Weitao, Taobao’s Social e-Commerce Platform

Weitao is a social e-commerce platform designed for brands and businesses of all sizes. It offers a variety of features and tools to help businesses grow their online presence and reach more customers. Weitao is Taobao’s answer to the growing need for social e-commerce solutions. It integrates with Taobao’s existing marketplace and provides a suite of tools to help businesses connect with customers, promote their products, and drive sales. Weitao is the perfect solution for brands looking to take advantage of Taobao’s massive customer base and tap into the power of social e-commerce in China.

What is social e-commerce?

Social e-commerce is a term used to describe the use of social media platforms to facilitate online shopping. This can include things like sharing product recommendations with friends, reading reviews before making a purchase, or using social media to find deals and discounts. In many cases, social e-commerce takes advantage of the fact that people are more likely to trust recommendations from peer reviews rather than official brands communication.

Quick Recap of what is Taobao for the one in the back

Taobao, the C2C e-business platform is owned by Alibaba, one of the main Chinese web companies. Because Alibaba is making war with Tencent, another big web company, they decided to shut down the QR code entrance on Taobao from Wechat, the mobile social network of Tencent. Instead, Taobao created its own social app called Weitao.

What is Weitao?

Weitao was created in order to make a better connection between sellers and consumers. It is an application similar to Wechat and Weibo with social feeds. It allows sellers to put their products, and when the consumers want to buy a product, they just have to click on it to land on the purchasing page.

 

But what will be the future of Weitao?

Weitao seems to be very important for Taobao. In fact, it has a second place on the Taobao navigation bar. Weitao has a high objective: they want to reach 1 billion Yuan sales for the “single day” (November 11^th is the single day in China). In fact, Taobao made promotion these last years for this day and it worked very well: they had 19,1 billion Yuan sales. So Weitao wants also to make high revenue on this day and already started to attract businesses.

Moreover, Weitao is the entrance of Taobao on the mobile traffic; it’s the direct competitor of Wechat, which means Taobao will invest probably a lot in it to compete with WeChat in order to not let Tencent be the leader on mobiles.

 

Weitao for sellers

On Weitao the sellers can have a special store dedicated to their products, where the consumer can see them. Knowing that advertising on mobile is expensive for Taobao sellers, they probably just should use Weitao, which is a dedicated app.

But not all the sellers should go on Weitao. In fact, because it’s new and in order to have a good image, for now, Taobao is helping especially big sellers. They will start to help more small sellers when the app will be more mature. It is then good to go on Weitao when you are a big seller. Moreover, big sellers have a better relationship with Taobao, so it’s easier for them

This is why before entering Weitao when you want to sell, you have to analyze your own situation first and see if it is suitable for you.

Then, when you want to open an account on Weitao, there is something you should be careful of: you can’t change the name of the account. So you should be aware of that and be careful when choosing your account’s name.