Tencent still needs to rely on third parties to support WeChat

At the Tencent Global Partner Conference held two days ago, the most popular topic was still WeChat. At this conference, Tencent announced that it would further open up WeChat, and it seems that WeChat is now drifting away from Zhang Xiaolong's pursuit. WeChat's inaction in the past two years has proved that Tencent cannot support itself alone, and it will eventually need more third parties to support WeChat.

Two years ago, WeChat was at its peak. It seemed that everything was possible for WeChat. With the crazy promotion of public opinion, WeChat was also very proud and really thought that anything could be achieved. After two years of personal exploration and facing the cruel reality, Tencent finally figured out a problem: the lower level people should do the physical work, the middle level people should do the intellectual work, and the upper level people should do the human work. WeChat should just focus on being a mobile Internet platform and let the dirty work of physical and intellectual work be done by third parties.

In fact, at the end of July, WeChat had released the application regulations for developer authorization, which indicated that WeChat would be fully open soon, and the official opening time was reserved for the Tencent Global Partner Conference. For this conference, Tencent invited many high-quality third-party companies to participate in Boao, the intention of this move was to ease the previous embarrassing situation, immediately establish a good cooperative relationship with third parties, and find strong support for the subsequent WeChat opening.

Prior to this, third parties had to rely on WeChat’s interface control in the delicate competition with WeChat officials, and they lived in fear. The official WeChat store made many third parties break out in a cold sweat. In addition, the official has provided many benchmark cooperation cases for merchants in different fields, but third parties do not have enough authority to intervene, and can only look at the huge potential market that the official cannot do.

In the competition with WeChat, third parties can only choose areas that WeChat has not yet entered. For example, some time ago, the third-party developer WeChat Business won the WeChat distribution mall development project of Joyoung Group, and in the card package cooperation, Joyoung was the first small home appliance company to officially cooperate with the "card package function" in WeChat version 6.0. In fact, most third parties can solve the card package development function, but WeChat had not yet completely opened up the card package permissions, so Joyoung could only default to joining the official.

At this conference, WeChat not only opened up the login authorization function, which makes it easier for third parties to participate in the development of more functions, but also opened up the card wallet function. This is a function that can directly access users and is very attractive to merchants. Since its debut in the beta version of WeChat 5.5 at the end of August, it has attracted the attention of many merchants. Zeng Ming revealed that WeChat card wallet now has 1,000 merchants entering every day.

The logic of the card wallet is similar to Apple Passbook. Zeng Ming compares WeChat's card wallet to a box that can easily store cards or coupons in the wallet into the phone. The card wallet is the main tool of WeChat O2O, providing merchants with a complete O2O solution for placement, verification, management, and business analysis. It also facilitates users to put electronic coupons, membership cards, air tickets, movie tickets, etc. into the card wallet for unified management and use.

In fact, although the card wallet is the main tool of WeChat O2O at this stage, the official only provides the saving function. The business operations behind the card wallet, such as issuance, verification and various management, are controlled by the merchants or enterprises themselves. As long as the enterprise or merchant is connected to the WeChat certified public account, they can apply to join the WeChat card wallet. This means that for third parties, the huge economic value hidden in the WeChat card wallet is another WeChat open gold mine after the micro site and micro mall.

After completely opening up functions such as authorized login, card wallet, and scanning, WeChat has basically opened up all interfaces to third parties, and third parties will not be constrained by interface restrictions. In other words, based on the WeChat public platform, merchants can easily meet their functional requirements for e-commerce, O2O, payment, CRM, etc. Third-party companies not only no longer have to compete with WeChat officials, but also have sufficient room for growth.

According to third-party WeChat developers who attended the meeting, the official purpose of completely opening up all interfaces is to allow third parties to explore the development direction of WeChat. But my personal understanding is that WeChat officials want to promote the innovation ability of third parties to improve the practicality of WeChat, and at the same time stimulate the passion of third parties to attract more merchants, because from the perspective of Tencent's human resources, it can handle millions of developers, but it cannot handle the needs of tens of millions of merchants. Third parties actively expand the market. Although the development money is earned by third parties, the accumulation of merchants is Tencent's greatest wealth.

In the past two years, the slow progress of WeChat O2O can only be blamed on itself for not thinking clearly and getting involved in the merchant development stage. Tencent is not capable of doing such dirty work. Micro-life and micro-shopping are doomed to fail. Without enough merchants, there will not be enough usage scenarios, and users will not buy into it. WeChat O2O needs to stimulate the enthusiasm of third parties to produce a "multiplication" expansion effect, rather than relying on a self-built team to do "addition" everywhere.

The result of 1*10*10*...*10 and 1+10+10 ... 10 is obvious. Times make heroes. The mature mobile Internet market is much faster than the PC Internet market of the past. Alibaba caught up with the good time and can develop slowly and steadily. Tencent only has one or two years to challenge Alibaba's business in the mobile Internet era, so the speed must be fast. If it misses this opportunity and Alibaba recovers, Tencent will have no chance.

WeChat O2O has at most one year of first-mover advantage. If this opportunity is missed, not only will Alibaba find its rhythm, but Baidu's direct number strategy will also be a threat. Facts have proved to Tencent that it still needs third-party "sailors" to support the WeChat ship.

PS: WeChat version 6.0 does not have a card package by default. You need to claim coupons before this feature will appear. However, I just followed several service accounts and tried to claim coupons for a long time but failed. Some merchants have even bypassed the card package and provided coupons through H5 pages. It can be seen how incomplete WeChat's official operation capabilities are.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.