Comment by bing_dai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bing_dai | Hacker News Reader

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/).

"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."

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.

So I'm resident in China and don't use WeChat, but my wife (Chinese) does however for all the things you listed. One of the annoying aspects seem to be its reliance on QR, but that is changing (UnionPay now supports RFC at places like Starbucks, not sure if this is related to WeChat or not). I've always had a problem with online payment because they always ask for my Chinese ID number (non-Chinese Uber with a UnionPay card works like this also, Uber is in China BTW, but they are supported by Alibaba, not Tencent, so their WeChat app isn't allowed to work). I'm not sure what the process is to get a China bank account linked to WeChat if you don't have one, but to be honest, I haven't tried for WeChat yet (my wife has offered to just put me on her card), whereas ApplePay in the states doesn't have a problem with foreigners.

On the other hand, much of the functionality of WeChat is app based, so I can and do use didi dache without WeChat (if I pay with cash, of course, and the non-taxi service is off limits to me).

I was impressed by Australia, where RFC seems to be ubiquitous, you just swipe and that's it. Hopefully China moves in the same direction.

Yeah, it takes a while to get used to scanning QR several times a day.

I installed many apps. I am very curious about their features and how well they worked. It was much better than I expected. It was easy to navigate the features and figure out how to use them. Considering the number of users, their traffic must be very high. They sustained the high load very well. Within my 3 weeks stay, I had only one instance that the service was slow or down. It was China Mobile. All the other services worked very well.

I opened an account in Agricultural Bank of China using USA passport. They did require a residence address in China in my case.

Seriously, just add a bank card to WeChat. Your life will be easier. If you're worried about security, just open a separate bank account (e.g. with CMB) and don't keep too much money in there.

Then you can use Didi for private cars, which are less likely than taxis to smell of smoke.

Regarding Uber in China: they accept Baidu Wallet, which works fine for foreigners with Chinese bank cards.

"much of the functionality of WeChat is app based, so I can and do use didi dache without WeChat"

Taxi hailing is the exception rather than the rule. Many other features (group buy / daily deals, cinema tickets, mobile topup, bill payment, ...) of WeChat require online payment.

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