WeChat has long been known as China's first super app, allowing users to not only message friends and families, but also to read news, make payments, book train tickets, hail a taxi — and most recently, watch Douyin/TikTok-like short videos with its new Channels (视频号) feature. It has 1.2 billion monthly active users, most of them in China.

But it seems like WeChat's ambition is nowhere near the end, as the Tencent, the social media giant behind it, has recently entered e-commerce, a domain it has previously largely been unexposed to since the app launched in 2011.

WeChat began a limited beta test of a new mini-program called WeChat Mini Store (微信小商店) on Tuesday, July 14, offering e-commerce hosting service to sellers for free at the time, allowing them to quickly post listings and create a virtual storefront within WeChat on their phone, no web development skills required. 

The e-commerce SaaS-based service can also help sellers manage orders and logistics, settle transactions, provide customer services, start marketing campaigns, etc. Sellers can even live stream themselves directly from the new mini-program. WeChat Mini Store is currently in a beta test, allowing a limited number of pre-selected sellers to onboard, with more availability to be opened up in future. 

The technology behind the new service is not new, as WeChat's first party online shop for its merchandise, known as WeStore, has been hosted with it for many years.

As China's three long-time internet giants each focusing on their own expertise — social network for Tencent, e-commerce for Alibaba, and search for Baidu — they rarely enter the others' domains on their own so as not to compete directly, but often invest in other companies that do challenge rivals' market leadership.

For Tencent, it has never been able to mount a meaningful challenge against Alibaba in e-commerce. However, it has long maintained significant stakes in JD.com, and Pinduoduo.

Now Tencent strikes again, putting crosshairs on two incumbents at the same time.

Back in April, Tencent secretly launched another e-commerce mini-program called Xiao'e Pinpin (小鹅拼拼), a blatant copycat of Pinduoduo, the startup that successfully upset JD.com in sales volume, threatening the market leadership of Alibaba.

The platform lacks a basic search feature as of right now, but other than that, from user interface to the the heavily social-based group buy business model, from merchandise selection to pricing — everything about Xiao'e Pinpin reminds consumers of Pinduoduo. And that makes the situation dangerous for the startup, whose customer base is built on cheap prices, rather than platform loyalty. 

Tencent currently owns 16.5% stakes and 3.5% voting rights in Pinduoduo. Launching Xiao'e Pinpin is widely regarded by industry insiders as a preemptive move in case Pinduoduo grows out of its ecosystem, or its control.

While launching two separate forays into online shopping, Shenzhen-based Tencent is also taking advantage of its leadership in social network to fuel the social-e-commerce.

During the pandemic, WeChat enabled short videos on Channels to link WeChat Official Account articles, which already had the ability to link product listings. 

These videos can also be reposted onto user's Moments, the immensely popular news feed feature inside WeChat. Allen Zhang, founder of WeChat, had previously said that Channels already has more than 200 million users. By connecting individual features, WeChat essentially turned on e-commerce integration within the entire app ecosystem. 

It's still early to say whether or not WeChat Mini Store and Xiao'e Pinpin repeat the same misfortune of Tencent's two prior e-commerce ventures, Paipai and Yixun, which are still alive but never gained meaningful traction and had pivoted to target smaller audiences long ago. 

One thing that's certain, though, is that Tencent just mounted challenges against Alibaba and Pinduoduo at the same time, with the latter being its long time ally while also being powerful enough to become its own tech empire, which is never a good outlook for the challenger.