Yuan and Xiaobu all reported that they did not interact directly with the WeChat store officials, and the event information was conveyed through private messages on the platform. Ah Jun has contacted the service provider of WeChat store, but he has not received any constructive solutions or opinions.
After Tencent’s repositioning of WeChat e-commerce in mid-2024, the industry generally believes that WeChat stores and Channels can release greater business power in the future by linking WeChat groups and circles of friends.
However, merchants may have their own ideas. Xiaobu doesn’t want to do private domain traffic, “You treat others as customers, and others may treat you as friends and keep chatting with you, which is not an encouraging thing for merchants.” Previously, the customer added Xiaobu’s WeChat, every time before placing an order for a teapot, he would chat privately with him and ask him to take pictures of all the teapots one by one and send them over, “Customers will become very picky eaters.”
Ah Jun had a painful experience because of the WeChat group.
Last year, because employees put the wrong packaging bag, the customer received a complaint in the WeChat group that was mistaken for a fake, and the team employees did not reply in time, which caused doubts from other fans. In the next two months or so, business fell by about 20%. Now mentioning Ah Jun still has lingering fears, “If you don’t do a good job in operating a private domain group, it may be a backlash.”
(At the request of the interviewee, Ah Jun, Fang Yuan, and Xiao Bu are pseudonyms in the article.) ）
