How widely-accepted are mobile payment methods in China’s brick-and-mortar shops?

Mobile payment methods like Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s Tenpay account for a huge portion of China’s online transactions. But do these new payment methods have the same kind of traction on offline shops and restaurants? Chinese tech news site Techweb recently conducted a survey of 1,607 businesses on a busy pedestrian street in Wuhan to find out.
Techweb broke its survey down into four shop categories: clothing, jewelry, food and beverage, and miscellaneous. All told, the site looked at 1,047 clothing shops, 310 food and beverage shops and restaurants, 49 jewelry shops and 201 miscellaneous shops (places like beauty salons, karaoke parlors, and movie theaters). In total, just 617 of the shops – 38 percent of the total surveyed – accepted mobile payments.
Here are the breakdowns by category and payment method:
Of course, this is only from one major shopping street in one Chinese city, so one shouldn’t go overboard in drawing conclusions. But it certainly seems like mobile payment has quite a ways to go before it’s widely accepted in the offline world.
Photo by Vodafone Germany
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