My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)
The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering. First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall: the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.
Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.
Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow "strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so the gossip goes.
Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming soon": https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml ... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.
My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)
The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering. First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall: the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.
Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.
Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow "strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so the gossip goes.
Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming soon": https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml ... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.
Rant over :).