Yandex.Checkout provides its partners with a new payment method, WeChat Pay. This service is integrated into the popular Chinese app WeChat. The new feature is well suited for merchants working with Chinese tourists in Russia or looking for an opportunity to start doing so.
According to the company’s data, WeChat has over 1 billion active monthly users, and the number of WeChat Pay users has recently reached 800 million. Millions of merchants use WeChat Pay to accept payments in their stores.
“Yandex.Checkout is one of the first companies to introduce WeChat Pay to the Russian market, which can be used as an additional advantage for stores interested in selling goods and services to Chinese tourists. Russia welcomes approximately 1.5 million Chinese tourists annually, and Yandex.Checkout offers a payment method that they are accustomed to. Merchants benefit from WeChat Pay with increasing average check and sales volume when working with tourists from China,” says Anna Kuzmina, Deputy Chief Commercial Officer at Yandex.Checkout.
Yandex.Checkout has already helped implement payment acceptance via WeChat Pay to the home appliance and digital electronics retail chain Citilink, with 7 large outlets in Moscow and 5 in Saint Petersburg so far. Prior to the implementation of WeChat Pay, the average check in Citilink stores for purchases paid for with cards issued by Chinese payment systems amounted to 6,500 rubles.
“Citilink is interested in testing payment systems that use QR codes. We can see the prospect of their further spread on the territory of Russia, and, besides, it’s impossible not to consider the increasing flow of tourists from China as we develop the network. Therefore, patnering with Yandex.Checkout, our first order of business was to add the payment acceptance via WeChat Pay to all of our large outlets in two largest cities in the country, Moscow and Saint Petersburg,” comments Sergey Potopnin, Chief Financial Officer of Citilink.
Payments via WeChat Pay are contactless and processed via QR codes. At checkout, the customers simply need to open the WeChat app on their smartphone, let the cashier scan the QR code, and confirm the payment from their phone.
Entering into a contract with Yandex.Checkout, companies can implement WeChat Pay inside PoS software or download a special app for Android to a smartphone or tablet. The app allows scanning QR codes for accepting payments.