Tag: wechat

Tencent is growing bolder when it comes to the mobile space

Tencent, one of China’s largest online retail and technology organizations, has seen profits from the mobile sector soar over the past several months. The company has long held a strong place in the mobile space, but has only recently begun to heavily involve itself therein through social media, gaming, and commerce. As the company continues to grow, it is beginning to become more cavalier with its mobile interests, launching new initiatives and services that are meant to enthrall mobile consumers throughout China.

Company continues to fight competition and attract support from consumers

Tencent is currently valued at over $120 billion, making it one of the largest and most influential business entities in the country and a competitor of the Alibaba Group, which is another massive organization based in China. The majority of Tencent’s success has been made in the gaming field, where its mobile games and publishing services have managed to win the favor of consumers and game developers alike. Gaming is not enough for Tencent, however, and the company has begun to focus more heavily on mobile and e-commerce.

E-commerce proves to be a tough battleground for Tencent

In terms of mobile commerce, Tencent has recently made updates to its massively popular WeChat application. These updates have introduced new features to the application that allow it to serve as a mobile shopping platform. The application can also be used to make payments for particular goods and services. The company has found success in the mobile field, but has not been able to mimic this success when it comes to e-commerce. Tencent has struggled for some time to establish a strong foothold in the e-commerce realm due to various challenges and strong competition coming from Alibaba.

WeChat may become the defacto mobile commerce platform for many people

Tencent is unwilling to abandon e-commerce, but the company may be focusing more heavily on the mobile space for the foreseeable future. The WeChat application is already the most widely used mobile app in the world, which also makes it one of the most widely used mobile commerce platforms. To date, no singular mobile commerce service has managed to attract the support of any significant majority demographic, but WeChat may be able to accomplish this goal.

This new shopping service is being provided by LV.com, bringing Chinese giants together.

WeChat has now announced that it will be broadening its mobile commerce offerings through the addition of a flight booking service that will be made possible through LV.com (which was formerly called 17u.cn).

This will bring WeChat into a partnership with a company in which Tencent currently has a stake.

The payments in this mobile commerce arrangement will, of course, support WeChat Payment. A consumer will be able to not only buy his or her ticket, but will also be able to receive notifications on the flight status, in addition to other related forms of information. All that they need to do is subscribe to an official LV WeChat account.

Currently, this mobile commerce option is available only in two cities, but this is meant to grow.

At the moment, WeChat is making this smartphone service available only in two cities in China: Shenzhen and Guangzhou. This will be only a starting point for the service, but there are plans to expand it outward into other cities, later on. The company has also specified that it will be broadening the service into the other forms of online booking that are available through LV.com.

Until now, there have been a large range of different categories of smartphone shopping based offerings that have been made available through WeChat. They have used the My Brand Cards channel in order to make it possible for consumers to be able to purchase tremendous ranges of different kinds of goods and services.

The company now feels that by adding the new option of being able to book flights fits in very well with its mobile commerce brand as it has established it until now. It will also be incorporating other travel related bookings in the future, which can include making hotel reservations or booking various types of tourism services such as getting tickets for a sightseeing tour. Those are not yet a part of the shopping experience but consumers should be expecting them before too much time has passed, considering the speed at which WeChat is known to expand.