Walmart Snubs Alipay for WeChat Pay in Western China
In a move that makes a surprising amount of sense when you stop and think about it, Walmart recently set up a deal with Tencent in China to bring WeChat Pay to its stores in western China. Given the popular perception of Tencent’s mobile payments platform, this is an e
Essentially, reports suggest, Walmart is simply throwing in with WeChat Pay aid a market that’s increasingly splitting in favor of either WeChat Pay or its primary competitor, Ant Financial’s Alipay. Alipay may be leading the field right now, but WeChat Pay isn’t far behind, and though the average Chinese citizen has both apps on his or her mobile device, Walmart’s support may be enough to give WeChat Pay that little extra edge it needs to approach parity with its multinational competitor.
Western China contains such places as Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan, and while not as populous as eastern China, it’s still a very large market. What’s more, it doesn’t even seem that Walmart’s planning to shut out Alipay altogether, with a representative noting that “In the future, Walmart will cooperate with more partners to provide payment solutions with more convenience and benefits.”
With over one billion accounts to its credit now, WeChat Pay isn’t some dark horse, but every bit a competitor to Alipay, which has been engaged in a frantic addition of new clients overseas for months now, most of which we’ve heard about firsthand.
In the end, this is a good plan for Walmart. There’s a dichotomy that runs through the Chinese mobile payments market, best distilled into the maxim: “Alipay for big bucks, WeChat Pay for pennies.” Walmart has long established itself as the bargain provider—for a while, its big advertising tagline was “Always low prices. Always.”—and now it’s got the perfect chance to demonstrate as much in China. Since WeChat Pay is the service for “pennies”, having it accepted at Walmart is a perfect conceptual demonstration that all you need to shop at Walmart, whether it’s in China or China, Texas, is
A clever move, but will it be enough? Only time will tell, but Walmart’s support of the pennies platform may be just the thing to cement it in the Chinese shopper’s consciousness as the low-cost provider.