Businesses court Chinese tourists with WeChat, AliPay
Boston Globe / June 29, 2018
By Janelle Nanos
In China, the notion of “cash or credit” doesn’t really exist. Each day, billions of users pay for everything from food to tax bills with the mobile payment apps WeChat Pay and Alipay. Now, many Boston-area retailers are incorporating these services into their business plans to better target a surge of Chinese tourists.
Visitors can use the apps to check in at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel or book a Boston Duck Tour. At Copley Place, they can pick up baubles from APM Monaco or handbags from Bottega Veneta. College students from abroad can use the apps to buy groceries at Ming’s Supermarkets, snacks from Beard Papa’s, or a manicure at Tinailery.
WeChat Pay and Alipay exist as payment options within the WeChat and Alibaba online empires, respectively. WeChat is one of the largest social networks in China, and Alibaba is pretty much the Chinese version of Amazon. Combined, they have 1.3 billion users making payments on their platforms. The apps must be tied to a Chinese bank account, and users pay for services by simply scanning a QR code.
Mobile payments now account for 93 percent of all Chinese spending, according to the Chinese research firm Analysys, and the systems are on a path to outpace the number of global credit card transactions by 2025, says Thad Peterson, an analyst at Aite Group.
Both Tencent, which owns WeChat, and Ant Financial, the Alibaba financial services arm that oversees AliPay, are aggressively trying to penetrate cities and regions that have a high density of Chinese travelers, Peterson says.
