mobile phone payment in China

[hermes]

With my research trip to China I am beginning to feel that mobile phone payment is really the way to go with my future chinese eccommerce endeavors. Everyone has a mobile and I notice that many chinese eccommerce sites offer mobile phone payment options. I have even managed to purchase things myself online (movies) here with my chinese mobile. Going the bank route etc. seems deadly complicated by comparrison. But I wonder, does anyone know any payment processors that could handle the mobile phone payment for my own chinese eccommerce venture?

[bill]

I'm not sure about the China market, but in Japan one of the biggest reasons that online payments took off here was that they were vetted and approved by the telecom (in my case NTT). People trusted that the telecoms would only approve legitimate business ventures and wouldn't be scamming them. This sort of trust model continues today. A lot of mobile payments are added directly to the phone bill. This is important in a country that doesn't have stellar credit card penetration.

The China market obviously works differently...but if I were looking for something like this in that market I'd start looking from the top down. You want to go with the most legitimate looking solution possible. You want a big name behind the system.

[tntpower]

There are only two mobile phone carriers in China: China mobile communication and china unicom. All mobile payments are processed by this two companies.

To deploy cell payment in your application, you need to be an authorized user. The minimum requirement is you need a ICP license. It is pretty hard to get a ICP license right now since the government has strict regulations on it recently. But you can pay some agents to do that. They have their channels and resources.

You can also use many other companies's turnkey mobile payment solutions. These companies, usually large ones (like sina.com.cn, sohu.com) or those who have been this industry for years. Unfortunately, you also need to be a licensed ICP.

Each provice can issue ICP license. It's hard to get a Beijing's ICP license while probably not so hard in other province.

Hopefully it is helpful to you.

[hermes]

thanks tntpower. really informative. I dont think I have the time or resources to try and register etc. myself. So, I would be very interested in using one of these agents. I have no chinese language skills to converse with them - but I can get a chinese native speaker to help me. I am in Shanghai now - so am well placed to get this sorted out.

[edited by: bill at 7:26 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2005]
[edit reason] see sticky [/edit]

[hermes]

Actually - I have done more research on this ICP license - there is no way I can go down that road - just too much hassle. And my site is not hosted in China so it is not absolutely necessary.

[edited by: bill at 7:27 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2005]
[edit reason] see sticky [/edit]

[tcpn8]

Hermes,
you might want to just search in google for "wireless payments in china" their is a fair amount of good information in the top couple results......