Payment Methods in Mainland China

Written By Wolfgang Geiger

WordPress developer in Hong Kong specializing in making websites work in Mainland China. More information on the About Me page

If you want to target Mainland Chinese customers, credit card payments aren’t the best way to get paid as credit cards aren’t necessarily super common among your target audience.

There are, however, 3 payment methods that should work for almost any Chinese internet user:

Alipay

Most payments in Mainland China are done via phone nowadays. Alipay was the leader in this area and together with WeChap Pay is still the most popular way to pay for literally anything.

WeChat Pay

WeChat Pay was Tencent’s answer to Alibaba’s AliPay. In what was probably one of the most genious marketing campaigns, Tencent used red envelopes during Chinese New Year to make almost everyone in China use WeChat Pay.

Today, Alipay and WeChat Pay are used everywhere, hard to say which one is more popular.

UnionPay

This is probably closest to what you’re used to from credit card payments and could be somewhat compared to a debit card.

UnionPay is used widely in Mainland China and

How to use Alipay, WeChat Pay and UnionPay with WooCommerce

This has become a lot easier over the last years and some providers like Stripe provide this service out of the box, you “only” have to apply and Stripe has to accept.

Other than that, there are country specific providers that help with those payments.

It’s very hard to give general advice on this without causing confusion or mislead people – this should probably be done on a case to case basis.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions in that regard.

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