WeChat Scan & Go Wins iF Gold Award, the First from China in Service Design Category

MUNICH, March 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- WeChat, one of the world's most popular mobile apps and social networks, brought home iF Gold Award for its smart retail innovation, Scan & Go. It is the first ever Chinese product to win gold in the iF Service Design category. Established in 1953, the German-based iF Design Award has always been known for its "Independent, Rigorous and Reliable" standards.

Scan & Go enables shoppers at retail stores to turn their mobile phone into a virtual checkout counter. When shopping, customers use their mobile phones to scan product barcodes, view product information, get discounts, complete self-checkout, and pay directly within the app via WeChat Pay. There is no queuing up at the cash register.

"This concept shows a customer-centric scan-and-go-solution for an optimized shopping and retail context. All parameters of the good user experience are met in this service design, including touchless access, efficiency or ease-of-use in scanning of market products and the final payment and checkout. This is user-friendly design at its best," says iF Gold Award in its Gold Statement to Scan & Go.

According to statistics, sales during peak hours in traditional supermarkets account for 60% of total turnover, and on average customers spends three to five minutes on queueing and payment during peak hours. With Scan & Go, customers no longer have to queue, and the payment time is shortened to one minute.

In order to realize queue-less purchasing, the WeChat team greatly optimized retailers' instore customer handling efficiency during peak hours, and enables overall management of the consumer traffic flow. By introducing dedicated lanes for Scan & Go, supermarkets have achieved over a five-fold increase in converting digital members within two months. 

In addition to improving retailers' checkout efficiency and providing customers with a better shopping experience, Scan & Go also integrates promotion and marketing modes through Mini Programs, to help increase sales. It helps retailers to link the online and offline aspects of their business, and has become the standard tool in China for merchants to realize digital transformation. Scan & Go is now widely used by retailers in China, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour.

"Scan & Go winning the iF Gold Award is an important affirmation of WeChat's smart retail innovation. In the future, we will continue to improve products and provide retail industry with more capabilities for the digital transformation," says WeChat Team.

The combined number of monthly active users of Weixin and WeChat exceeded 1.08 billion as of the third quarter of 2018. Following the footsteps of China outbound travelers, WeChat Pay is now available in 49 countries and regions outside of Chinese mainland, supporting cross-border payment transactions in 16 currencies. In 2019, WeChat Pay will increase investment in Europe to help local merchants digitalize their services to better meet the needs of Chinese travelers.

SOURCE WeChat