Today’s WeChat Essential Tip is a little more advanced. We are going to give you a step by step guide on how to set up your own personal shop and start selling on WeChat using Weidian (English name: YouShop). Yes, you too can be part of the Chinese mobile commerce revolution!

This article will cover the following:

Background info: Weidian basics

Download and Registration Process

Linking a bank card

Setting up your products

Promoting your products on WeChat

Background info: Weidian basics

You can think of Weidian as the mid-ground where Wechat meets Taobao. Weidian’s mobile commerce platform is based on social relationships with no centralized entry point. The industry tends to describe Weidian as a ‘decentralized’ business model. You can post your products information across a wide variety of social media platforms, not only WeChat. Weidian, backed by Tencent, has an ultra streamlined registration and administration processes which makes it simple for anyone to sell goods or services.

Things you need to set up your Weidian:

A Chinese person’s ID card number

The details of a Chinese bank account in that person’s name

Things you don’t need to set up your Weidian:

A Deposit (the process is entirely free)

A Business License

Some things to sell (you can act as an agent to sell other people’s things if you wish)

Registration Process

Step 1: Download and install the Weidian app

Search for 微店 (weidian) on the App store or any Chinese Android App Store

Alternatively download directly from the official wesite: http://www.weidian.com/

Opening the app and flicking through the intro pages will take you to the login / register page

We suggest you skip the normal registering process and just go straight for 微信登录 (login with WeChat). It will ask you to authorize the app to access your personal WeChat info. You will need to input the phone number that you wish to bond to the account. The app will send a message to that phone number with a code for you to input confirming the number is in fact yours.

Once you are all done, you can reach the home screen of the app. Where you can see the following options:

Swiping to the right reveals further options

The little red button at the bottom of the screen has links to lots of tutorials and videos to help you use the app. These will be very useful if your Chinese is good enough to follow.

Linking a bank card

Okay, so next step. Let’s link that bank card up so we can take payments. Let’s click on the pink ‘Income’ (收入) button at the bottom right, taking us to this page. Select (我的银行卡) ‘My Bank Card’

Now it’s time to get your Chinese friend’s ID card and bank card info, you will need to input it.

Once set up and linked you should see a screen like this when selecting (我的银行卡)’My Bank Card’ showing the details of the card linked. You can only link 1 card.

Setting up your products

Okay now onto the fun part: adding our products. Lets go to the green button in the top right ‘My Products’

You will be met with this screen

Setting up a new product is very easy. Add a picture, add a note, fill in your price, inventory amount and a model number (if appropriate). Click (完成) ‘complete’ in the top right when done.

Promoting your products on WeChat

Upon adding your product, you will be prompted with the following message to share. So you’re ready to go, let’s post our book on our moments first (朋友圈 the 2nd option)

After adding a comment, it will appear like this:

Similarly posting to a group or chat (微信 the 1st option) will appear like this:

Now let’s imagine your friend wants to buy the product. Clicking on the link brings up a page featuring the product with a nice big red buy now button at the bottom.

The payment process has several pages where you must confirm various things. The page below is an important option. You can choose to make a direct payment to the seller or take the recommended option of a secured payment, which means the payment will be held from the seller until you confirm that you have received the good.

And that’s it. Your first customer has bought your first product. Congratulations!

As a final side note, Weidian also has its desktop friendly web browser version that can be found here:

http://d.weidian.com/vshop/1/CPC/login.php

Alternatives to Weidian

Despite what you may be starting to think, this article is not an advert for Weidian, we promise. There are several alternatives to Weidian using a similar model of sales:

Youzan 有赞: http://youzan.com/

Paipai : http://wd.paipai.com/

V店 http://vd.cn/ (a rather unfortunate web address)

China Channel is in no way associated with Weidian.

This article was based on Weidian app for Android Version 5.4.0

Join us tomorrow for our next article in the WeChat Essential Tips series where we will be giving away more free info on WeChat. Follow us on WeChat by scanning the QR code to follow our official account.