What did the WeChat Open Class say in 2025?

The 2025 WeChat Open Class was held behind closed doors on January 9, focusing on the relationship between WeChat Stores, Mini Programs, and Service Accounts planned by the WeChat team, as well as updates to the e-commerce infrastructure. This article will explain in detail the core content of the 2025 WeChat Open Class and provide you with the latest developments and trends in WeChat e-commerce development.

On January 9, the 2025 WeChat Open Course continued the "non-public" tradition that was revised last year, and once again held a small closed-door meeting for industry insiders, without inviting the media or allowing live broadcasts.

However, based on the photos sent back by the audience, we still learned some core information released by the WeChat team. This open class focused on the relationship between WeChat stores, mini programs, and service accounts planned by the WeChat team, as well as the updates at the e-commerce infrastructure level. The recently popular "send gifts" function also occupied a considerable space in the open class and is expected to be officially launched during the upcoming Spring Festival.

WeChat Lecturer announced that in 2024, the GMV scale of WeChat stores increased by 1.92 times, the number of orders increased by 2.25 times, the number of active sales increased by 3.83 times, the GPM increased by 1.5 times, and the number of monthly active sales merchants increased by 1.7 times. Clothing and home furnishings, food and fresh produce, jade and jadeite, personal care and beauty, education and training, maternal and child toys, books and audio-visuals, etc. are currently the fastest growing advantageous categories on the video account.

97.7% of video users are over 25 years old, and 63% are women. 32% are from first-tier and new first-tier cities, 40% from second-tier and third-tier cities, and 28% from fourth-tier, fifth-tier and sixth-tier cities and overseas. It can be concluded that the core user group of video accounts is adult women from second-tier and third-tier cities.

In terms of commercialization, this open class conveyed a very clear spirit, that is, WeChat Stores should cooperate well with other atomic components of WeChat (mini programs, service accounts, communities, Soso, etc.) to build an e-commerce ecosystem within WeChat, rather than relying solely on video accounts and live broadcast channels.

WeChat Open Class PPT

1. The trinity of mini programs, mini stores, and service accounts

WeChat Open Class spent a lot of effort to introduce the need for mini programs to work well with WeChat stores.

In the third quarter of 2024, the transaction volume of mini programs exceeded 2 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than ten percentage points. Although the results are good, many mini program merchants are indeed worried about how the mini program store system will coexist with the WeChat store system based on video accounts in the future.

According to the WeChat team's plan, WeChat stores, mini programs, and service accounts will form a "three-in-one" system in the WeChat e-commerce system. WeChat stores will undertake transactions, orders, and after-sales experience; mini programs will be responsible for providing functional services, membership systems, and marketing methods; and service accounts will be responsible for user retention and repeat purchases.

In this system, mini programs are like brand official websites, where users learn about brands and are reached by marketing activities, then go to WeChat stores to place orders and become fans of service accounts. The lecturer of the public course said that this model will bring new traffic + high repurchase, and ultimately achieve "operation growth" for merchants.

The combination of mini programs and WeChat stores solves the problem of mini program merchants’ lack of channels to acquire new customers, and also solves the problem of WeChat stores’ lack of brand homepages.

In order to make it easier for merchants to interconnect, WeChat has also helped merchants reduce the difficulty of development: merchants do not need to develop a mini-program mall separately, they can directly launch the mall on the mini-program through the small store component; and, WeChat has unified stores and unified management. When merchants need to adjust the price of a certain product, they can modify it in the entire WeChat service with just one click, which improves the merchants' operational efficiency.

WeChat Open Class PPT

2. “Gift giving” will also benefit offline stores

On December 19, the WeChat team began to conduct a grayscale internal test of the "send gift" function. At that time, 36Kr wrote that "for merchants, the emergence of the gift function is a significant benefit. For the WeChat platform, this may be a genius invention comparable to the 'WeChat red envelope'."

The lecturer of the open class said, "The outside world has hyped up the 'send gift' function, which is beyond our understanding. This function will continue to iterate and develop, and it is not clear what changes will happen in the future." But its appearance has obviously made competitors quite uneasy - Taobao and Douyin soon followed suit and adopted the gift-sending function.

The lecturer said that the impact of "giving gifts" on merchants is not only to increase sales, but also to help merchants reduce promotion costs based on social relationships. Moreover, because only high-quality products can be spread through social relationship chains, it is a valuable virtuous cycle. "If all merchants are committed to this, the ecology of WeChat transactions will definitely undergo tremendous changes." The lecturer said.

The open class also demonstrated two exciting new ways to play the "Send Gifts" function: "Give gifts from merchants" and "Send gifts by scanning codes offline".

Regarding "good gifts from merchants", it means that merchants can make exclusive "page decorations" for products with gift attributes in WeChat stores, and can also customize stickers and package cards to make the entire gift-giving process more refined and thoughtful - it sounds like the meaning of "red envelope cover" to the WeChat red envelope product.

"Offline gift-giving by scanning QR codes" benefits offline merchants, allowing offline customers to send gifts to their WeChat friends online directly by scanning the QR code presented by the store. It can be said that this adds a new entry and new scene to the "gift-giving" function, and also brings new sales channels to offline merchants.

3. Lowering the entry threshold for merchants, WeChat seems ready to face the outbreak

When we talk about WeChat e-commerce, a word that is often used is "restraint", which is reflected in the platform's strict review standards, excessively high deposits, and the loose connection between official operations and merchants. It is generally believed that this is because the WeChat team is not ready to face the difficulty brought about by the explosion of commercialization, so it is deliberately slowing down.

But today WeChat seems to be ready. In a public class, the WeChat team announced that it would lower the threshold for merchants: 1. All categories should be opened; 2. The deposit amount should be reduced; 3. 0 yuan deposit.

First, 391 third-level categories were adjusted from "targeted access" and "temporarily closed" to open categories, and 26 first-level categories including clothing and underwear, luggage and leather goods, agricultural supplies and gardening were simplified to simplify the entry rules, greatly lowering the entry threshold for merchants;

Secondly, 25 categories including jewelry, underwear, and women's clothing have reduced their guarantee amounts, with the highest reduction reaching 50%;

Finally, the 0 yuan deposit currently covers many categories and will continue to cover them in the future.

A Tencent insider revealed to 36Kr that the group has very strong confidence in the performance of WeChat e-commerce in 2025.

In the past year, affected by the macro-economy, many e-commerce platforms have experienced a decline in sales, but Video Accounts still have the advantage of a low base.

Tencent President Martin Lau said in a Q2 2024 conference call, "Compared with other short video platforms, we have not slowed down in terms of the growth of total merchandise transaction volume. The main reason is that compared with our competitors, the scale of our e-commerce transaction volume is actually very small, and there is still huge room for growth."

Author | Wang Yuchan Editor | Qiao Qian