Payment services provider Worldline is helping its e-commerce clients enter the growing Chinese market.

More than 1.38 million Chinese people already order products from other countries. The key to this important user group is the omnipresent lifestyle tool, Weixin (the mainland Chinese version of WeChat). Through a mini program that integrates merchants into the social platform, seamless access and user-friendliness is guaranteed. Worldline facilitates this integration and ensures that Weixin payments are widely accepted.

Well-known international brands are shopper’s preferred choice. For example, L’Oréal generates around 60% of its total revenues from the APAC region in China. Recently, retail sectors have also become increasingly diverse. The main focus was initially on beauty products and baby items, but now clothing, household items, electronics, sports goods and even food products are being ordered increasingly and delivered to China.

In order to be able to reach out to Chinese shoppers on a large scale, in addition to language barriers, particular attention needs to be paid to the habits and needs of Chinese customers. This includes the ubiquitous social super-app Weixin, an ecosystem used by more than 1 billion Chinese people for practically everything, from chatting, journaling to researching their leisure activities, and, of course, for shopping and payments. Under the name WeChat, Weixin is also popular with Chinese people living abroad.

In Q4 2021, Worldline extended its Weixin Pay payment solution, used in Europe since 2019, from a POS service to e-commerce, app and the mini program. This is a special in-app feature integrated into the Weixin platform and giving Weixin users direct access to an exponentially growing target market of participating e-commerce merchants, without having to switch media, visit another website or download another app.

Guillaume Pascale, Head Global Sales & Verticals at Worldline, comments:

“Worldline allows European e-commerce customers to integrate their mini program into the Weixin platform. The aim is to increase customer loyalty and harness the Chinese users’ purchasing power. We are already introducing our multi-channel mobile payment solution to retailers all over Europe.