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Previously, in the autumn of 2021, marked by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology holding an ‘Administrative Guidance Meeting on Blocking Website Links’, the era when major Internet companies divided their spheres of influence officially came to an end, and China’s Internet finally returned to interconnection. However, getting large companies with conflicting interests to let go of their grievances is not something that can be done overnight. Over the past four years, the process of interconnection has only been bumpy.
Entering the autumn of 2025, interconnection may take a turn. Recently, it was reported that Alibaba and Tencent are negotiating ‘cooperation terms’. Taobao may open a mini-program on WeChat to complete the transaction closure directly. In return, Taobao will allow WeChat Pay to be used without a password.
Why is the Cooperation Between Taobao and WeChat Key to Domestic Internet Interconnection?
This is because the two companies once faced off against each other. As early as 2013, Taobao suddenly prohibited sellers from using WeChat QR codes in their stores and changed all links in WeChat to redirect to the mobile Taobao download page. Taobao’s reason for this was that WeChat had security risks and was rife with phishing links, stating, ‘As long as WeChat is not safe, we will not open up. We only open up to safety.’
WeChat then retaliated by stopping redirecting relevant links to Taobao and prompting users that the URL ‘has been blocked by Taobao’. Since then, blocking website links and rejecting jump requests from third-party apps have become common solutions for large companies, turning China’s Internet into isolated islands.
To solve the problem of WeChat users sharing Taobao product links, Alibaba also developed ‘Taobao口令’ as a stopgap measure. Before the interconnection policy was announced, Alibaba also tried to launch a WeChat mini-program called ‘Jianzhile’ for the Taobao Value Edition, focusing on the ‘1 Yuan Welfare Purchase’ section with only WeChat Pay as the payment option. However, this operation did not escape WeChat’s scrutiny, and the mini-program was soon shut down by WeChat on the grounds that ‘the selected category does not match the mini-program’s operation content’.
It was not until the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held the ‘Administrative Guidance Meeting on Blocking Website Links’ and the interconnection policy was implemented that Taobao reappeared on WeChat in a legitimate way after 8 years, no longer needing to use Taobao口令 to complete jumps.
However, as WeChat began to focus on video account e-commerce, the interconnection process between Taobao and WeChat quietly faced waves. On the eve of the 2023 ‘618’ shopping festival, Alibaba quietly launched a WeChat mini-program called ‘Tmall Youpin’, which was the first retail e-commerce mini-program of the Taobao system named after ‘Tmall’ to appear on WeChat. However, just one month later, ‘Tmall Youpin’ was suspended by WeChat for ‘inducing sharing’.
Why Has the Interconnection Process Between Taobao and WeChat Suddenly Advanced in the Autumn of 2025?
The reason is simple: both parties once again have a basis for cooperation. Taobao, as an e-commerce platform, has an endless demand for traffic. However, as content platforms with traffic have begun to commercialize e-commerce one after another, the previously abundant traffic has disappeared, so Taobao has naturally fallen into an unprecedented traffic anxiety.
With changes in the Internet market environment, the once seemingly inexhaustible traffic has entered a ‘dry season’, and the cost of traffic procurement has become increasingly expensive. For several years now, the key indicator ‘annual active consumers from China’ in Alibaba’s financial reports has been hovering at the same level for many years.
To address this, Taobao first turned to contentization, hoping to build its own traffic pool. When the contentization strategy did not progress smoothly, it encountered the once-in-a-lifetime second ‘takeaway war’, and Taobao Flash Purchase really brought new growth to Taobao e-commerce. However, the traffic from Taobao Flash Purchase requires real money subsidies, so it is not a long-term solution.
Extending its reach into WeChat, a national social application, has always been Taobao’s long-cherished wish. But for a long time in the past, WeChat has been cautious about commercialization, and past grievances have also led Tencent to be vigilant about Alibaba’s penetration into its core business. Coupled with the fact that since 2023, Tencent has regarded video account e-commerce as a new growth source, and the e-commerce business has been elevated to a first-level strategy, the latter naturally does not want Taobao to compete with video account e-commerce within the WeChat ecosystem.
The turning point came when video account e-commerce remained lukewarm. From last year’s 618 and Double 11 to this year’s 618, the performance of video account e-commerce can only be described as ‘silent’. In other words, even now, Tencent’s attitude towards video account e-commerce is actually contradictory. When WeChat launched the ‘gift-giving’ function, Ma Huateng said ‘don’t over-praise it’, and when the WeChat e-commerce product department was established, Liu Chiping also said ‘don’t overinterpret it’.
It is not difficult to find that Tencent has not yet unified its thinking on how to do video account e-commerce and how to convert social traffic into transaction traffic. Therefore, when Tencent is undecided about video account e-commerce, it is understandable to return to the old business of being a traffic ‘water seller’.
