Thread: Chinese Credit Card Payments?

Hello,

I currently run a small business selling e-items (books and other files) I've recently started getting the site translated into chinese as I would really like to target the Chinese market.

I'm struggling to find a way to accept payments from china. My original intention was to use PayPal, I assumed that was international! It doesn't seem that way although I'm finding it very hard to get information.

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Andy

I'm currently writing a guide telling you how to do this. It will be up in the next few days.

China seems to work slightly different to most of the rest of the world in terms of online payments. While some debit and most credit cards are Visa all of th eother cards are UnionPay. These cannot be used on the internet as far as I know.

In order to pay for something on the internet with a chinese account the individual has to sign up to internet banking at their account. They then click to pay and enter their security information. The money then seems to be sent in pretty much the same way.

I'm finding merchant accounts pretty difficult to find out about in China but they certainly do exist.

An easy option would be to use Alipay. This is similar to paypal but it also seems to operate some form of escrow service. It only seems to be available in chinese so you can try using Google Translate. Alternatively I can help out if needed.

Alipay is a must have payment option if you're doing business in china. Even businesses with merchant accounts will normally offer alipay. Alipay is also very popular on taobao.com (china's answer to eBay)

My wife just said that Alipay offer merchant accounts and they do appear to. [url=http://market.alipay.com/alipay/merchant/index.html]支付宝-首页[/url] my chinese isn't that good so I'd have to ask my wife to help out if you are interested in applying! Also I'm not sure what bank accounts are supported

Finally managed to put up a guide which can be found here [url]http://www.merchantaccounttalk.com/asia-merchant-gateways/83-accepting-online-payments-china.html#post408[/url]

There are actually quite a few different options for accepting payments in china. Alipay is the easiest but you need to have a chinese bank account at ICBC, Bank of China, etc...

If you need any help applying or getting a bank account then please let me know

Andrew