the concept is that the primary feature that wechat provides is your identity with your wechat account. you connect to other people and you have verified their

the concept is that the primary feature that wechat provides is your identity with your wechat account. you connect to other people and you have verified their identity as well. from there it is most logical that you then want to use that identity to share work, make appointments, pay for things, etc. the miniapp that we used the most was a voting tool. you could see who in the group had voted for what and it was very useful to have it all integrated, as opposed to an external website where none of the voters were verified to be the same people from the group. sending money is also a no brainer once you can trust that the person you are sending money to is really the same one. and external payment system means that you would have to verify that the person you are sending money to is the same person you were talking to on wechat. that's just extra steps. if happens of course otherwise alipay would not exist, but part of that is because alibaba has other features (like the market) that people want to use, and they do not support wechat pay. i wuld suspect that if they had supported wechat pay, then alipay would not have been able to gain any significant market share at all.