By: OTT Pay
WeChat is a super app and the world’s largest social media and messaging platform. It has well over 1.2 billion active users (mostly in China) because it combines all the common apps your phone has now: voice, text, social networking, videos, searching and booking services, ordering food, translation into 20 languages and payments. And its mini program ecosystem makes it easy to take almost any digital action without leaving the app. The Guardian refers it to as “A Swiss army knife app.”
The payment side of WeChat is WeChat Pay, which requires a Chinese bank account to use. It’s the second-most popular payments platform in China, with 935 million active users in 2023. This is slightly behind AliPay.
All this to say that the 935 million people (3X the entire American population) who use WeChat Pay to buy everything from candies to cars will want to keep using it when they buy from North American stores.
Who Uses WeChat Pay?
Over 50% of WeChat’s users are under 30 years old, and a sizeable majority of this group is under 24. The male/female split is relatively even with slightly higher male adoption. None of this is too surprising given that the app world skews younger.
But here’s what is surprising: while China is obviously the country with the most WeChat downloads, number two is the United States with 1.22 million downloads in the second half of 2023, and Canada, despite its small population, has over 1 million active users. Some of those users are new immigrants or students. Some are Americans or Canadians who do business in China, or Chinese nationals who do business in America or Canada. But all of them could be your customers if you accepted WeChat Pay.
How do WeChat Pay Fees Work?
Customers generally don’t pay WeChat Pay user fees. Businesses pay a percentage of the transaction amount, but the rates are competitive to encourage more widespread WeChat Pay acceptance. But for those fees, merchants who accept WeChat Pay get access to unique insights into customer behaviour and transaction patterns they can leverage in multiple directions, from operations to marketing to pricing strategies.
Who Should be set up to Accept WeChat Pay?
Any retailer who expects Chinese nationals or recent immigrants from China to walk into their store or land on their websites should strongly consider accepting WeChat Payments.
Online, this could literally be any eCommerce site, since there’s about a 10 to 20% chance that an online store’s next visitor will be a WeChat Pay user.
Offline, this would include any retailer or merchant in or near an American or Canadian city of over 500,000 people (roughly the size of Kansas City). In smaller cities, towns, counties and villages, companies that serve tourists or business travellers should also consider accepting WeChat Pay. This would include restaurants, attractions, hotels and the like. But it would also include shops a traveller might go to: drug stores, supermarkets, florists, grooming services like barbers and nail salons, etc.
How to Accept WeChat Payments?
In order to start accepting WeChat Payments, retailers would need a system for creating and reading QR codes that can process WeChat payments.
When merchants find a quality payment gateway partner, they’ll be able to accept payments in local currency with automatic currency conversion, regardless of the customers’ original home currency.
