Sci-Tech Information: WeChat Payment Tools Launched to Strike Alipay
further into mobile commerce territory. Today Tencent (HKG:0700) added support for any brands to allow customers to purchase items or services inside the app. It works for both in-store payments (where retailers will likely scan a QR code generated by your order inside WeChat) or for purely online purchases that'll be delivered to you later.
WeChat users in China can now find this option inside some brands' official accounts. It works only with €service accounts' which are designed to support companies and retailers in offering things like loyalty cards, customer service, and online selling.
An example of the new in-app purchases in WeChat can be seen in the account belonging to Pacific Coffee, a chain of stores that rivals Starbucks and Costa. Within Pacific Coffee's brand account in WeChat, there's the option to buy drinks.
Customers can then select the type of drink, size, number of cups, and also the payment method. In this case, those in need of caffeine can pay via WeChat Payments (update: A Tencent representative points out this should be called Weixin Payments, referring to the app's Chinese name, as it's not available to overseas users. Subsequent uses of the phrase have been changed) or Pacific's own prepaid card.
WeChat has done ecommerce before with things like flash sales of Xiaomi phones and paying for taxi rides. And Tencent already has Weixin Payments in place as the messaging app's main epayment option. The addition of a framework for in-app purchases allows the app to take the functionality mainstream to all verified vendors, whether they're big name brands or ordinary small businesses.
Nowadays, Alipay could not stay calm anymore, which illustrated that WeChat payment came with full preparation.
The public account opened the door of payment for WeChat, and WeChat Payment completed the final step in a closed loop O2O.
In a WeChat Payment experience activity scene, once you scanned the QR code of drinks, it would automatically enter the WeChat Payment page, then you could press the button to jump to the binding bank card payment page. After you enter the bank card number, ID number and set the password, you would complete the payment. Then the vending machine will automatically pop the products you just bought.
In the process, you actually also completed a WeChat Payment registration. In fact, the technical support and license for WeChat Payment was TenPay. But in this way, TenPay got the perfect stealth, and didn't disturb many old Alipay users at all.
For consumers, it is not really €not wanting to register a new payment account€, but € not enough temptation.€ If WeChat Payment offers the enough benefits for consumers, it's still a strong competitive opponent to Alipay wallet considering the current WeChat user advantages. Currently about 10,000 vending machines that supported WeChat QR code scanning have been put into operation in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places.
It is understood that in addition to the common WeChat QR payment, there are app payment and the public account payment you can use. App payment mainly includes dianping and WeChat cooperation model. When users want to find a restaurant, they can find the nearest restaurant on the mobile dianping client, and pay the coupon through WeChat Payment.
It is noteworthy that, a variety of WeChat public accounts can access to the payment function. For example, Reference News official WeChat subscription center References Secretary, allows users to directly pay the subscription of the newspapers.
This also means that once WeChat Payment is popularized, you can achieve a complete closed loop from online to offline. Clearly, WeChat in mobile end will form a giant that could compare to Ali Empire.
These days, Alipay is crazy to promote Alipay wallet. At least on a national scale,YinTai (a Chinese online shopping mall) has already been a territory of Alipay wallet.
And By the end of October this year, Alipay Wallet version 7.6 officially launched the public service platform, there were already a large number of banks, telecom operators, utilities payment institutions, retailers, etc. joined them. Alipay wallet announced that companies entered Alipay wallet services platform would be exempt from any certification fees when WeChat Payment had its public meeting. Obviously, it aimed at WeChat's earlier news that it would charge an 300 yuan annual fee for the service accounts.
However, the WeChat team confirmed that, the 300 yuan certification cost is the third party service fee when the service account apply for WeChat authentication. Tencent also claimed that 300 yuan certification fee is just for the service account operators, individual users and subscribers acocunts are irrelevant.
According to WeChat reports, WeChat public accounts increased to more than 200 million within 15 months, with 8,000 accounts growing and more than billion times information exchange per day. However, for the specific number and proportion of service and subscription accounts of the more than 2 million public accounts, WeChat didn't reveal much for now.
Compared with the WeChat, Yu'E Bao currently plays a great role in Alipay wallet. It's found that in recent days perhaps in order to actively promote Alipay wallet,the annualized 7-day return of Yu'E Bao soared from about 4.8% to 5.2%, and many users are happy to earn a little more each day. And now, it is difficult for WeChat to compete with Alipay directly in a short time.
Perhaps, if there was no WeChat, in mobile Internet payment field, Tenpay could hardly compete with Alipay, but with 600 million users support, WeChat Payment and Alipay wallet could have a fight.
WeChat challenges Alipay
In old days during the Spring Festival holidays, children usually kneel down and touch their foreheads to the ground before they are given a red envelope containing cash from older family members, and nowadays employees have to work exceptionally well in order to be handed a red envelope from the boss at the company annual meeting.
This year, however, many found a new way to spread the red envelope with the wish for luck: handing red envelopes electronically via smartphones.
Tencent Holdings, China's largest Internet company by revenue, launched a "red envelope grabbing" function on January 26 for users of WeChat, the company's highly popular instant messaging smartphone app.
The function allows users to send virtual red envelopes containing cash either to a specific person or a group of friends, among whom the money would be randomly divided.
Tencent's biggest rival, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, launched a similar function on January 24 on the firm's online payment service Alipay, which allows its users to claim virtual red envelopes from others.
However, Alibaba's efforts appear to have caused a much smaller fuss than Tencent's.
While some observers said Tencent's successful red envelope campaign could give the company a lift in surpassing Alibaba in the online payment service arena, analysts told the Global Times that the WeChat operator still has a long way to go.
Viral envelope
Tencent's red envelope function gained considerable popularity among the 600 million WeChat users around the world.
More than 8 million users participated in Tencent's "red envelope grabbing" spree and more than 40 million envelopes, each containing 10 yuan ($1.65) on average, had been claimed from January 30 to February 7, the Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, citing data provided by Tencent.
In fact, the activity seems to serve a greater goal for Tencent than just adding some fun to WeChat users' Chinese Lunar New Year celebration: It helped the company nurture a customer base for its online payment services.
Tencent has been trying to fight Alibaba Group in the online payment arena for about a year.
However, as a latecomer, Tencent's payment service and online fund product had been lagging way behind its competitor in both numbe
WeChat users in China can now find this option inside some brands' official accounts. It works only with €service accounts' which are designed to support companies and retailers in offering things like loyalty cards, customer service, and online selling.
An example of the new in-app purchases in WeChat can be seen in the account belonging to Pacific Coffee, a chain of stores that rivals Starbucks and Costa. Within Pacific Coffee's brand account in WeChat, there's the option to buy drinks.
Customers can then select the type of drink, size, number of cups, and also the payment method. In this case, those in need of caffeine can pay via WeChat Payments (update: A Tencent representative points out this should be called Weixin Payments, referring to the app's Chinese name, as it's not available to overseas users. Subsequent uses of the phrase have been changed) or Pacific's own prepaid card.
WeChat has done ecommerce before with things like flash sales of Xiaomi phones and paying for taxi rides. And Tencent already has Weixin Payments in place as the messaging app's main epayment option. The addition of a framework for in-app purchases allows the app to take the functionality mainstream to all verified vendors, whether they're big name brands or ordinary small businesses.
Nowadays, Alipay could not stay calm anymore, which illustrated that WeChat payment came with full preparation.
The public account opened the door of payment for WeChat, and WeChat Payment completed the final step in a closed loop O2O.
In a WeChat Payment experience activity scene, once you scanned the QR code of drinks, it would automatically enter the WeChat Payment page, then you could press the button to jump to the binding bank card payment page. After you enter the bank card number, ID number and set the password, you would complete the payment. Then the vending machine will automatically pop the products you just bought.
In the process, you actually also completed a WeChat Payment registration. In fact, the technical support and license for WeChat Payment was TenPay. But in this way, TenPay got the perfect stealth, and didn't disturb many old Alipay users at all.
For consumers, it is not really €not wanting to register a new payment account€, but € not enough temptation.€ If WeChat Payment offers the enough benefits for consumers, it's still a strong competitive opponent to Alipay wallet considering the current WeChat user advantages. Currently about 10,000 vending machines that supported WeChat QR code scanning have been put into operation in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other places.
It is understood that in addition to the common WeChat QR payment, there are app payment and the public account payment you can use. App payment mainly includes dianping and WeChat cooperation model. When users want to find a restaurant, they can find the nearest restaurant on the mobile dianping client, and pay the coupon through WeChat Payment.
It is noteworthy that, a variety of WeChat public accounts can access to the payment function. For example, Reference News official WeChat subscription center References Secretary, allows users to directly pay the subscription of the newspapers.
This also means that once WeChat Payment is popularized, you can achieve a complete closed loop from online to offline. Clearly, WeChat in mobile end will form a giant that could compare to Ali Empire.
These days, Alipay is crazy to promote Alipay wallet. At least on a national scale,YinTai (a Chinese online shopping mall) has already been a territory of Alipay wallet.
And By the end of October this year, Alipay Wallet version 7.6 officially launched the public service platform, there were already a large number of banks, telecom operators, utilities payment institutions, retailers, etc. joined them. Alipay wallet announced that companies entered Alipay wallet services platform would be exempt from any certification fees when WeChat Payment had its public meeting. Obviously, it aimed at WeChat's earlier news that it would charge an 300 yuan annual fee for the service accounts.
However, the WeChat team confirmed that, the 300 yuan certification cost is the third party service fee when the service account apply for WeChat authentication. Tencent also claimed that 300 yuan certification fee is just for the service account operators, individual users and subscribers acocunts are irrelevant.
According to WeChat reports, WeChat public accounts increased to more than 200 million within 15 months, with 8,000 accounts growing and more than billion times information exchange per day. However, for the specific number and proportion of service and subscription accounts of the more than 2 million public accounts, WeChat didn't reveal much for now.
Compared with the WeChat, Yu'E Bao currently plays a great role in Alipay wallet. It's found that in recent days perhaps in order to actively promote Alipay wallet,the annualized 7-day return of Yu'E Bao soared from about 4.8% to 5.2%, and many users are happy to earn a little more each day. And now, it is difficult for WeChat to compete with Alipay directly in a short time.
Perhaps, if there was no WeChat, in mobile Internet payment field, Tenpay could hardly compete with Alipay, but with 600 million users support, WeChat Payment and Alipay wallet could have a fight.
WeChat challenges Alipay
In old days during the Spring Festival holidays, children usually kneel down and touch their foreheads to the ground before they are given a red envelope containing cash from older family members, and nowadays employees have to work exceptionally well in order to be handed a red envelope from the boss at the company annual meeting.
This year, however, many found a new way to spread the red envelope with the wish for luck: handing red envelopes electronically via smartphones.
Tencent Holdings, China's largest Internet company by revenue, launched a "red envelope grabbing" function on January 26 for users of WeChat, the company's highly popular instant messaging smartphone app.
The function allows users to send virtual red envelopes containing cash either to a specific person or a group of friends, among whom the money would be randomly divided.
Tencent's biggest rival, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, launched a similar function on January 24 on the firm's online payment service Alipay, which allows its users to claim virtual red envelopes from others.
However, Alibaba's efforts appear to have caused a much smaller fuss than Tencent's.
While some observers said Tencent's successful red envelope campaign could give the company a lift in surpassing Alibaba in the online payment service arena, analysts told the Global Times that the WeChat operator still has a long way to go.
Viral envelope
Tencent's red envelope function gained considerable popularity among the 600 million WeChat users around the world.
More than 8 million users participated in Tencent's "red envelope grabbing" spree and more than 40 million envelopes, each containing 10 yuan ($1.65) on average, had been claimed from January 30 to February 7, the Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, citing data provided by Tencent.
In fact, the activity seems to serve a greater goal for Tencent than just adding some fun to WeChat users' Chinese Lunar New Year celebration: It helped the company nurture a customer base for its online payment services.
Tencent has been trying to fight Alibaba Group in the online payment arena for about a year.
However, as a latecomer, Tencent's payment service and online fund product had been lagging way behind its competitor in both numbe
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