How to improve you E-commerce presence in China ?

Everyone heard about WeChat Pay, WeChat shops and WeChat e-commerce.

But have you heard of Weibo shops?

We wrote last week about Uncle Tongdao, and a look at their Weibo account may seem familiar to you… it looks like a WeChat account connected to a WeChat shop.

These shops are completely native to Weibo. How do they work? Very simple: they “deep link” to the Taobao APP (which means that clicking somewhere on Weibo opens the Taobao APP at a specific location)

This is not the only way Weibo enables to connect with Taobao. Other KOLs use more low-tech but extremely efficient solutions in order to take their followers to e-commerce: – Users link to get a Taobao discount (usually from a large brand) – They then another link to access the discounted product – The Weibo account either runs the Taobao / Tmall account or (most of the time) gets a commission off the sale

Some might be surprised by this tight interconnection between Weibo and Taobao. It is in fact extremely natural as Alibaba owns a 20% stake in Weibo.

There were in fact rumors early this year that Alibaba would expand its stake in Weibo, which caused a surge in Weibo’s stock price. Given Weibo’s outstanding Q3 performances, such a move might very well still be on the table.

Taobao sales look like a promising way for KOL to get money… but given the lucrative business of ads, is it a prefered approach for monetization?

It clearly is.

By looking at the official Weibo ranking of top KOL on the platform, we can observe that the number 1 KOL in both fashion and cosmetic space are both using this tactic. Their names are Linxin Design and Hot Cosmetics.

Conclusion

For years, Weibo has been discounted as a dying social network, despite strong growth metrics. Although it is clear Weibo is not what it used to be (especially in terms of time spent daily on the APP), it remains a strong contender for social e-commerce.

With more affordable CPC ads and a better media support for video content, Weibo has true assets to stand out as a weapon of choice for e-commerce and marketers in China.