How Luckin Coffee launched the first “gift giving” service on WeChat Store

With the launch of the "Send Gifts" feature in WeChat Stores, Luckin Coffee became the first brand to successfully use this new feature to achieve explosive sales. This article will explore in depth how Luckin achieved a single-day sales of over 10,000 in WeChat Stores through carefully planned marketing activities and precise product selection strategies.

Ten days after the WeChat store "Send Gifts" function was officially launched, the first benchmark case appeared.

On December 30, Luckin Coffee launched a promotional activity for New Year gifts in its WeChat store. On that day, the sales of gift sets in its "WeChat Gift Zone" exceeded 10,000. As of January 5, the "Luckin Fresh Coconut Latte Gift Set" priced at 19.9 yuan, which was specially launched for the gift function, had sales of 23,000, ranking first among stores.

Luckin is one of the first brands to conduct large-scale testing of the gift-giving function on WeChat Stores, and has already verified certain results. We have previously analyzed that WeChat gift-giving is a very good marketing product innovation, and it is more attractive to large brands with gift-giving and social attributes. Luckin's explosive sales did not exceed this scope, but at the same time, the path, speed and scale of its explosive sales also gave us a deeper understanding of the application and prospects of WeChat gift-giving.

It can be expected that after Luckin Coffee started, more brands may seize the opportunity of the New Year’s Goods Festival before the Spring Festival, and more cases will emerge. The possibility of "giving gifts" will also be verified and seen more.

1. To trigger an explosion, the brand must participate, and it depends on planning, product selection, and private domain.

Luckin Coffee achieved 10,000 orders by giving gifts in its WeChat store, which was a relatively successful holiday marketing event. Luckin Coffee has a social attribute, and coffee is also suitable for gift giving. The brand also personally promoted this event.

Luckin Coffee is a pre-packaged coffee brand launched by Luckin Coffee in August 2024. It is a relatively new business outside of the store scene and is in the business expansion period. In the second half of last year, it was quickly launched on major e-commerce platforms and entered offline supermarkets and convenience store channels such as Yonghui and FamilyMart. At the same time, it was officially announced that Tan Jianci was the spokesperson and cooperated with IPs such as LABUBU and Xiao Liuya. For the New Year's Festival scene and the new channel of sending gifts on WeChat, there is naturally a stronger initiative to try.

In terms of planning and execution, Luckin Coffee has also completed the entire process of initial topic ignition, precise product selection, intermediate private domain guidance, and finally the live broadcast room acceptance.

Before the event started, the "first gift of the New Year" was used as the pretext and node to promote the gift-giving event on official accounts, Weibo, Xiaohongshu and private domain groups, making it a hot event. In terms of product selection, four gift box sets were launched specifically for gift-giving activities, priced at 19.9 yuan, 39.9 yuan, 99.9 yuan and 179 yuan, all of which were sets of mugs/thermos cups + coffee liquid/powder/coconut milk.

The homepage of Luckin Coffee WeChat Store has a separate "WeChat Gift Zone"

On December 30, public domain accounts continued to heat up the topic; in Luckin Coffee’s private domain group with millions of members, the brand’s official assistant directly forwarded the gift link. At the same time, @瑞幸即享咖啡 continued to broadcast on the video account to take over the traffic and further amplify the topic.

On the day of the event, Luckin Coffee promoted content on Weibo, Xiaohongshu and other platforms

In the end, the 19.9 yuan package sold more than 10,000 orders a day, becoming a hit of the day; the 39.9 yuan package sold more than 2,000 orders; and the 99 yuan and 179 yuan packages sold less than 100 orders. The price of the 19.9 yuan package is the third lowest in Luckin Coffee stores, only higher than a few trial packages. Low-priced welfare-based products are always a powerful tool to lower the threshold for consumer decision-making and cultivate users' habits of using new channels and new functions. This is also a reference point for brands to do gift marketing on WeChat in the future.

As of January 5, the 19.9 yuan gift set was the best-selling item in Luckin Coffee stores, with 23,000 units sold; the 39.9 yuan gift set was the third best-selling item, with more than 4,300 units sold, both of which more than doubled the first-day order volume.

2. "Giving gifts" can indeed attract traffic to small stores, which is what WeChat stores need most

In the detailed analysis of the case of Luckin Coffee's explosive sales by "Jianshi", we noticed the following data: on the day of the gift-giving promotion, the number of visitors to Luckin Coffee's WeChat store increased by 700%, and continued to increase by 400% on the next day, including some Luckin users who visited the store for the first time.

In other words, the gift-giving function, especially a popular gift-giving marketing event, can attract traffic to WeChat stores. Using gift-giving to attract traffic to WeChat stores should be what WeChat stores or WeChat e-commerce teams want to see the most. Gift-giving is just a function that adapts to WeChat scenarios. It will ultimately drive the growth of user usage habits, supply quantity, and transaction frequency of the entire WeChat e-commerce.

At present, this link is open, which means that it is foreseeable that gifts can be used to expand the scale of the small shop crowd/improve the usage habits of the small shop.

When this feature was first launched at the end of last month, some people analyzed that the biggest benefit of sending gifts is that it can encourage people to open the WeChat "Orders and Card Wallets" page, thereby increasing the frequency of opening WeChat stores.

After users send and receive gifts, the order delivery information will appear in the form of "Shop Orders" on the "Orders and Card Packs" page of their personal WeChat. The page originally displayed information such as cards, coupons, and tickets. After the update, the original card and ticket information was merged to further highlight information related to WeChat e-commerce shopping. For example, the first option on the left above is the "Shopping Cart", and below it are "Viewed Shops" and "Shop Orders".

Gift orders appear on the "Orders and Card Packs" page, which also has "Visited Shops"

Of course, shopping order display is a basic function for e-commerce platforms, and the increase in the frequency of opening this page still requires someone to send gifts. However, for WeChat e-commerce, perhaps it is more concerned about starting with small products and small functions, constantly optimizing links and infrastructure, and showing its determination and understanding in e-commerce, so as to really attract its own supply, consumers, and subsequent transactions.

In today's Chinese consumer market, both supply and consumers are not scarce, but it costs money for merchants to expand their channels and for consumers to develop habits, and platforms need to demonstrate persuasiveness.

We understand that some people in the home appliance industry said that WeChat stores attach great importance to the gift-giving function, and "the gift-giving function may be the part of the store with the highest growth rate in 2025."

3. Is “giving gifts” more suitable for local life?

Another point worth noting in the Luckin Coffee instant coffee case is that it stimulates people's imagination about the adaptability of gift giving to local life.

Currently, small stores only support gift giving through e-commerce, but Luckin Coffee’s attempt to enjoy instant coffee makes it hard not to think of the possibility of combining Luckin stores with gift giving. After all, sending someone a cup of coffee that can be redeemed immediately or even ordered and drunk immediately on WeChat is a more differentiated experience than sending a coffee set that needs to be delivered by express.

Especially for a chain brand like Luckin Coffee, which has dense offline stores, a large coverage area, strong brand awareness, and low-priced, high-frequency products, there is more room for execution.

This is actually an exploration of the possibility of combining gift giving with local life, especially instant delivery.

Gift-giving scenarios inherently require more precise delivery times. Valentine’s Day gifts and birthday gifts cannot arrive the next day, so instant delivery and in-store redemption are more in line with the timeliness requirements of these gift-giving scenarios than express e-commerce.

In other words, gifting is part of the instant delivery market, but we have previously done it on local life platforms. So WeChat gifting can naturally intersect with local life and instant retail in the instant gifting scenario.

Of course, this requires that small stores can also dispatch ready-made third-party delivery resources, or link up with platforms such as Meituan, but given consumer habits and insufficient orders, it is difficult to guarantee immediate delivery capacity, and long delivery times will inevitably affect the experience - this is also one of the reasons why Douyin's local life is difficult to expand takeaway. A few large brands such as KFC that have self-delivery capabilities may be more likely to participate.

However, Xiaodian is still focusing on e-commerce business. A merchant who wants to test gift giving mentioned that "Xiaodian currently does not allow local life merchants to open local stores." The entire video account's attempt at local life is still very basic. Gift giving does not currently support sending virtual items such as group purchase coupons/membership cards. The combination of gift giving and local life is still in the imagination stage.

4. "Send Gifts" officially enters the verification period

In fact, neither the product function of sending gifts to friends nor the scene of gift giving are unique to WeChat stores. The advantage of sending gifts on WeChat is that it has a natural social ecosystem. Luckin Coffee has initially verified that it can send out hot products and smoothly attract traffic to small stores through a whole set of operations including topic creation, preheating, and private domain acceptance based on highly adapted brands, products, and opportunities. Luckin Coffee has verified the integrity of the link of using gift giving to attract supply and leverage WeChat e-commerce.

One piece of data we have verified with multiple practitioners is that the GMV of WeChat stores in 2024 will be in the range of 200-300 billion.

Other data shows that after one week of sending gifts on WeChat, it has reached 300 million users (but because most categories of small shops have the gift-sending function enabled by default, it is not ruled out that the so-called "reach" refers to the number of people who clicked on the small shop during this period), of which more than 40 million consumers clicked on the function, and 12 million users engaged in behaviors such as adding to cart that are strongly related to consumption.

Judging from the above two data, although the actual consumption generated by gift giving is still relatively small, the performance of gift giving in attracting users to small stores is promising.

The success of Luckin Coffee will once again increase people's attention to WeChat stores and gift-giving functions, raising expectations. More new cases may emerge around the upcoming Spring Festival and Valentine's Day. Luckin Coffee staff said they are "very much looking forward" to the use of the gift-giving function during the Spring Festival.

The "Send to a Friend" button appears in the prime position between "Cart" and "Buy"

WeChat Stores are also constantly updating the gift function. This included launching a commission sharing function a week after the gift function was launched, allowing merchants to share gifts on social media or communities through commission sharing, thereby expanding product traffic and GMV. Recently, the "Send to a Friend" button on the product page was moved to the prime position between "Shopping Cart" and "Buy".

Small shops also need more cases to verify and correct the possibilities and ceilings of gift giving.

Author | Zhao Xiaomi (Beijing) Producer | Pang Mengyuan (Shanghai)