As Chinese social media and online shopping evolve rapidly, more and more mobile app developers are jumping into e-commerce, seeking a new source of revenue. In the latest example, Xiamen Meitu Technology Co., Ltd., a Chinese developer of popular photo-enhancing apps, announced this week that it will add e-commerce features in its app in 2017 with the aim of turning its apps into a major online shopping channel within five years.

Meitu starts with a big user base. The company says it has more than 456 million active users—consumers who use its apps at least once a month—who use its six apps to enhance their smartphone photos. To put that in context, Twitter reported it had 317 million monthly active users in September.

Meitu, which recently listed its shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, launched its flagship mobile app, Meitu Xiuxiu, in 2008. It allow smartphone users to easily improve their selfies, with features like eye brightening and making their cheeks thinner or fuller. The app quickly became popular among Chinese users of the Twitter-like Weibo social network and WeChat messaging app, especially among women. Meitu executives figure that positions it well to sell items women buy, such as cosmetics and apparel.

“We hope to make our users prettier in real life, not just in pictures,” Cai Wensheng, the co-founder and president of Meitu, told a news conference last week in Hong Kong. “Most of Meitu’s users are female, and that’s a demographic group with strong purchasing power. We estimate about 70% online shoppers in China are female and they generate 70% of the web sales in the apparel, beauty and luxury sectors.”

Meitu says it can recommend personalized beauty products to users of its app, as its facial-recognition technology allows it to accurately detect a user’s age and skin condition.

Another Meitu app, Meipai, allows users to create video clips and share them with friends via live-streaming. Meitu says there are more than 1,000 individuals with strong social media followings using this app, which makes it a potential channel for brands to promote online sales.

Two hundreds brands have agreed to utilize Meitu’s upcoming e-commerce features to sell products, Meitu says, though it declined to identify those brands.

Meitu also says it has started to discuss possible cooperation in logistics and other e-commerce operations with several leading e-commerce companies in China, which it also did not name.

More than 1.1 billion mobile devices have downloaded Meitu’s apps and its users generate about 6 billion pictures and 7.9 billion video clips in a month, the company says.

Meitu, meanwhile, is expanding distribution of its photo-enhancing apps beyond China, with the introduction of the BeautyPlus and AirBrush apps that target global users. The company says it now has more 400 million users outside of China, although it did not specify how many use Meitu apps each month.

For more information about the Chinese market, please click here for the Internet Retailer 2016 China 500.

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