Adyen Levels the Playing Field for Brick-and-Mortar Merchants with WeChat Pay for POS
One of the most popular mobile payment apps in China, WeChat Pay has been available for online commerce via the Adyen platform since 2016. And now, according to Adyen’s press release, the mainstream mobile payment method will now be going offline for Adyen’s merchant clients.
This is a big benefit for Adyen brick-and-mortar merchants as they will now have the capability to facilitate their commerce via China’s three largest payment providers – Alibaba’s Alipay, China UnionPay and now WeChat. And from a company perspective, the WeChat Pay addition is another big push towards Adyen’s unified commerce solution.
Chinese consumers strongly favor mobile commerce facilitated by apps like WeChat Pay. In fact, mobile payment volume in China more than doubled to $5 trillion in 2016, according to CNBC.com. And according to Adyen, WeChat alone has 1.3 billion users – with 400 million of them using WeChat Pay for either product purchase or P2P payments.
The release also touts a few key trends as being responsible for China’s new buying power:
- Chinese consumers favor luxury brands and are responsible for up to half of all luxury brand sales worldwide.
- Chinese consumers have a broad commerce scope and often shop cross-border for their purchases. Adyen cited data from Forrester predicting a 20% increase in cross-border ecommerce by 2022 (reaching $630 billion), with China in the lead.
Speaking specifically about the ability for offline merchants to enable Chinese consumers to make payments via their three most popular payment methods, Roelant Prins, Adyen’s chief commercial officer, explains that the new offering enables Adyen merchants to “cater to this incredibly important and large customer base as they travel abroad.”
To further quantify the large impact Chinese consumers have on the payments ecosystem, Prins references Singles Day – an annual Chinese entertainment festival popular among the young singles in mainland China to celebrate their single status. The same release quotes him as explaining that, “After November’s record-breaking Singles Day sales, it’s more important than ever for retailers to find ways to allow Chinese consumers to make purchases with their payment method of choice.”