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.
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!
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 ;)
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.
This was really strange to me, being used to pay with debit card almost everything in Portugal.
Contactless payments can be found where is a card terminal, but not everywhere.
NYC has contactless bus payments now.
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.