Bots and WeChat of the West

wechat first gather a lot of users by building a great chat app. Starting by copying whatsapp then extending it to be much more while seamlessly linking to other tencent social media accounts which includes qq one the largest instant messaging community in the world by virtue of the fact that everyone in china already used qq so switching over to wechat was easy because you could reuse your username and login.

People started moving to wechat payments because they were offering it for free and started giving out free money and gift for depositing money into your wechat wallet. They spent a lot of money to get users to add their bank account to their wechat, there is no way they have recouped those costs yet. They are also charging little to no fees for sending and receiving money, way less than what banks charge so they cant be making much if any money off it yet, they are waiting until adoption of wechat payments becomes ubiquitous and then will jack up the fees. The hold near monopoly within china and are protected from outside competitors by china strict financial regulations that dont allow foreign companies to run banking and payment services in china. Paypal currently runs their service in china through a chinese based partner that process the actual transactions and paypal just provides the front end app and api

I think that "Logged in Users with Saved Payment Information" is very big. It takes a lot of the friction out of WeChat commerce.