WalkTheChat

How to sell on WeChat with Youzan? The ultimate guide

Thomas Graziani

In this article we’ll learn how to sell via Youzan. We are picking Youzan as the largest WeChat shop platform in China. Many large WeChat accounts (such as Luoji Siwei) use Youzan as their main e-commerce channel.

Youzan recorded a Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) of 33 billion RMB in 2018. Click here to learn more about Youzan’s financial status and company culture.

So let’s get started.

What do you need to get started on Youzan?

In order to get started on Youzan you’ll need:

Also note that Youzan is not free, it costs 4,800 RMB (about $750 USD) per year for its cheapest plan.

How to sign up for Youzan

Simply head over to Youzan home page (https://youzan.com) and click on the “注册” (Signup) button.


You then simply have to fill in your phone number, the verification code which will be sent to you via SMS, your name (you will be able to change it later) and a password, then click “确认注册” (Confirm Sign Up) in order to confirm subscription.

Once your account is created, click the blue “创建新店铺” link on the right hand side in order to create your store.

Fill in the information (no need for a company name if you do not have a registered company in China) and click “创建店铺” (Create store) to finish creating your store.

On the next page, you will be asked to select a template. You can scan the QR code to see a preview of each template. In our case we’ll select the “通用模板” (General purpose template)

Click “确认” (Confirm). That’s it, your store is created!

Youzan will ask you whether or not you want to link your WeChat Official Account to your store. We’ll do that later, so for now you can click “稍后再说，进入店铺后台” (Later, enter store back-end) to finish the process

How to verify your Youzan store

Let’s get right through the boring administrative part of setting up your store so we can then focus on selling.

We’ll need to verify your store in order to be able to collect payments from customers. Just click on the “末认证” (Not verified) and “立刻认证” (Verify now) label on the main store page.

You will then be taken to a page where you can select between individual / company / organization verification. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll select “个人” (Individual) registration and fill the required fields.

You will then be shown a payment QR code. This QR code must be scanned by an individual with the same name that you filled in the previous screen. The person will then have to pay a 0.01 RMB verification fee.

Youzan will cross-check the name you submitted with the name that was used for payment. If they match, the verification will be successful.

Purchasing a Youzan subscription

In order to keep using Youzan on the long-run (past your 1-week trial period) you’ll need to upgrade your store.

To do so, press the “立即订购” (Buy now) button at the top of the screen.

On the next page, you will be offered the choice between a 1-year plan (4,800 RMB) and a 2-years plan (8,800 RMB). The savings from the 2-years plan aren’t very significant, so I would recommend you go for the 4,800 RMB offer. Press “立即订购” (Buy now) again.

The next screen will ask you to review the billing information, then press “同意协议并付款” (Accept terms and pay).

On the next screen, select “在线支付” to pay online. You’ll be taken to a page with a QR code that can be scanned with either WeChat or Alipay in order to complete payment (obviously you’ll need either a personal WeChat payment or an Alipay account for that)

Upon payment, your account will be fully activated. This means that you will now be able to collect money from your orders by going to the 资产 (Assets) / 提现 (Withdraw) section of your account.

That’s it! We now set up the basics of your Youzan store. It’s now time to take it to the next step and set up the products and layout for your shop.

Youzan Products Section

Youzan 商品 (Products) section contains 5 main menus:

Let’s now dive in and add a first product category

Adding your first product category

Let’s now add a first product category by going into the “商品” (Products) / “商品分组” (Product groups) / 新建商品分组 (Create new product group)

On the product category page you can enter and select:

Once you’re done picking the options you like most, press 预览效果 (Preview) and 保存 (Save) to save the category.

Let’s now add our first product.

Adding your first products

Now that your first category is created, let’s start adding products to it. Head over to the “商品” (Product) / “商品管理” (Product management) / “发布商品” (Publish product) panel.

The first panel asks you to choose a product type among 女人 (Women), 男人 (Men), 食品 (Food), 美妆 (Cosmetics), 亲子 (Childcare), 居家 (Furniture), 数码家电 (Electronics), 礼品鲜花 (Gifts & flowers), 餐饮外卖 (Food delivery), 丽人健身 (Workout), 休闲娱乐 (Entertainment),  酒店客栈 (Hospitality),  婚庆摄影 (Wedding photography),  汽车养护 (Car maintenance),  家政服务 (Home services), 门票卡券 (Tickets), 家装建材 (Construction material), 钟表眼镜 (Watches and glasses), 宠物 (Pets), 文化收藏 (Culture), 日用百货 (White goods), 教育培训 (Education & trainings), 媒体服务 (Media services), 充值缴费 (Top-up services), 其他 (Other).

In the next page, you can select:

Once you’re done with this section, press “下一步” (Next)

You’ll be taken to a screen where you can enter a short introduction for the product (商品介绍) and a longer product description.

It is also possible to drag-and-drop more complex elements through the drag-and-drop menu on the left-hand side of the screen:

You can use these elements to design the perfect product description.

Deleting products

We’ll also clean up demo products from the store. In order to do so, we have to first take them “off the shelves” by selecting them and clicking the “下架” button.

You can then head over to the “仓库中” (Storehouse) section, select and delete the products (删除).

Setting up shipping templates

In the previous section, we set up an uniform shipping fee for all cities. Let’s see how to customize it based on the destination.

Head over to the 设置 (Settings) / 订单设置 (Order settings) / 快递发货 (Send parcel) / 新建运费模版 (Setup new shipping template)

You can then enter a template name (模版名称), pick a way to calculate the shipping fee (depending on number of items “按件数” or weight “按重量”).

Press “指定可配送区域和运费” to add a new zone. Select the cities included in the zone. Then select the default number of items (首件), the shipping fee for this number of items (运费), then the additional fee (续费) when adding a certain number of new items (续件).

Let’s take a concrete example. In the example above I defined 2 shipping zones:

It means, if I get a product delivered to Beijing:

You can apply these tarifs to each individual items, so you can get a very fine-grain of control over the shipping costs for your products.

In order to apply your shipping rate, just go to the product editing screen and select “运费设置” (Shipping settings), “运费模板” (Shipping template) and select the template you just created.

That’s it for this first introduction on how to create products.

Let’s now set up a home page for our shop.

Picking a color scheme for your store

Let’s start by going to the 店铺 (Store) / 全店风格 (Whole shop design) section. This section is very intuitive, you just have to pick a color scheme, and click 保存 (Save):

Once you’re done, let’s move on to setting up an home page for your store.

Setting up your Youzan Home Page

Go to the “店铺” (Store), “微页面” (Pages), “新建微页面” (Create new page) section of the store.

You’ll be invited to select among several templates. You can pick whichever you like, but in this specific case we’ll select the “自定义模版” (Custom template) template and built up our home page from scratch.

You can use the bottom menu in order to add new elements to the template. It is similar to the menu we described in the previous lesson about product description.

Here’s the list of elements again for your reference:

Adding new elements

We discussed already in lesson #1 about Chinese design principles what are the main principles when designing a home page from China.

Search bar

Let’s start by adding a search bar (“商品搜索”) at the top of the home page, which is a fixture of Chinese e-commerce home pages.

Banner

Next step is to add some banner elements, which are very prevalent in Chinese mobile home pages.

Here are a few banners we prepared for you and you can edit for your specific case (Photoshop files)
http://walkthechat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/WeChat_Shop_Banners_20170129.zip

Go to the “图片广告” (Image ads) section and click “添加一个广告” (Add a new ad) to add a new slide. Select a picture and press “确认” (Confirm).

In order to link the slide to a product or category, go to “设置链接到的页面地址” and select “商品及分类”. Use the 已上架商品 (Already published products) section to link to products, and the “商品分组” (Product categories) section to link to categories.

You can also link the banner to other elements such as Promotional events, but we’ll look more into that in upcoming sections.

Image menu

It is usual for the top-level menu to be a series of icons linking to main categories or sectionf of the websites.

In this case, I created 3 food categories (Fruits/水果 – Fast food/快餐 – Sweets/甜品) and a Profile/我 page and used them to create a top-level menu using the 图片导航 (Image navigation) section. Icons come from kameleon flat icons.

Use the “设置链接到的页面地址” (Set up link to page) section, clicking 商品与分类

And then link to categories in the 商品分组 (Product categories) tab, like you did for the banner previously.

For the profile page, use the “会员主页” (Member page) link to create a link to the profile page.

Pre-products banner

Let’s add another banner, similar to the first one but narrower. We’ll use the “图片广告” (Image ads) again and link it to another category.

Category title

We can create a category title by simply adding a picture with no link (once again with“图片广告” /Image ads)

Products category

We can then add products by category via the 商品列表 (Products list) feature:

The products category section enables a large amount of customization

In this case, I added two categories, using Youzan default categories (最热商品 / hottest products and 最新商品 / latest products), picking the 小图 (2 products per row) type of display and 促销 (sales promotion) type of cart buttons.

The result is the following:

We’re off to a good start, but we can keep improving!

Designing the bottom menu

There is one part of the home page we didn’t touch yet: the menu at the very bottom. Let’s now take care of that.

You can enter the menu management panel in the 店铺 (Store), 店铺导航 (Store navigation)

You can use this panel to manage the menu:

Designing the profile page

We will now finish by designing the profile page. This is the page that we linked to from the home page, and that users can use to manage orders, coupons and points.

You can find the profile page management interface in the 店铺 (Store) / 会员主页 (Member page)

You can customize:

Let’s deep-dive into advanced functions of Youzan such as coupons, flash sales and group buying, that can increase your conversion rates and sales.

Creating coupons on Youzan

Let’s start with creating coupons for our users.

Head over to the 营销 (Marketing) / 营销中心 (Marketing Center) / 优惠券 (Coupons) section of the back-end

Click on the 新建优惠券 (Create a new coupon) button to generate a new coupon.

You can then create a coupon specifying:

How to promote Youzan coupons

1. QR code and links

Once your coupon is created, you can click on the “推广” button to access it’s QR code (优惠券二维码) and a link to the coupon (优惠券链接)

You can add this links to your account menu to push your coupons to users.

2. Store home page

The “优惠券” (Coupons) section of the home page can be used to display your coupons directly on your home page. Use the 添加优惠券 (Add coupon) button to select the coupons you want to display

3. After a purchase

You can offer a discount automatically after a purchase. In order to do so you must create a “Payment reward” (支付有礼). Head over to 营销 (Marketing) / 营销中心 (Marketing center) / 支付有礼 (Payment reward).

Click the “新增活动” to create a new payment reward

You can then fill the payment reward information accordingly:

The coupon will be displayed as a clickable event just after payment

4. As a gift after a game

You can use Youzan to generate games and offer discounts are rewards. However these games are already considered “old school” and aren’t as popular as they were a couple years ago, so we won’t spend too much time on them.

If you want to explore, you can find them in the 营销 (Marketing) / 营销中心 (Marketing) / 互动营销 (Interactive marketing).

There are 8 types of games: 刮刮卡 (scratch cards), 疯狂猜 (Crazy guess, a Q&A game),
生肖翻翻看 (Flip and see, enabling users to pick cards and win prizes), 幸运大抽奖 (Fortune wheel), 摇一摇 (Shake to win, using the “shake” function of WeChat), 水果机 (Fruit machine, a board game where users can win prizes), 分场次即时抽奖 (Recurring events where users can win prizes instantly), 幸运砸蛋 (Lucky egg, user breaks an egg which can contain a prize)

Creating group-buying deals

A powerful feature of Youzan is to enable group-buying deals. This means users can get a discount if several of their friends purchase the same item. Group-buying deals can be created in the 营销 (Marketing) / 营销中心 (Marketing center) / 多人拼团 (Group buying) section of the Youzan back-end.

Click the green “新建拼团活动” (Create a group-buying deal).

You will then be presented with the creation page to create a new group-buy. You can enter:

The group deal will automatically be displayed on product pages:

Creating flash sales

We’ll end by creating a “Flash sale”. Flash sales are short-term discounts which enable to drive sales by creating a feeling of urgency.

Head over to the 营销 (Marketing) / 营销中心 (Marketing center) / 限时折扣 (Flash sales) section and press 新建限时折扣 (Create a new flash sales) to create a new deal.

Configure the flash sales by entering:

Click the blue “参加折扣” label to include products in the flash sale

Once you selected the products, click on “第二步：设置折扣” (Second step: set up the flash sale).

For each product, enter the “减价” (Discount value) which translates the amount discounted for each product in RMB. The system will calculate the discount % and the final value. Once you’re done, click the blue “保存” button to save the flash sale.

Let’s now add the Flash sale to our home page. First head back to the home page management section 店铺 (Store) / 微页面 (Youzan page). We can now use the 营销活动 (Marketing event) feature. Select “添加活动” (Add event) and “限时折扣” (Flash sale)

Click 选择 (Choose) to select a specific flash sales.

Click the (+) sign to add products:

Click the 选择 (Choice) button to pick products to display

The flash sales will be displayed on your homepage with a countdown to the end of the flash sale.

That’s it for this class! Good luck selling on Youzan!