[Photo by Shinsegae DF Inc.]

Shinsegae DF Inc., duty-free store operating unit of South Korea’s retail conglomerate Shinsegae Group, said Thursday it will offer a membership service via a Mini Program of China’s largest mobile messenger WeChat to reach deeper to Chinese consumers.

WeChat Mini Programs, launched in 2017, are sub-applications within the messenger platform, enabling users to use an app (program) without downloading, installing, registering, or logging in the app. They do not need data to download and take up no memory on phone, and users can just ‘use it and go’ with QR codes.

With the benefits of speed and ease of use, monthly users of WeChat Mini Programs reached over 600 million as of mid-2018, with an average 230 million users active every day. The number of mini programs also jumped to 2.3 million, larger than that of applications offered in the Apple App Store.

Shinsegae DF expects the new mini program would bring more Chinese customers to its duty-free stores by offering more shopping benefits and convenience to individual travelers to Korea.

[Photo by Shinsegae DF Inc.]

Shinsegae DF built a platform for its membership registration service on WeChat in 2017 and has attracted a membership of 150,000 in just a year and a half. In 2018, it opened a separate website only for the WeChat membership holders to provide simple registration process with various promotional benefits to make shopping easier for Chinese customers.

Shinsegae DF, a latecomer in the travel retail market, ranked ninth in the world’s top 25 travel retailer rankings measured by sales turnover for last year, according to the Moodie Davitt Report. It moved up four notches from a year ago, with revenue of 2.38 billion euros ($2.66 billion) for full 2018. Switzerland’s Dufry kept its lead for fourth consecutive years with revenue of 7.69 billion euros, followed by Korean names Lotte Duty Free with 6.093 billion euros and The Shilla Duty Free with 5.48 billion euros.

By Lee Han-na and Lee Ha-yeon

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]