Baidu Trials Micro Purchase Tool Weigou on Chinese Valentine's Day
China's search giant leverages its e-commerce site to get consumers to buy gifts for their lovers quickly and easily.
To show your love on Chinese Valentine’s Day, Baidu is encouraging Chinese consumers to buy gifts for their lovers through a promotional campaign using Weigou, its e-commerce platform also known as micro purchase.
Baidu Weigou is reported to have quietly rolled out early this year. The portal partners with other e-commerce sites such as Yihaodian, JD.com, and Dangdang, including brand owners and suppliers.
“As most of them are Baidu search marketing customers already, we use their Baidu ad accounts to give them APIs and link them to our partner open platform,” Kaiser Kuo, director, international communications at Baidu says.
He did not list specific brands but Weigou’s landing page features mostly handset manufacturers such as Apple, Huawei, Lenovo, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony.
For the Chinese Valentine’s promotional campaign on Tuesday, it appears that the e-commerce sites have worked directly with Baidu instead of with the brands.
A rundown on how it works below:
Baidu features a static image of legendary romantic characters, the cowherd and weaver maid, on its home page.
Once you click on the image it redirects to the Chinese Valentine’s Day-themed page that lets users choose whether they plan to buy a gift for their male (green button) or female (orange button) partners. As of 6 p.m., the counter revealed that close to 3.3 million users have bought a gift on Weigou.
For example, when a male user decides to buy a gift for his girlfriend, he would be prompted to a page that allows him to choose the characteristic of his lover and the estimated budget.
He can choose from a range of personalities that best describes his girlfriend from girl-next-door to shopaholic to office lady and select a budget from as low as under $100 RMB to above $2,000.
If the boyfriend has a shopaholic girlfriend and a gift budget between RMB$1,001 to $2,000, he might be served the results below.
He could follow the suggestion from the algorithm and buy a HTC handset for his girlfriend or choose a different category such as sunglasses or handbags. If he likes the result, he could also share it to his social networks on Sina Weibo, QQ, Renren, or Baidu.
If he decides to buy one of the luxury-branded purses, he could select the city to receive delivery on the top right-hand corner or reselect gift options again.
Once the user selects an item, he would be asked to fill in his handset and registration number to purchase the item.
According to Baidu, this Chinese Valentine’s campaign is available on the web and mobile.
While Baidu has leveraged the commemorative day to experiment its shopping tool, Google has created an interactive doodle in the form of a game that uses birds to form a bridge that unites the romantic figures in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
