Alipay announced strongly: Mini Program users exceed 500 million, WeChat responded: WeChat exceeds 600 million!

When it comes to mini programs, many people will think of WeChat mini programs. After all, the concept of "mini programs" was first mentioned by WeChat. WeChat also won the Business Innovation Award for this!

Since WeChat launched mini-programs, Alipay, Baidu, Toutiao and other players have entered the market. However, judging from the current data, Alipay mini-programs seem to pose the greatest threat to WeChat mini-programs.

According to the data recently released by Alipay, the total number of users of Alipay Mini Programs exceeded 500 million, with daily active users reaching 170 million, and the peak during the Spring Festival even reached 280 million.

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On January 9, 2019, in the WeChat Open Class main forum "Peers·Mini Programs", WeChat Open Class lecturer Du Jiahui released the WeChat Mini Program data for 2018. The average daily usage frequency increased by 54% compared with last year, and the total number of Mini Program users has exceeded 600 million. The number of daily active users of Mini Programs has reached 210 million. It has served more than 100 billion users, with an annual transaction growth of more than 600%, creating a commercial value of more than 500 billion.

But judging from the data comparison, Alipay is still far behind WeChat Mini Programs.

Why did Alipay create mini-programs?

Everyone knows that the cost of online marketing is getting higher and higher. Even if paid promotion is adopted now, the effect may not be as good as it was in the past!

The reason why Alipay wants to develop mini programs is for one purpose only, which is to help merchants attract traffic and keep more users in their own ecosystem.

For example: Why did Alipay hold a "Wufu" activity during the Chinese New Year? To put it bluntly, Alipay was panicking, because if Alipay didn't hold such an activity, how many people would use Alipay during the short one-week Chinese New Year? To put it bluntly, everyone spent their time on WeChat!

Guan Zhong, general manager of the Alipay Mini Program business unit, said that the first thing they did this year was to gradually open up the numerous APP ports with hundreds of millions of traffic in the entire Alibaba system, allowing merchants and developers to develop once and operate on multiple terminals. In the future, the Alipay Mini Program will be able to synchronize with Amap, Koubei, Ele.me, etc.

Why is Alipay no match for WeChat?

What is the advantage of WeChat? It has 1 billion users, while Alipay's biggest advantage is its merchants. It's a simple reason. Why did WeChat Pay become popular overnight? It's all because of the effect of WeChat red envelopes.

Nowadays, many people like to use WeChat Pay and don’t like to open Alipay. Some even say that it is difficult to download the Alipay app. I am not making this up. You can find data for comparison. Even Jack Ma said that WeChat red envelopes attacked Pearl Harbor. It was from that time that WeChat snatched market share from Alipay!

WeChat’s mini-programs are mostly real mini-programs, and users will find the icon to open them independently when needed. After all, WeChat is just for fun for many people. However, the number of users of Alipay is mainly because Alipay has made some commonly used functions into mini-programs.

Since the launch of WeChat Mini Programs, Zhang Xiaolong has been emphasizing its convenient attribute. Now, the emergence of various convenient mini programs also better serves users' usage habits.

The emergence of mini programs can be said to be the beginning of the transformation of offline enterprises. Mini programs have completed a closed loop from product display, ordering to payment. Combined with the official account's graphic shopping guides and user sedimentation, merchants can easily accumulate their own user data.

***, I want to say one more thing. Now many Alibaba sellers are guiding buyers to place orders on WeChat. What does this mean? Think about it yourself!