![]() ![]() In HeyTea’s case, the miniprogram gave the company access to information about the popularity of tea flavors and customer churn. Such data, which connect users’ offline behavior with their online profiles, can then help drive product decisions. By scanning a QR code, customers beam details about their physical situation - I’m at a HeyTea and drinking this particular cheese tea - back to the miniprogram. But with miniprograms, some of the biggest beneficiaries are local businesses that depend on foot traffic. Small- and medium-size businesses in particular have struggled against ambitious tech behemoths like Amazon. Offline businesses looking to move online have long faced a list of challenges like payment processing and analytics. Because miniprograms run inside WeChat, businesses’ customers don’t have to sign up, log in or add their credit card numbers. It resembles the European Union in the way it has evolved into a market ecosystem: Miniprogram developers benefit from a common currency (WeChat’s mobile payment system), an identification system (WeChat’s login and password) and greatly lowered barriers to trade and movement (easy integration with any number of other services on WeChat). All of them are drawn in by the gravitational pull of WeChat’s enormous number of users and its standardized software infrastructure. They come from global conglomerates like McDonald’s and Tesla and from local businesses like restaurants, hair salons and gyms. In the two years since then, businesses have created more than a million of them, equal to half the number of iOS apps available in Apple’s App Store. In early 2017, it introduced miniprograms. WeChat’s first foray into this marketplace came in 2012, with the introduction of “official accounts,” which resemble Facebook Pages. It is a social network, a payments system, a communication medium and, perhaps most ambitious, the infrastructure for businesses like HeyTea. Today it has more than a billion monthly active users and - according to a 2018 report by WalktheChat, a WeChat marketing company - hosts roughly 34 percent of all Chinese data traffic. Developed by Tencent, a social media giant, WeChat got its start as a chat app before evolving into a superapp. One app in particular would come to dominate Chan’s life: WeChat. Chan describes the adoption of the platform as - in what has been the case for hundreds of thousands of other businesses in China - “the starting point of our digital transformation.” Simultaneously, it created technological opportunities for the company, like online marketing and the collection of data about its patrons. ![]() The resulting miniprogram, called HeyTea Go, is opened by scanning a QR code and lets customers place orders without having to stand in line. “At the time, we just thought that the miniprogram provided a pretty good user experience,” Chan says. Chan could have created a regular mobile app, but the integration with WeChat Pay, the platform’s mobile payment service, made billing easy, and most important, customers were already there. Such apps are part of WeChat and don’t need to be downloaded, allowing anyone to set up a digital storefront within WeChat. In early 2017, WeChat announced a new feature called miniprograms. To solve the problem, Chan turned to the same platform that made it too big to live with. Complaints were starting to flood in online. Long delivery times were spoiling the quality of its teas. Customers were hiring people to stand in line for them (a practice known as daigou, or ‘“substitute buying”). Yet as much as the shop had benefited from the viral marketing, Chan knew it was also unsustainable if HeyTea wanted to become anything more than a pop-culture gimmick. “I think that curiosity, the desire to wait in line because everyone else is doing it, it speaks to something fundamental in human nature,” says Peilin Chan, HeyTea’s chief technology officer. Stories on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media and messaging app, of customers waiting two, three, four hours for a cup of tea only served to stoke greater demand. The scene was far removed from the days 18 months earlier, when HeyTea, one of the hottest brands in China, was infamous for its long lines. “Scan the code to avoid lines,” a sign read. On the front facade, right by the door, an illustration of a hand holding a phone displayed a two-dimensional bar code, or QR code. On a recent weekend, one of the last truly warm days of early fall, the location was full of upmarket customers - families with strollers, Gen Z-ers in knockoff Supreme streetwear - enjoying the popular cheese tea. The HeyTea shop in the Chaoyang district of Beijing is an expression of svelte minimalism, its LED lettering and black tiles giving off a vaguely retro vibe. ![]()
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