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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
by 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 agoDoes 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 agoNo. 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 agoA 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 agoLike 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.