Adyen rolled out WeChat Pay, one of the most popular mobile payment apps in China, allowing Adyen merchants to offer WeChat Pay on their point-of-sale terminals worldwide. This is a key addition to Adyen’s unified commerce solution. Since 2016, consumers have been able to buy goods online using WeChat Pay through the Adyen platform; now, they can do the same in brick-and-mortar stores.

The addition of WeChat Pay means that Adyen merchants can now accept payments from China’s three largest payment providers, including Alibaba’s Alipay and China UnionPay (UPI). WeChat has 1.3 billion users, 400 million of whom use WeChat Pay for either paying friends (P2P payments) or purchasing a product.

“We are thrilled to announce that Adyen now offers all three major Chinese payment methods on our clients’ POS terminals worldwide,”

said Roelant Prins, chief commercial officer, Adyen.

“This capability allows our merchants to cater to this incredibly important and large customer base as they travel abroad. 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.”

China’s new buying power is driven by several key trends:

• Chinese consumers crave luxury goods – Chinese consumers are responsible for up to half of all luxury brand sales worldwide, according to a McKinsey report. This year, it is projected that cross-border buyers in China will spend an average of US$473.26 each on cross-border purchases, which represents 2 percent of the total retail e-commerce market. This is expected to equate to US$85.76 billion in 2017.
• Chinese consumers are global shoppers – this factor has led to cross-border purchases. By 2022, Forrester predicts that cross-border e-commerce could increase by 20 percent, reaching US$630 billion, with China leading the boom.