WeChat Mini Stores have officially joined the Double 11 Grand Promotion.

WeChat, which has long maintained a restrained attitude towards e-commerce promotional events, is officially joining the Double 11 shopping festival this year.

On September 22, WeChat Shop announced that the platform will officially participate in the Double 11 promotion. After two trial runs during the 618 shopping festival and the "Golden Autumn Promotion", WeChat Shop's Double 11 campaign will run from October 12 to November 15, lasting a total of 35 days.

A WeChat Shop lecturer is reluctant to describe this move as "joining the battle". He explained that after more than 20 years of development, Double 11 has formed a fixed consumer mindset. WeChat Shop launching promotional events is to conform to user habits, rather than joining the industry price war.

This year's Double 11, WeChat Shop will launch basic full-reduction coupons, group-specific full-reduction coupons, sharing multiplier coupons, and category supplementary coupons, and provide up to 100% full platform subsidies for three types of "high-quality shops" that meet the criteria: brands, service providers, and best-selling stores. Merchants can also get a 1:1 co-investment subsidy from the platform.

Live streaming remains the core venue of the promotion. The platform will provide merchants and live streamers with exclusive streamer coupons that can be stacked with cross-store full reductions, set up various challenges and no-threshold shopping credits, and large-scale live broadcasts will also receive traffic incentives.

As the Double 11 promotion enters its 17th year when consumers are slightly fatigued, WeChat is also trying to add a new gameplay to it: social relationship chains.

Traditional e-commerce platforms concentrate traffic on their homepages and promotion venues, while WeChat Shop's coupons can be shared in WeChat groups, private chats with friends, and the search bar. For example, the sharing multiplier coupon requires users to send the coupon to friends to unlock greater discounts together, and the increased discount part is subsidized by the platform.

"During the 'Golden Autumn Promotion', some cases distributed thousands or even tens of thousands of streamer-exclusive coupons in groups, with an extremely high redemption rate. These coupons can be stacked with the existing full-reduction rules of the platform, and since they are claimed in the private domain, users feel a stronger sense of exclusivity, so the redemption rate is very high. We will follow this practice in the upcoming Double 11 to help merchants improve conversion rates," the WeChat Shop lecturer said in an interview with media including Jiemian News.

"Gifting" is also a unique capability of WeChat Shop. East Buy revealed that after enabling the membership price feature on WeChat Shop, its gifting business once achieved a single-day GMV of over 5 million yuan.

However, WeChat is also setting boundaries for social e-commerce. The WeChat Shop lecturer stated that shopping has a certain degree of privacy, and not all product categories are suitable for social dissemination. The platform encourages brands to carry out reasonable marketing, but will also severely crack down on behaviors that induce users to forward content to Moments and group chats through material benefits.

Another background for joining Double 11 is that WeChat Shop is getting rid of its dependence on live streaming.

In August 2024, Channels Shop was upgraded to WeChat Shop. Behind the name change, the transaction scenarios have expanded from WeChat Channels to official accounts, mini-programs, search, communities, and one-on-one chats. Since this year, WeChat has also significantly increased its investment in shelf scenarios. The WeChat Shop lecturer said that the live streaming and short video scenarios have been verified, and the next step will be to focus on verifying the shelf direction.

Data disclosed by WeChat Shop shows that during this year's 618 shopping festival, the transaction volume of the "Shop & Card Pack" scenario increased by 537% year on year, and the number of merchants with transaction volume exceeding 1 million yuan increased by 564% year on year. In the same period, the transaction volume brought by content creators to brands increased by 225% year on year, and the number of brands with transaction volume exceeding 10 million yuan increased by 200% year on year.

This also means that WeChat e-commerce is generating new growth beyond live streaming. In the past, brands in WeChat Channels mainly relied on live streaming to drive transactions. Now, scenarios such as clipped live content, mini-programs, search, and shop shelves can all support transactions.

Some brands have adjusted their organizations and investments accordingly. Lin Junhong, a relevant person in charge of Skechers, told Jiemian News that the sales volume of WeChat Channels in the first half of this year has nearly doubled year on year, outpacing the growth rate of other e-commerce channels it has settled in. WeChat Shop as a whole has a higher customer unit price, higher conversion rate, and better input-output ratio than other channels. Its next plan is to set up a dedicated team to operate the "Shop & Card Pack" feature, and optimize operations in the way of traditional shelf e-commerce.

WeChat officially joining the promotion at this time is also related to brands' traffic anxiety.

As customer acquisition costs on traditional e-commerce and content e-commerce platforms continue to rise, brands still regard WeChat as one of the few platforms that can connect the public domain, private domain and offline stores at the same time. Many merchants mentioned in interviews that WeChat users are more willing to buy products with high customer unit prices, stockpiling attributes or emphasizing quality. Among them, apparel is the largest transaction category on WeChat Shop, while food has a short decision-making chain and is naturally suitable for family sharing and holiday gifting.

At the same time, WeChat also hopes to get rid of the impression that "WeChat e-commerce users are mostly older". WeChat Shop disclosed that in 2025, the number of purchasing users under 25 years old increased by more than 336% year on year.

WeChat has no shortage of traffic, content and social entrances, and the next step is to build a continuous transaction conversion operation system. This year's Double 11 will also become a concentrated test of the collaborative capability of the WeChat ecosystem.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Jiemian News", author: Lu Keyan, published with authorization from 36Kr.