WECHAT PAY || China's $12 Trillion Mobile Payments Industry
If you haven't heard of WeChat, you may have been living under a rock for the past year. If you have yet to hear of WeChat Pay and you are a retail brand or online eCommerce brand, you better get on it fast. Here's why:
The number of transactions made via non-banking mobile apps grew from $3.8 billion to over $97 billion from 2013 to 2016. There's a whopping 2400% increase in just 3 years.
The first 10 months of 2017 already saw $12.8 trillion in mobile payments transactions, a 38% increase over the entire 2016.
According to a report by Tencent, RDCY, Ipsos and cooperative partners, Weixin and WeChat's combined monthly active userbase of 938 million users (Q1 2017), generated a daily payment transaction volume on Tencent's active payment accounts exceeding $600 million.
Because of the prevalence of mobile payments, 40% of Chinese people carry less than 100RMB in cash. Some don't even need to bring their wallet because every day transactions can be made effortlessly using WeChat Pay.
What does this mean for overseas retailers? This means tourists visiting from China are very likely to expect they can pay for their purchases using WeChat Pay or some other form of mobile payment. With WeChat Pay, they simply pull up their WeChat Wallet and scan a QR code to pay for their purchase. The integration of WeChat Pay with the everyday lives of the Chinese consumer is moving forward by leaps and bounds.
In 2017, Tencent released several programs to ease adoption of WeChat Pay for overseas retailers, meaning whether you are in Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, New York, LA or San Francisco, you can now set up a Point-of-Sale terminal or a wireless WeChat Pay terminal that allows you to accept WeChat Pay payments.
The setup consists of two components, submitting a merchant application to WeChat Pay and obtaining payment terminals for your store(s). If you have would like more information on how to get set up on WeChat Pay - contact us today to get started!
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