During the study tours we deliver with ChinaTechTrip, I often give lectures about WeChat and mobile payment in China. Western chat apps are often either blocked or don’t work correctly. It’s therefore only logical that whenever I take a tour group to that country, we use WeChat for communication and its integrated mobile payment system WeChat Pay for payment. While cash payment should legally still be accepted everywhere, for more than five years, Chinese consumers pay almost everything with their smartphones.
Before the pandemic, we would arrange for group members to receive a so-called ‘relative card’.This basically is like giving pocket money to contacts in WeChat, and it worked relatively – no pun intended – well. This was the only option since linking credit cards to WeChat rarely worked. But in the summer of 2023, both WeChat Pay and its competitor Alipay announced that foreigners could now link their credit cards to their payment app and finally be able to pay with their smartphones in China. I’d heard that promise before, but this time was supposed to be different. This new functionality was supposed to make it easier for foreigners who visited China.
Hurdle 1: installing WeChat
When you install WeChat on your smartphone, you have to go through a ‘friend verification process’. Since Tencent has had challenges with fake accounts, scams and phishing in the past, they probably had good reasons to implement this some five years ago. But it comes with serious challenges if you want to add a group of people on WeChat.
During the account registration process, a ‘friend’ needs to scan a QR code or enter the new user’s phone number into the app at their end. This sounds simple enough, but when you have a group of 15 travellers, friend verification becomes a real problem.
Anybody who verifies a new user can only do so once a month and at most three times a year. As such, I could only verify two people in the two months before the tour departure date. Now, you might think that one could use a domino approach with each new user verifying the next person in the group. Alas, that won’t work because there are certain requirements for the verifying person, among which a WeChat usage history of at least six months.
We contacted WeChat’s support team to ask for a solution. They proved very unhelpful, first ignoring our requests and later telling us that people had to contact support individually if they ran into problems. But we didn’t want to burden our tour participants with that.
We realized we needed one existing WeChat user for each group member. That might not be a big problem in China, where everybody and his dog uses WeChat, but try finding that many in The Netherlands. We decided we had to mobilize a small army of Chinese users to help us. Our local tour operator partner came to the rescue. We provided them with a list of all telephone numbers, which they divided among an equal number of staff and family members.
On the 5th of September, during a briefing session about the tour, the whole group simultaneously installed WeChat on their smartphones. We first ensured they didn’t download the app through the available Wi-Fi because we’d heard that too many downloads from one IP address could cause immediate blocks.
Once the whole group reached the friend verification page, we sent a message to China where, at 11 PM, more than 10 Chinese people started entering the Dutch phone numbers in their apps. Sure enough, this worked, but the amount of preparation we had to do to make this happen was bordering on silly.
The group continued the registration process, some of the members being repeatedly confronted with inexplicable error messages. They repeatedly had to enter the same details in some of the registration steps. But eventually, everybody had an installed WeChat app on their phone.
But you could tell from the look on their faces that they were wondering if this clunky thing really was that fantastic ‘super app’ from China everybody was raving about…
Hurdle 2: Installing WeChat Pay
In daily life in China, everybody uses their mobile phones to pay for things. To let our group experience this and enable them to make their own purchases, we wanted them to activate WeChat Pay. Or, ‘Weixin Pay’, as it is confusingly referred to in the registration process (Weixin is the Chinese name of WeChat).
Alipay was an alternative, but since WeChat was an important theme in the tour, it seemed the more logical choice. As it turned out, it was the wrong one.
We recorded two videos showing the group how to activate WeChat Pay and link their credit card.
As part of the process, people had to enter their name and passport details and go to a separate screen to upload a scan of their passport. This is where the real problems started. Several group members were told that their passport scan didn’t match their entered details, and the attempts to link their credit cards were rejected. In most cases, it was unclear what had caused the problem. In a Chinese message (which foreigners won’t be able to read), the app told the user to wait 15 days (!) and try again. Some of these second attempts also failed because they had no idea what they had done wrong in the first place.
Notifications that passport verification had failed (left) and that one can try again in 15 days (right).
It seemed like some attempts were rejected because of deviations in the names people had entered during part of the registration process and the actual names on their passports. In The Netherlands, the common name someone uses can differ substantially from what’s in their passport. A passport can have baptismal names, maiden names or other deviations. One registration was rejected because of a difference in upper- and lower-case characters.
Since the registration process hadn’t clearly described what name to enter and group members did not know that this data was compared to the passport scan, they had entered what they would always use on any registration form.
A Tencent employee we were in contact with – let’s call her Lisa – was very kind and attempted to help us.
She sent me the instructions below about how people had to fill in the concerned registration screen.
It is helpful, but these explanations are unavailable on screen to whoever is registering in the app. So, ‘Name’ can be interpreted in many ways since it doesn’t specify that it has to be the exact passport name.
At the time, it seemed like the entered details and passport scans were manually compared and rejected by WeChat staff. Lisa asked us to wait a week or two; WeChat’s tech support was working on an OCR scan functionality that would pull the text from a passport scan, making entering those details redundant. Fortunately, we still had a few weeks before departure.
Meanwhile, Lisa arranged for someone in WeChat customer service to call a few people who had gotten stuck in the registration process. From what we heard, it was a long, somewhat frustrating phone conversation with things getting lost in translation, but eventually, they succeeded in making another attempt to register. The app told them the attempt failed … only to show another message telling them registration had succeeded 12 minutes later.
Hurdle 3: a blocked account
The time I had spent getting people on WeChat and WeChat Pay had been more than I had anticipated. It was time I should have been spending on the content and the tour programme instead. And I was baffled by the fact that a connection within Tencent had to get involved to solve our problems. I would think she had more important things to do as well…
Just when I thought most of our problems had been solved, one of the worst issues was still to come: a group member got blocked in WeChat. She had never used the app before, but the first time she tried to post something in the group chat, she received an error message in Chinese, which she, of course, could not read. It said:
“Your account is temporarily unable to use the chat function, tap to learn more”
Clicking on the link, she was presented with the below message on the left.
Having one group member that wasn’t able to communicate with the rest in the group sounded like a scenario for potential disasters, but when tried to help her get her account unblocked, we were shown the message on the right:
Seeing that message, we worried our own account would get blocked if we proceeded.
There was no other solution than to contact Lisa again, who must have been reaching her own levels of desperation by then. We provided the account details and the user’s e-mail address, and he had to verify by e-mail that it was her before her account finally got unblocked.
Other problems
Once we had succeeded in finally getting some people’s WeChat Pay activated, we decided to test it.
The WeChat Pay app shows an option to top up your WeChat balance, transferring money from your credit card into your mobile wallet. But trying to do so resulted in the message on the left picture below.
The same thing happened when attempting to make person-to-person money transfers (picture on the right). When consulting Lisa, we were informed that those options are unavailable to international users. This information was only available in an online FAQ infographic, not in the app itself. One wonders why these options have not been disabled for international registrants who cannot use them anyway…
In the meantime…
When I first ran into the first problems with group members activating WeChat Pay, I sent a request for support through a form on WeChat’s website. I clearly stated that it concerned a group of foreign tourists. Five days later, I received a reply from WeChat Support:
This advice was useless. It referred to the process of activating payment in Weixin, the Chinese mainland version of the app.
I was starting to lose my patience and responded:
No less than 39 days later, I received a reply:
The webpage the message referred to contains the same advice I received 39 days earlier.
I felt like I was caught in something that resembled Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.
I responded:
I’m still waiting for a reply.
Meanwhile, I started wondering how anybody who didn’t have a Tencent connection at their disposal would ever get WeChat customer service to help them solve their problems…
So now what?
When I first posted about our experiences on LinkedIn and Twitter, I received many responses from people who had run into the same issues trying to register on WeChat and/or WeChat Pay. More recently, I have seen other study tour groups sharing their frustrationa about comparable problems.
I’ve been a fan of WeChat since I first installed it on my phone when I was living in China in 2012. I’ve done many presentations on the app, and I think its mini-programs are one of the best innovations of the past decade. And whenever I’m in China, I never use cash anymore. I also rarely use the alternative app for mobile payment, Alipay.
I would love for our tour group members to experience all of this as well. But the hassle that registration in the WeChat app and linking credit cards has caused me and my customers has reached a point where I’ve decided not to use WeChat and WeChat Pay anymore on future tours.
Some of my group members who couldn’t jump through all of WeChat’s hoops in time ended up installing Alipay instead. The Alipay process was as smooth as WeChat’s was cumbersome. They had it working in a matter of minutes instead of days or even weeks. And guess what? Alipay also has a chat functionality that enables the group to chat and us to send them important messages.
They will miss many of the experiences in WeChat, but at the end of the day, it will save them excoriating frustration and save me – and Lisa, for that matter – a lot of wasted time.
