Weixin—or WeChat as it’s called outside of China—is one of the most widely used mobile messaging apps in the world, with 438 million monthly active users, according to Tencent, the Chinese Internet giant that developed it and other popular online messaging and gaming services. And e-commerce is becoming a bigger part of the Weixin service. In May, Tencent began allowing Chinese e-retailer JD.com and others to sell directly to consumers through Weixin. Among the foreign companies using the service isItalian apparel e-retailer Yoox Group S.p.A. And Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd. reported this week on how it is using the …

Hillshire Brands sees the promise of Apple’s iBeacon, software that’s been embedded in iOS 7 for a year. With iBeacon, Hillshire can track a shopper wheeling through a grocery store and send his iPhone a coupon or an ad for sausages just as he approaches the right cooler. Hillshire says consumers in 10 U.S. test cities who received iBeacon messages via apps such as recipe service Epicurious have been 20 times likelier to buy its American Craft sausages. Last year, iBeacon promised Apple a new wave of consumer data and looked like a boon to retailers and advertisers trying to reverse a …

Toyota is using a new mobile advertising unit to serve real-time offers to customers who are in a Toyota dealer’s region and in the market for a car. Co-created with Opera Mediaworks and Saatchi & Saatchi LA, the ad unit leverages Opera Mediaworks audience-management platform to determine that a user is an in-market auto shopper and GPS location data to deliver the appropriate offer, showing what interest rate a buyer in that location could pay to finance a purchase.