Comments on: China does e-commerce

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:30:58 +0000

I can remember when e-commerce took off in Japan way back when. Japanese like Chinese did not have credit cards or credit histories and all transactions took place with cash.

But, Japan caught on, of course and now there is no stopping them.

China will catch on as well...it will just take time.

Thanks for you comments, Tim.

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:30:30 +0000

I barely remember when e-commerce took off in Japan way back when. Japanese like Chinese did not have credit cards or credit histories and all transactions took place with cash.

But, Japan caught on, of course and now there is no stopping them.

China will catch on as well...it will just take time.

Thanks for you comments, Tim.

By: Tim Stay

Tim Stay — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 23:24:09 +0000

I had a similar problem with an online business I had in Brazil. Here in the US it grew great and was very profitable. When we duplicated it in Brazil, it languished, even though the market research told us that there was market demand for our service. The reason? We only operated via credit card and few Brazilians have them. The only other process was a cumbersome process of going to the bank, getting a type of money order that had a numerical certificate and then the user could enter that in. We were never able to get it to work that well.

It think that there would be great opportunity for someone to figure out an alternative to credit card payments that could be handled on line for these countries that don't have high credit card usage. Some flavor of paypal, maybe?

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 15:26:22 +0000

Thanks for these comments, Samantha.

Hey, that's my wife!

As I have mentioned before, Sam is a native Chinese who also holds an MBA from a US school. I think she might have some insight here.

Thanks, sweety!

By: Samantha

Samantha — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:55:54 +0000

I agree. Chinese will eventually catch up but it’ll take them much longer than American did. Chinese people don’t feel comfortable to be in debt. Most of them have savings accounts in the bank, and buy things only when they have cash.

Another reason that the credit cards business won’t take off soon is that most Chinese don’t have credit history. It’s hard for the banks to lend money to people without credit. Will you lend money to people you don’t know?

So, if you’re thinking of doing business in China, forget about credit card payment. Of course, in some big cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing, credit cards are getting more and more recognized and accepted, but for the majority of the country, people don’t even know what a credit card is.