Mobile payment in china
In china, when I go out to shopping or hang out With friends, I usually just grab my iPhone. That’s all. Every shops and retailers support mobile payment from apartment store to street vendors or food delivery. And now, Chinese mobile payment systems are more than just a modern convenience. It has a considerable impact on China’s travel and tourism industry. One way a destination can demonstrate a strong “China Welcome” is by allowing visitors to purchase goods and services using popular Chinese payment systems — in particular WeChat Pay and Alipay.
The two payment systems are current two dominant mobile payments in china.
A relative latecomer to the mobile payments market when compared with Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent’s WeChat Pay launched in 2013,with a number of approved merchants, and has rapidly grown since. The service aims to be as convenient as possible, allowing users to pay both on and offline. WeChat Pay borrows Alipay’s model for offline purchasing by using system generated QR codes — it’s common to see codes for both platforms at points of sale.
On the contrary，Alipay is China’s most popular mobile payment system. The service launched in 2004 as the Chinese alternative to PayPal, over a decade before WeChat Pay. Alipay allows its users to make payments on China’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, by linking their bank card to the app. It shares much of the same functionality with WeChat, enabling users to make payments using QR codes, and both services offer no transactions fees except for large withdrawals.
Personally, I prefer WeChat becausea huge difference between the two mobile payment systems is that WeChat Pay’s integration into China’s most popular social media platform, WeChat, and every WeChat user has access to WeChat Pay as long as their account is linked with their bank.
So, in my opinion, the main reason WeChat Pay trumps Alipay is that people don’t want to leave the app they spend their life on, WeChat. They expect to do everything via WeChat — messaging, booking tickets, paying fees, doctor appointments, and, of course, pay for things.
Here, I have a really interesting question. Apple’s products are very popular, while apple pay have limited success in china. According to Bloomberg, a mere 1% of a Chinese bank’s 10 million online banking customers had the service activated.
I think one reason is the ease of use.To pay with Apple Pay, customers hold down their iPhone near a contactless reader and scan their fingerprint with Touch ID, which confirms the payment. Besides, the other important reason is cost. Apple Payrequires an expensive installation of a Near Field Communication (NFC) antenna — there is little incentive for Chinese shopfronts to install this when WeChat Pay and Alipay compatible QR codes can be cheaply displayed.
