Comment by clubdorothe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clubdorothe | Hacker News Reader

I went back to China for a month in December 2019. It's crazy how Wechat payment is now used everywhere.

Any shops in China (I believe 99% of them): in wechat, you have "wallet" that generates QR code. Go to any shop, at the counter, show the QR code generated, they have the machine (or wechat app) to scan it. done. Crazy efficient. Most of the people there don't bring wallets anymore.

Most of the restaurants in Shenzhen now has a QR code. You scan it, order what you want, and the food come. Don't need any interaction with the waiter, what I felt a bit inconvenient since I like to ask what's good there.

Starbucks: When I've left home, ordered via the Starbucks "mini-app" inside wechat, when I arrived in starbucks 5 minutes later, it was ready on the counter.

Metro and Bus: get the metro/bus "mini-app" in wechat. you get . In their receipt it is mentioned "blockchain" technology. I'm not too sure if they use it, wondering if they really do use a blockchain behind to generate receipts.

Sending money to ANYONE: never been that easy to send money to anyone. Even if you , show the QR code, and they'll . No more " I don't have cash on me " excuse. There is also no hard limit on how much you can send. I remembered paying all my rent via wechat when I lived there, about 3000 usd every 3 months.

Not sure if you know, but at least life in Sweden is pretty close to this. Contactless payments are everywhere (Apple/Samsung/Android pay) and the app “swish” works great for sending payments to people. Even some businesses have a swish QR code displayed in lieu of taking cash payments.

Same in Finland, although most people still use contactless cards instead of Apple/Samsung/Android payment apps. But since they work on the same terminals, it's really easy for people to switch when they want to.

I'd go all in on Apple Pay if not for the fact that the grocery store I go to has a loyalty card program and I can't use that with Apple Pay. Luckily the loyalty card is tied to my bank card, so I can get the loyalty card benefits and pay with the same tap.

The brilliant thing about wechat (or alipay) is that they don't have a close affiliation to the banks. And therefore far less transaction fees.

Do people have to pay transaction fees for using their bank cards in the US? At least over here in .nl there are none of these fees (as a consumer) and we have free NFC payments with your regular bank cards or Apple Pay etc.

EU caps the transaction fee of banks to like 1%. (which is paid by the seller).

NL is a bit of a special cookie here, companies in NL don't like paying 1% transaction fees, so most companies only accept MAESTRO. Because Maestro has lower tx fees.

Every time I visit I can't pay for anything with my VISA or Mastercard. It's rather frustrating.

Yeah nobody uses credit cards because of these fees. However, I have never heard of a 1% fee on regular bank card transactions. I know there used to be a 25 cents fee for consumers when they wanted to pay small amounts by cards, but nowadays shops promote payments for this as well and it’s free everywhere. I think it’s a few cents per transaction for the seller.

Put Germany on the same cookie jar, while it has largely improved since I arrived here, plenty of restaurants are still only accepting cash payments.

This was really strange to me, being used to pay with debit card almost everything in Portugal.

In Germany I thought it was due to being privacy conscious?

On the contrary, it is due to the operating taxes.

In 99% of cases no fees for consumers. I know only 1 store that has a credit card surcharge.

Contactless payments can be found where is a card terminal, but not everywhere.

NYC has contactless bus payments now.

Not sure about the fees part, my quick search shows it's 0.6% for businesses to receive money, at the first glance this seems cheap indeed, but there are other tricks in it, unsurprisingly.

It charges you 0.1% for withdrawal once you used up the initial 20K RMB quota, and the real profit driver is its own credit part, if the customer paid using credit from Alipay, which the company agressively promotes to users and urges to be set as default, the fees for businesses then adds another whopping 4%. Would they raise fees even higher? I think they want to. The duopoly raised fees in lockstep before.

It isn't that much different from other card organisations, except theoretically it encourages users to put cash on their platform's various funds and pay with credit it offers so it doesn't need to pay a clearance fee for every transaction. It takes away the protection for customers by credit cards, offers guarantee of receiving money without disputes to businesses.

So it really comes down to the time saving from processing cash vs the cost, since paying with bank cards or gift cards are uncommon in China, and usually you need to type your PIN as it's required by banks even for credit cards to avoid their fraud responsibilities. And the public inertia of not wanting to bring cash they are trying to build.

Same in the UK, you get at least £30 from your contactless card/Apple/Android pay.

Some shops do more, an increasing large number allow a larger limit. However some large shops (Tesco) only allow large limits on their own payment apps, rather than Apple/android pay, forcing you to use your card and pin!

The £30 limit does not apply to mobile payments. There's no limit for those. I've successfully made 2k£ transactions with Apple Pay.

It depends on the merchant and they're apple/android pay enabled or not.

Regular contactless limits are 30, otherwise the limit is much higher.

My highest was ~£1200 at an apple store, and I had paid a 500 deposit on a car, but it refused the 8K balance. So there is a limit somewhere between your 2K and my 8K attempts on apple pay ;)

That sounds pretty scary,what a price to pay. Let's say you're blacklisted for something, that's it, you can't buy anything or get any services from anywhere. You can't even beg for money! I hope I never have to see that in my lifetime,a very rare thing where I would prefer wars before it came to this.

That's exactly what's happening:

- https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/939q35/heres-how-chin... - https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/25/20976964/chinese-america...

or suddenly being not a part of a desired ethnic group

Mobile pay for Starbucks is a thing in North America, without the centralization of surveillance.

(There's probably a dozen tracking SDKs, but we're working on getting those to be properly opt-in, and they aren't fed almost directly to the gov't.)

Now that Apple Pay is available for online checkouts it has mostly the same convenience as WeChat. Hopefully Android Pay or whatever will catch up soon, as Apple Pay is only usable in Safari from what I know.

Eh. 2019 May, Hangzhou, impossible to rent a bicycle without alipay or wechat. The funny bit is that with UK phone number you can't sign up for the service.

China should have gone wireless cards, like most sensible countries.

I just wish they would allow foreigners to use it as well. I live in Hong Kong and go to China quite often to visit friends, but it’s a pain in the ass to pay. Usually my friends pay for me, and I give them cash. The rest just split through Wechat.

It's allowed for foreigners who has the mainland bank account. But yes, it's impossible without.

Yeah sorry, by foreigners I was mostly referring to tourists.

I've been to Chengdu and Shenzhen in 2017. People were sometimes sighing and rolling their eyes when I tried to pay with cash. Even worse with cards.

Why are cards worse?

You need special equipment to accept cards.

Did they not have the equipment?

First, it takes time. Second, western cards (especially debit) are not always accepted in China.

Yeah I guess cards can be slower than cash

I don't really have an issue in Canada with payments. Contactless w/ Visa/Amex/Interac is basically ubiquitous, and cash is fine when you don't want to rely on the networks. That thing you describe with Starbucks is here too, not that I really care about waiting 90 seconds for a beverage at a Starbucks, on the occasion that I visit one.

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