The "Send Gifts" feature in WeChat Store might be a genius invention that can rival "WeChat Red Packet".

Text | Wang Yuchan

Editor | Qiao Qian

Before the most important festival of the year arrives, WeChat Mini Store has officially started the gray-scale test of the "Send Gift" feature. Currently, in addition to jewelry and educational training, WeChat Mini Store has begun the gray-scale test of the "Send Gift" feature in all categories, but it only supports products with an original price of less than 10,000 yuan. Stores that meet the rules will automatically activate the "Send Gift" feature, and the product details page will display the "Supports Sending Gifts" entrance.

Now, in the WeChat Mini Store, select a product that supports "Send Gift", lightly touch "Send to Friend" to pull up the "Confirm Gift" page, then select the style, browse the amount, and then select a friend on the "Send Gift" page and complete the payment, and you can send a gift to your friend.

There is no need to ask the recipient's delivery address in advance, nor is it necessary to ask the recipient about the desired style, WeChat Mini Store has omitted the two most cumbersome steps in the entire gift-giving process. After the recipient receives the gift message, they can fill in the delivery address by themselves, choose to replace other styles of the same price under the product by themselves, and then click "Accept Gift", which is considered as officially accepting this kindness.

Gift Sending and Receiving Process

The gift-sending feature does not support the recipient to transfer the gift to other friends. Also, once a gift is sent (based on the successful sending of the gift message to the recipient), regardless of whether the friend accepts the gift or not, the sender cannot actively cancel the gift or the order within 24 hours.

If the friend does not accept the gift within 24 hours (based on opening the gift message and lightly touching "Accept Gift"), the order will be automatically canceled and the refund will be returned to the sender through the original channel of the order payment.

36Kr found that not all users currently have the default gift-sending feature, and the new feature only covers some users. A merchant told 36Kr that it is expected that the gift-sending feature will be fully available to all users next week.

What Does This Mean for Merchants?

For merchants, the emergence of the gift-sending feature is a significant benefit, especially for merchants whose sold products have a strong gift attribute. This feature eliminates the trouble of the gift giver asking for the address and style. Combined with WeChat's own social resources, it makes gift-giving as easy as sending a red envelope, and is expected to increase the success rate of selling gifts.

A snack merchant told 36Kr that they are already considering launching more gift box products to welcome the new customer bonus brought by the new feature. In addition, they are also looking forward to the gift-giving needs brought by the upcoming Christmas, New Year's Day, Lunar New Year, Lantern Festival, and Valentine's Day. "The demand for giving gifts always exists. The new feature does not create demand but reduces the difficulty. This makes us very excited," the merchant said.

From the "WeChat Mini Store 'Send Gift' User Guide" released by the WeChat Mini Store operation team, it can be seen that the current WeChat team has integrated this feature with the original system, and the threshold for merchants to adapt to the new feature is not high.

Merchant-side Process

In the merchant order page, after the sender makes the payment and before the recipient accepts the gift, the gift order status is "Pending Payment". After the recipient fills in the address and accepts the gift, the gift order status is "Pending Shipment". The "Payment Success Notification" and "Pending Shipment Notification" will only be pushed after the recipient fills in the address and accepts the gift.

The gift order does not have buyer information, and merchants are temporarily not supported to blacklist users, but existing blacklisted users are not supported to send or receive gifts in the gift scenario.

For gift orders, when merchants handle after-sales of gift orders, it is the same as for ordinary orders. The gift order includes freight insurance, and the recipient is regarded as the beneficiary of the freight insurance. If the recipient initiates a return and refund, they can enjoy the relevant compensation rights and interests according to the freight insurance rules corresponding to the order.

In addition, if merchants do not wish to participate in "Send Gift", they can close this feature on the "WeChat Mini Store > Marketing Center > Send Gift" page. Currently, WeChat only supports closing the gift-sending feature at the store level. That is to say, merchants either support gift-giving for the entire store or do not support it for the entire store, and the feature cannot be closed for a single product.

What Does This Mean for WeChat?

The emergence of the gift-sending feature can't help but remind people of the birth of WeChat Red Packet - it also appeared when the year-end was approaching, also met the users' needs to maintain human relationships, and also only reduced the action threshold without creating new needs - although bank transfers can also send money to relatives and friends, it is just not as easy and interesting as WeChat Red Packet, so the former will never be as frequent as the latter.

For the current WeChat e-commerce business, competing in SKU and price is not its strength. WeChat's real strength lies in mastering social relationships. Before the gift-sending feature appeared, the main means for WeChat e-commerce to utilize social relationships was through the operation of merchants' WeChat groups and the recommendation of users' acquaintances (but this ability is mainly utilized by Pinduoduo), but it lacked product-level functions. The current gift-sending feature obviously makes up for this and is expected to truly revitalize the power of social relationships in the e-commerce ecosystem.

Gift Selection and Postage Payment Interface

In August this year, Tencent announced the upgrade of the Video Account Mini Store to the WeChat Mini Store. Compared with the previously relatively closed Video Account Mini Store, the store and product information of the WeChat Mini Store will flow in multiple WeChat scenarios such as official accounts (subscription accounts, service accounts), video accounts (live broadcasts, short videos), mini programs, and search. It can be understood that the previous "Video Account E-commerce" strategy has been officially raised to the level of "WeChat E-commerce".

Tencent has a very high expectation for the WeChat Mini Store. In the earnings call meetings of the last two quarters, Liu Chiping, President of Tencent, emphasized many times that Tencent "has repositioned the live e-commerce business to make it closer to WeChat e-commerce." That is to say, the ecosystem that Tencent wants to build is not only relying on the Video Account and live broadcast channels, but also to build an e-commerce ecosystem within WeChat and connect it with the entire WeChat ecosystem.

It is also worth mentioning that because social relationships themselves have a "viral spread" effect, the gift-sending feature is expected to drive more new users who have never used the WeChat Mini Store to enter the WeChat Mini Store by searching for the names of popular gift brands in "Search" or clicking on the gift link sent by the other party to complete their first consumption.

In the earnings call for the third quarter of this year, James Mitchell, Chief Strategy Officer of Tencent, said that it plans to add search functions in the Video Account and mini programs, use search technology to optimize the information flow, and add commercial search entrances in different locations. Referring to the data of other live e-commerce platforms, consumers who come through searching for keywords usually have a higher conversion efficiency.

"We hope to create a unified and trustworthy shopping experience through the WeChat ecosystem, and the key lies in indexing and standardization." Liu Chiping, President of Tencent, said that in the future, Tencent hopes to form more incremental closed loops through the combination of the Video Account and WeChat Search, and use the AI large model to improve the relevance of search results.