Pay for my coffee with my phone? Sure!
Pacific Coffee (太平洋咖啡 - Tàipíngyáng Kāfēi) has become the first major coffee chain on the Chinese Mainland to start accepting WeChat Pay (微信支付 - Wēixìn Zhīfù). Just scan the QR code provided on the cash register and pay straight from the WeChat application on your phone, either from the balance in your WeChat Wallet or directly from a connected bank card.
This significant step forward should be viewed in the context of the general payment battle between Tencent (腾讯 - Téngxùn), which owns WeChat, and Alibaba (阿里巴巴 - Ālĭbābā). These two, who make up two of the ‘Big Three’ internet companies in China - the other being Baidu (百度 - Băidù) - are rapidly expanding their deals and partnerships in the highly lucrative mobile payments space.
Alibaba’s own and much more established payments system, Alipay (支付宝 - Zhīfùbāo) recently finished tying up a huge deal with the nationwide convenience store chain, Family Mart (全家 - Quānjiā), to allow customers to pay for groceries quickly and painlessly through their mobile phones.
Consumers are the real winners in China - a country where credit cards are extremely hard to come by and cash is king. The loser, if there is any, is poor old Apple. While millions of Chinese are using Apple-branded iPhones to make most of these mobile payments, one thing they are not doing is using Apple Pay. Apple has yet to successfully negotiate an agreement with UnionPay (银联 - Yínlián) who largely controls the electronic payments market in China, and doesn’t look like it will any time soon. Will there be any market space left when they finally land in China’s mobile payments market?
This post was imported from my Tumblr, which I used for blogging between 2014 and 2015.
