8 ms·

WeChat is becoming a mobile payment giant in China

49 points by devy 11y ago

verst 11y ago
I used WeChat Pay when I was in Shanghai for 3 months last fall. Super convenient to have one place to buy concert tickets, order a taxi, pay your takeout order, top up your prepaid SIM card, or just send money to friends. It's extremely smooth. Virtually everybody has WeChat in China. Unlike here in the US (San Francisco) you never have to ask which payment app (if any) your friend uses. "Do you have Venmo, PayPal, SquareCash, Google Wallet, etc?" - asking this gets old. Do take note that each Chinese mobile carrier actually also sets up a digital wallet for you associated with your phone number. People can push money into your phone carrier wallet. The same wallet is automatically charged for your phone usage charges. With this mechanism, you can even easily pay folks who do not use WeChat Pay from WeChat Pay (!) - all you need to know is their phone number. To use WeChat Pay you need to link it to a Chinese debit card and getting one as a foreigner requires a Chinese bank account. Depending on your immigration visa (I had a short term student visa), that may be difficult to accomplish.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Does it require a Chinese ID number or will a passport number suffice? Almost all unionpay online services seem to require a Chinese ID number, locking foreigners out.
  - sdm 11y ago
    No. You just need a Chinese bank card. Though some services do require a Chinese ID number. But pay/send money in WeChat that's all that is needed. China Merchant Bank is the easiest to deal with: English online banking and their mobile app, while Chinese only, is pretty easy to use without knowing Chinese.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    A couple of things to note if you're using WeChat payments as a foreigner: - When they started, the process accepted passports only for certain banks (and I opened a CMB account for this purpose) but now it seems to work for other banks, too (at least CCB and ICBC) - The process of adding a card to your WeChat wallet is now really smooth, but adding multiple cards can be problematic for foreigners. WeChat won't let you add multiple cards unless they all belong to the same person. Same person = same name registered on your bank account. But the account name at one bank could be LASTFIRST, whilst at another bank it might be FIRSTLAST. In this case, you could only add one of those two bank cards.
  - Cerium 11y ago
    Like Venmo send money features are available without anything but a phone number, as long as people send you more money than you send (mantain positive ballance).
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  "you never have to ask which payment app (if any) your friend uses" Everyone uses WeChat for messaging, but some people still have Alipay as their only online wallet. Yesterday, I asked a friend to send me some money using WeChat, but he doesn't use WeChat wallet, so used Alipay instead.
dmoy 11y ago
It is really easy. In fact so easy, that it does mean you have to educate your elders about not sending money to someone who says they're your kid, without authentication. My wife went a step further and has a fake alias for her elders in wechat, so if someone steals her login they won't know who is a gullible adult.
ngokevin 11y ago
Many Chinese citizens' digital lives exist solely on Wechat. You can even hail a taxi from Wechat.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  There is also a separate app for that. You can hail a taxi from wechat, it's just not the only way.
- xufi 11y ago
  Don't forget Baidu
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bing_dai 11y ago
My comment about WeChat, and China's mobile payment ecosystem in general, when TechCrunch reported in January that "Apple Pay Is Coming To ATMs From Bank Of America And Wells Fargo" (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay-atm/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay-atm/). "The real news about Apple Pay is how painfully slow it's adoption (by merchants and consumers) is after so many years of release. In comparison, in China most people aged less than 70 and most merchants big (like Taobao) or small (someone selling a pile of oranges on the street) have been using mobile payment (Wechat Pay or Alipay) for many of their financial needs for years: paying money online / at a physical store, accepting payment, sending money to people, in-app purchase, borrowing money, buying financial products, paying bills, paying for parking ticket....there's no need to bring cash to stores or input the credit card info everytime someone buys things online. I highly recommend anyone wanting to see the future of North America's payment technology to have a trip to China. I believe there's lots of catch up to do here."
- muddyrivers 11y ago
  WeChat is an ecosystem that integrate so many things extremely well. First it is a chat app. Almost everyone with a smartphone is a wechat user, including my mother over 70 years old. She even figured out how to video-chat with me in Chinese New Year Eve. I have group chats with my college classmates, high school classmates, etc. It can be used to pay utilities, TV & internet services. By the way, the CCTV system in my remote hometown had the feature to pay all of these in TV using remote many years ago. It is a pain to navigate with a TV remote, though. With wechat, it becomes so easy. You can pay your cellular service with wechat. As in Europe, you pay the data amount what you consume. It will remind you before you run out of money in your account. It is integrated with Didi Dache, the Chinese Uber. Then you can pay the driver with wechat as well. You can use it to order train tickets, including the high speed trains. Order a movie ticket? no problem. Online shopping on one of the biggest online retailer? Sure. Look for where to eat? It works. And more and more ... You can transfer money to other friends, like splitting a bill, etc. It is so convenient that I feel my phone is much less useful when I am back in America. The only hurdle is that you must have an China bank account to transfer money into your wechat account.

49 points by devy 11y ago

verst 11y ago

I used WeChat Pay when I was in Shanghai for 3 months last fall. Super convenient to have one place to buy concert tickets, order a taxi, pay your takeout order, top up your prepaid SIM card, or just send money to friends. It's extremely smooth. Virtually everybody has WeChat in China. Unlike here in the US (San Francisco) you never have to ask which payment app (if any) your friend uses. "Do you have Venmo, PayPal, SquareCash, Google Wallet, etc?" - asking this gets old. Do take note that each Chinese mobile carrier actually also sets up a digital wallet for you associated with your phone number. People can push money into your phone carrier wallet. The same wallet is automatically charged for your phone usage charges. With this mechanism, you can even easily pay folks who do not use WeChat Pay from WeChat Pay (!) - all you need to know is their phone number. To use WeChat Pay you need to link it to a Chinese debit card and getting one as a foreigner requires a Chinese bank account. Depending on your immigration visa (I had a short term student visa), that may be difficult to accomplish.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Does it require a Chinese ID number or will a passport number suffice? Almost all unionpay online services seem to require a Chinese ID number, locking foreigners out.
- sdm 11y ago
  No. You just need a Chinese bank card. Though some services do require a Chinese ID number. But pay/send money in WeChat that's all that is needed. China Merchant Bank is the easiest to deal with: English online banking and their mobile app, while Chinese only, is pretty easy to use without knowing Chinese.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  A couple of things to note if you're using WeChat payments as a foreigner: - When they started, the process accepted passports only for certain banks (and I opened a CMB account for this purpose) but now it seems to work for other banks, too (at least CCB and ICBC) - The process of adding a card to your WeChat wallet is now really smooth, but adding multiple cards can be problematic for foreigners. WeChat won't let you add multiple cards unless they all belong to the same person. Same person = same name registered on your bank account. But the account name at one bank could be LASTFIRST, whilst at another bank it might be FIRSTLAST. In this case, you could only add one of those two bank cards.
- Cerium 11y ago
  Like Venmo send money features are available without anything but a phone number, as long as people send you more money than you send (mantain positive ballance).
rahimnathwani 11y ago
"you never have to ask which payment app (if any) your friend uses" Everyone uses WeChat for messaging, but some people still have Alipay as their only online wallet. Yesterday, I asked a friend to send me some money using WeChat, but he doesn't use WeChat wallet, so used Alipay instead.

dmoy 11y ago

It is really easy. In fact so easy, that it does mean you have to educate your elders about not sending money to someone who says they're your kid, without authentication. My wife went a step further and has a fake alias for her elders in wechat, so if someone steals her login they won't know who is a gullible adult.

ngokevin 11y ago

Many Chinese citizens' digital lives exist solely on Wechat. You can even hail a taxi from Wechat.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
There is also a separate app for that. You can hail a taxi from wechat, it's just not the only way.
xufi 11y ago
Don't forget Baidu

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bing_dai 11y ago

My comment about WeChat, and China's mobile payment ecosystem in general, when TechCrunch reported in January that "Apple Pay Is Coming To ATMs From Bank Of America And Wells Fargo" (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay-atm/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/apple-pay-atm/). "The real news about Apple Pay is how painfully slow it's adoption (by merchants and consumers) is after so many years of release. In comparison, in China most people aged less than 70 and most merchants big (like Taobao) or small (someone selling a pile of oranges on the street) have been using mobile payment (Wechat Pay or Alipay) for many of their financial needs for years: paying money online / at a physical store, accepting payment, sending money to people, in-app purchase, borrowing money, buying financial products, paying bills, paying for parking ticket....there's no need to bring cash to stores or input the credit card info everytime someone buys things online. I highly recommend anyone wanting to see the future of North America's payment technology to have a trip to China. I believe there's lots of catch up to do here."

muddyrivers 11y ago
WeChat is an ecosystem that integrate so many things extremely well. First it is a chat app. Almost everyone with a smartphone is a wechat user, including my mother over 70 years old. She even figured out how to video-chat with me in Chinese New Year Eve. I have group chats with my college classmates, high school classmates, etc. It can be used to pay utilities, TV & internet services. By the way, the CCTV system in my remote hometown had the feature to pay all of these in TV using remote many years ago. It is a pain to navigate with a TV remote, though. With wechat, it becomes so easy. You can pay your cellular service with wechat. As in Europe, you pay the data amount what you consume. It will remind you before you run out of money in your account. It is integrated with Didi Dache, the Chinese Uber. Then you can pay the driver with wechat as well. You can use it to order train tickets, including the high speed trains. Order a movie ticket? no problem. Online shopping on one of the biggest online retailer? Sure. Look for where to eat? It works. And more and more ... You can transfer money to other friends, like splitting a bill, etc. It is so convenient that I feel my phone is much less useful when I am back in America. The only hurdle is that you must have an China bank account to transfer money into your wechat account.