Does any web professionals know a good merchant solution for unionpay?

[lunaprey]

Hi everyone,

I have a small web development company here in China, and I have a client who wishes to accept Unionpay. I've looked at paypal, but their website seems broken with Chinese accounts and they aren't responding to our tickets. Alipay will only allow you to apply and then they call you, but they haven't returned my call, I'm guessing because I don't speak Chinese very well.

So yeah, can anyone provide some advice or resources?

Thanks,

Luna

[imron]

How good is your Chinese reading? I don't think you'll find much information about it in English.

This page seems to have a few links which are useful (if you read Chinese), including this document which provides an overview of their online payment solution (again all in Chinese).

In a nutshell you include their "NetPayClient" software on your website (which has support for a host of different OS and programming languages) and that takes care of the transaction and reports success or failure to your site.

The document also lists the steps involved to getting payments set up which basically boils down to:

Sign various agreements and pay various fees (a one off 4,000 RMB fee for the merchant software, and 3,000 RMB/yearly membership fee).

Supply copies of your business certificates.

Download the merchant software.

Install and test the software on your site.

Begin accepting payments on your site.

Presumably as it's your client who wants to accept UnionPay, you will need to provide their details and probably you'd need to pay the same fees again for each new client wanting similar functionality. As you can see, it also adds a non-trivial cost to the development of the site.

[lunaprey]

Wow, imron, that's horrible news!! Paypal only asks for 3% of all the money made, and alipay only wants like 2-3%. No competent company would choose to pay such high fees. I think this explains why the language is only in Chinese. This seems to be a scheme for computer illiterate Chinese companies who wish to come online.

Thanks for the source though, but yeah, If I had to ask each client to pay 7k, I'd make no money.

[imron]

Paypal only asks for 3% of all the money made, and alipay only wants like 2-3%

Hah, according to that document, that was just the setup costs. They still want 1.8% per transaction too!

[roddy]

"No competent company would choose to pay such high fees."

Until they actually become the low fees - draw a graph, the lines cross at 250,000* if you ignore the software purchase.

*I think.

[lunaprey]

This is just evidence the Chinese tech industry is undeveloped and has plenty of room for companies to come in and charge more reasonable prices. You know, with less than 250,000 RMB, one could start their own merchant company. I'd like my web solutions company to do just that in the future to be honest. Paypal and Alipay seem to be the only legitimate solutions right now, and Paypal is broken for China, and Alipay doesn't work with non-chinese-speaking developers.

[roddy]

Good luck with the unique business opportunity that mysteriously nobody else has taken advantage of.

[imron]

You know, with less than 250,000 RMB, one could start their own merchant company

I seriously doubt this, but feel free to prove me wrong

[Matty]

I'd try (and plan to try) to work with AliPay, most people will know and and associated some level of trust to it since it's also used by PayPal.

However if you're unable to work with it due to language issues, it may be worth getting a Chinese programmer to help you this one time. That's my plan anyway when I eventually get to it.

[lunaprey]

Matty, yes, It sounds to be the best solution. Now I just have to find a Chinese developer who speaks English.

[Matty]

Oh, geeze... hard choices, to script something up for him for cash or....

Oh well, I'll just be nice today I guess:

http://global.alipay...ice/service.htm

Or more specifically:

https://globalprod.a...rationGuide.htm

I find it interesting these documents have a "Confidential" water print on them.

Not sure if it's exactly what you need since it's more targeted at global transactions, but if it's not I'm sure it would be pretty close, maybe as close as just 1 changed URL.

Also in theory the first download on the following page contains code samples in various languages, I've not looked yet though.

http://club.alipay.com/read.php?tid=9976972

[roddy]

Lunaprey, how are you getting on with this?