Ok, make that two mysteries to solve, both which relate to one another on a monetary level.
While I’ve been in China for over 50 days and started work on July 3rd, I finally got my first paycheck on Friday. Well, sort of. The funds were deposited into my account just fine, but on the company intranet site I am unable to view any details and the little bit of information that’s provided says I have no payslip! A few emails were sent off on Friday and I hope to have this remedied by Monday or Tuesday.
By the way, it’s normal to get paid only once per month here in China, thus why Friday was my first payday.
With one mystery hopefully being solved by my company, it’s time to figure out the bigger mystery of the two: why did WeChat fail at two different shops when I attempted to pay today yet it worked two other times?!
A little background on paying for things in China might be helpful for those who are uninitiated. For the longest time this country was a cash-basis economy. And in many ways it still is. Example: Earlier this week when I signed the lease for my apartment (the one at The Summit if you read my last post and didn’t hear which one was picked) I gave the landlord 6,000rmb as a deposit…in cash! Future rent payments and the remaining 3,000rmb will be paid via bank transfer. Personal cheques do not exist here in China at all and I’m not sure if one could order a cashier’s cheque at a bank. Credit cards are not quite as rare as cheques and you can find some places that accept them, mostly around hotels and restaurants that cater to foreigners, but they are not easy to obtain and many hoops need to be jumped through to get one. And if you’re thinking a co-branded airline/hotel/bank card with a generous rewards program would exist here, you’re mostly going to be disappointed. (You can find airline credit cards, but the rewards or points…yeah, I’m keeping my USA based credit cards for those.)
OK, I get it, you’re wondering how can the likes of Alibaba or Taobao or any of the innumerable food delivery sites function without revolving lines of credit. This is where third-party apps come to play. From personal observations, WeChat is the most widely used messaging platform. Everyone uses it for keeping in touch similar to txt and those more adventurous, like my parental units (love you Mom, love you Dad!) have figured out how to use it for free video chatting. Yet WeChat is even more of a platform than that. Once your WeChat account is connected with your Chinese bank issued debit card, you can send money to friends, pay restaurant bills, buy movie or train tickets, and even pay your utilities! App developers just need to hook into the WeChat APIs (application program interface for my non-tech geeky readers out there) if they want to accept payments; WeChat handles everything on the backend regarding moving money between people, stores, app sites, and banks. It’s pretty slick. (OK, the company Tencent is also involved, but I’m not sure where WeChat’s involvement in the payment space ends and Tencent’s begins … so we’ll just keep it as simple as possible.)
Now that there’s money in my bank account, and that bank account is connected to my WeChat account, I figured I could go out and spend some of that hard-earned Chinese yuan! This is where the aforementioned mystery starts to take hold.
In the Times Square neighborhood of Suzhou there are a number of great shopping stores. One of which is called Sundan Life. Think of it like a high end Best Buy or a Nordstrom’s that doesn’t sell clothes. It has electronics, pottery, home appliances, musical instruments, cell phones, video games, a travel department, and even a wine shop. This store was my destination today so I could go buy new clippers with the purpose of cutting my hair; it’s rather shaggy after two months since my last trim. (My 18 year old clippers do not work so good here due to the voltage difference; China uses 220v while the USA is 110.) When I selected the clippers I wanted — really easy choice as there was only one type available, yet 30+ different types of electric razors — the store clerk rang me up. There was not enough money in my WeChat wallet to cover the bill so I changed the money source to be my debit card; the purchase went through just fine. Next up it was time to celebrate this purchase so I headed up to the third floor to browse the wine. I selected a lovely shiraz from southern Australia and paid for that using my WeChat balance. (The wine, a $15 screw-top bottle, is quite delicious, thank you for asking!)
My WeChat balance was running low so I opted to “top up” as dinner was next on the to-do list. I moved 500rmb from my bank to the WeChat account and thought everything was OK. After dinner it was time to pay, so once again I pulled out my phone, fired up the WeChat app and attempted to pay using my balance. It failed and the failure message was in Chinese! Ugggh. The cashier tried again, but that failed a second time. I had cash on my so I paid that way and left. I stopped at one more store on the way home to pick up some stuff for breakfast and attempted to pay with WeChat again; another failure. Annoying! Now the mystery is deep: Why are the purchases failing?
I’m not fully certain, but the only thing I can think of is my balance might not have transferred right away from my bank account. There is a transaction record in the bank account and in WeChat, so it should [hopefully] normalize soon. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow when I attempt to pay again! If it does fail tomorrow, I should remember to take a screenshot of the error so I can attempt to translate it using Google Translate and see if that helps.
Before I end this blog post, I did want to give one warning: Never ever ever use your debit card online to purchase goods or services, especially if you have the option of using a credit card. There are big differences in how fraud prevention happens and, if it does, how you are protected — or not, in the case of a debit card — as a consumer. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do your research and read some articles to inform and protect yourself while shopping online with your debit card. If you do have to use your debit card instead of a credit card, try and use it as a credit card and do NOT enter your personal PIN. If your debit card number and PIN are discovered by a criminal lurking online, your entire account can and will be drained of funds before you even realize what happened.