Luckin Coffee’s WeChat store received over 10,000 “gifts” in one day

In the wave of digital marketing, the "Send Gifts" function of WeChat Stores has brought new growth opportunities to brand merchants with its unique social attributes and innovative gameplay. This article exclusively reveals how Luckin Coffee used this function to achieve an amazing result of more than 10,000 orders in one day, becoming a benchmark case in the industry.

The “gift giving” feature in WeChat stores, which is still being hotly discussed or tested, has already created the first benchmark case in the industry.

Data from Luckin Coffee Shop shows that they launched a New Year gift promotion on WeChat on December 30, 2024, and received more than 10,000 orders from users in one day. Even the long-tail data on the second day showed that the number of visitors exceeded half of the test day.

In the early morning of December 19, 2024, WeChat Store launched the "Gift" gray test. This highly social gameplay, coupled with the fact that it was in the early stages of a series of holiday peaks, including New Year's Day, Spring Festival, and Valentine's Day, attracted the attention of many brands and merchants.

The Luckin Coffee team told Jianshi that their WeChat store had just opened, and they hoped to attract traffic to the store through popular new features. On the other hand, they also hoped to test the entire operation chain of WeChat gifts from listing, user purchase, delivery, and after-sales service, understand user feedback, and prepare for the Spring Festival. Therefore, they scheduled the promotion on December 30. As far as Jianshi can see, this is the first case of large-scale testing of the "gift giving" gameplay in the industry.

In the "project disassembly" obtained by Jianshi, it can be seen that Luckin Coffee has prepared three price levels of products, namely 19.9 yuan, 39.9 yuan, and 179 yuan. In addition to preparing a private domain pool of millions of people for diffusion, social media accounts including WeChat official accounts, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and video accounts were also used for cold start. The latter also caused a lot of discussion on some social media platforms.

From the screenshots of the store's transactions, we can see that on December 30, the best performing product was the 19.9 yuan product, with more than 10,000 orders per day. The 39.9 yuan package also had more than 2,000 orders. The 179 yuan package received less than 100 orders (see the screenshot below).

This may be related to trial and error: In social networks, when faced with new features and new products, if you need to pay to experience them, you usually start with a price of 9.9 yuan or 19.9 yuan. Only after successful verification will the order frequency and the average purchase price gradually increase. The Luckin Coffee team told Jianshi that the ultra-low average purchase price makes it easier for users to try out new products.

Interestingly, “sending gifts” is closely related to the real gift-giving and gift-receiving habits of Chinese people offline. When analyzing the data, it was found that about 20% of the gifts were not received at the address filled in after they were sent, so they were automatically returned after 24 hours. The Luckin Coffee team speculated that this may be because some users who received 1-on-1 gifts were “embarrassed” to accept them. Just like when we receive gifts offline, we will refuse them because we feel embarrassed.

During the testing period, some users were unable to participate because the "send gift" function was still in grayscale testing and was not covered, which may have affected some orders.

The above data only records the “gift giving” on that day, and does not calculate the subsequent long-tail conversions and repeat purchases.

On the day of the "gift giving" campaign (December 30), the number of visitors to Luckin Coffee's WeChat store increased by 700%, and continued to increase by 400% on the second day (December 31). However, due to the short duration of the campaign, it is not possible to see the users' repurchase behavior, and further observation is needed.

The Luckin Coffee team told Jianshi that from the actual experience, the "send gift" function is very complete, whether it is given by users or designed by the team, the functional experience is very smooth. Therefore, the team is very much looking forward to its use during the Spring Festival.

However, "sending gifts" is usually considered to be a major function comparable to WeChat red envelopes, but compared with the function setting of WeChat red envelopes that can be sent to social groups, it still lacks some fun. Therefore, they also tactfully suggested that "sending gifts" can also be sent to the social group like sending WeChat red envelopes, so that group members can receive them easily.

Now, the Luckin Coffee team is also discussing activities during the Spring Festival, and we may continue to observe.