436,000 Chinese tourists visited New Zealand in the 12-months to February - more than any country bar Australia. Chinese are also our primary source of international students and one of our largest migrant groups. Yet whilst they are very important, Chinese consumers remain largely misunderstood by many New Zealand businesses, who stand to benefit by better servicing their needs. Making just a few simple tweaks to align with how Chinese prefer to purchase products is an easy way to grow both sales and advocacy.

For anyone who has visited China since 2016, the prevalence of mobile payments is likely to have stunned them. Chinese consumers now spend 90 times more on their smartphones than Americans according to Forrester Research. Everything from restaurants, to clothes, to hotels, to borrowing a bike is paid for with the simple scan of a QR code in a payment app - a different process than contactless payments at home. A year ago, mobile payments accounted for 45% of purchases in McDonalds' 2,400 China restaurants, and usage has soared since. There are vendors who no longer accept cash and cards anymore and even beggars have a personal QR code handy for passers-by.

As recently as 2010, China was predominantly a cash-based society. It was not uncommon for Chinese to stow stacks of red bills under the mattress as they had little trust or patience for the banking system. Credit card companies worked hard to change this by providing countless incentives to lure consumers onto plastic, yet just 15-20% have ever signed up. The majority of consumers leapfrogged credit cards to go straight to the much more convenient and widely accepted mobile payment apps.

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Smartpay Holdings Ltd. published this content on 23 April 2018 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 22 April 2018 22:46:05 UTC