Tencent Opens WeChat Further to Rivals as App Walls Come Down

(Bloomberg) — Tencent Holdings Ltd. will soon allow WeChat groups to display links to external shopping sites such as Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, taking another step toward dismantling longstanding barriers erected across China’s most popular social media service.

Tencent will soon begin testing a function to allow group-chat participants to share links to third-party e-commerce platforms, the company said Monday in an official blog post. Directed by regulators, the company will eventually allow WeChat’s users more options for sharing content, though it didn’t elaborate. And it promised to let them tweak settings and take other steps to manage external sharing in future.