Huawei is selling its smartphone through the WeChat app

Chinese manufacturer Huawei recently launched a new smartphone in China and to sell it the company looked towards an unconventional sales channel: a messaging application. WeChat is one of the most widely used messaging application in China and Huawei teamed up with it to sell the new Honor 6 smartphone. This partnership became possible after online retailer JD.com integrated a virtual store in WeChat earlier this year. Tencent’s WeChat is already widely used for customer service and marketing in China. Selling directly to customers is still a new idea but its starting to take off nonetheless. JD said that through its WeChat store some 550,000 customers either pre-ordered the Honor 6 or took part in a sale campaign prior to the launch of the smartphone.

When Huawei Technologies released its new smartphone in China this week, the company chose the Chinese messaging app WeChat as one of its main sales channels. While many businesses use Tencent’s WeChat for marketing and customer service, the idea of actually selling products through WeChat is only starting to take off, after a virtual store run by online retailer JD.com was integrated into WeChat in late May. JD, China’s second-largest e-commerce company after Alibaba Group, said this week that in its WeChat store, 550,000 customers either pre-ordered Huawei’s new Honor 6 smartphone or participated in its sales campaign before the handset became available on Tuesday. This shows that WeChat is already recognized by Chinese consumers as a shopping channel, JD said. In March, Tencent, the Internet giant that developed WeChat, announced a deal to buy a 15% stake in JD and the two firms became strategic partners. It is the first time for the JD-WeChat store to team up with a handset maker, according to JD. Last month, JD and Huawei launched a promotional event in which WeChat users tried to win a free Honor 6 phone by correctly guessing its price ahead of its release. The store has also been running ads for the Honor 6, which comes with a 5-inch screen, a 13-megapixel camera and a mobile processor made by Huawei’s own chip unit. It went on sale this week for 1,999 yuan ($322) in China.