Mobile payment is popular, and you have a new business after each code scanning payment.

"It is very convenient to collect money with this QR code now. I will give you the money directly after scanning, and you don't have to change it. " In front of a community fruit stand in Cheng Nan, the owner is introducing a plastic card with a QR code printed on it.

Nowadays, mobile payment has become a universal existence in China. From star-rated hotels and chain restaurants to roadside restaurants or pancake stalls, you will see QR codes or code scanners.

Now even the courier who receives the courier at home will ask the last sentence, "Do you pay by WeChat or Alipay?"

For more than 20 years, credit cards have never left a few consumer places in China. Within two years, mobile payment is almost as popular as cash.

During the Spring Festival of 20 15, 200 million bank cards were bound by WeChat payment. But it and Alipay become the standard of offline payment, not just Tencent and Alibaba.

Their popularity is inseparable from the two-dimensional code covered with hard plastic on the counter or the payment machine used by the clerk to scan your mobile phone.

Wechat and Alipay let people tie their bank cards to their mobile phones, but it is these machines that really make mobile payment a daily thing.

Most of these devices come from third-party payment service providers, such as Doraemon, Qian Fang, Kellogg and Lacarra. They basically support WeChat or Alipay payment at the same time, and many of them can also collect money from JD.COM, QQ wallet and Baidu glutinous rice.

Participants can get a handling fee, but not much.

Whether consumers pay by WeChat or Alipay, businesses need to pay a certain fee for this convenience.

Wechat and Alipay open special payment QR codes for merchants, with rates of 0.6% and 0.55% respectively. However, compared with the rates provided by service providers, their fees are still too high to support a QR code to complete the payment of multiple payment apps, so merchants still choose the services provided by service providers.

Most service providers only charge merchants 0.38%, and very few service providers charge merchants 0.6%. This means that every time the user pays 1 1,000 yuan, the merchant will divide 3.8 yuan. After receiving the money, the service provider needs to pay Alipay 0.2%, and the remaining 0. 18% is his own.

Compared with credit card consumption, this rate allows merchants to pay less handling fees.

Take a tea shop with good business as an example. Suppose you earn 6.5438+10,000 yuan a month, and the commission left by the service provider is only 654.38+ 080 yuan.

In addition, the 0.2% rate of Alipay and WeChat is a prerequisite. For example, Alipay requires all stores of service providers to trade more than 1000 orders every day for a whole month. The daily 1000 bill is not a very low figure. If not, the service provider will pay 0.3% of the monthly income to Alipay-every100000 yuan to 80 yuan.

Moreover, there is sometimes low-price competition among service providers.

The owner of a laver-covered rice shop downstairs in Beijing Jianwai SOHO said that he had used this QR code to collect money for half a year and had changed the QR code once. At first, he used Alipay's word of mouth, because it was being promoted at that time, and word of mouth was free of charge. But then word of mouth began to collect money. Now he uses the QR code provided by the koala business circle to pay, because there is no handling fee.

"The rebate rate of 0. 18% is actually a considerable sum of money, but only if you have to accept it. Now every family in this market is doing this. " Chang Dawei, CEO of Doraemon, said this when referring to the fee income.

At the same time, they don't think WeChat and Alipay can make money from payment. Chang Dawei told us that WeChat's appeal to push mobile payment is not to make so much money, and WeChat may not make much money or even lose money in this matter.

The money posted by WeChat and Alipay is also one of the incomes of Dora Bao and Qian Fang.

In April last year, WeChat launched the Spark Program to subsidize service providers, and invested a total of 654.38 billion yuan in marketing funds to subsidize cooperative service providers. Each service provider can get a maximum incentive of 500,000 yuan per month. In addition, the WeChat payment team also provides material and technical support for service providers. Alipay also launched a similar incentive plan in August last year, and plans to invest 654.38 billion yuan in cash within three years to encourage service providers to attract more store customers for themselves.

20 16 is also the year with the largest subsidy.

Last year, double 12 was the biggest subsidy on Alipay. Alipay not only promotes the double 12 activities in restaurants and supermarkets, but also promotes the random reduction activities of the day in amusement parks, parking lots, gas stations and scenic spots.

In fact, every time users pay by mobile phone, they get the opportunity to reduce 5 gross 1 yuan, which comes from the subsidies of WeChat and Alipay.

In addition to paying subsidies, WeChat and Alipay can also get a small share of the handling fee. If they only pay with the balance, they can get 0.2%. However, if the user is bound to the credit card express payment, Alipay and WeChat also need to pay the card issuer.

There was another way to make money, but now it has been banned by the central bank.

If you only follow the rates left by WeChat and Alipay, these service providers won't make much money. But there used to be gray ways to increase income.

After consumers scan the code on Alipay and WeChat, the funds will generally go to the merchant's bank card one day later. Therefore, many companies that provide payment services prepay their own funds, so that businesses can get the money faster. Charge merchants a handling fee higher than 0.38% to earn the rate difference.

This behavior is classified as "Qing Er". Consumers' money is not directly transferred from Alipay or WeChat to the merchant's bank card. The money first goes to the service provider's own account and then to the merchant's account. The danger of this is that if the funded company runs away with money, the business will lose money.

Previously, a large number of companies were doing this business, whether it was traditional credit card payment or scanning code payment now.

However, at the beginning of the year, the central bank issued the Notice on Cleaning up and Rectifying the Illegal "Aggregation Payment" Business, requiring these service providers, as outsourcing agencies for acquiring bills, not to directly participate in the capital settlement and settlement of merchant accounts. Violators will face the penalty of revoking the payment license or not renewing the license when it expires.

Some companies were severely punished by the central bank. A more recent example is that Tonglian Payment and UnionPay Business were fined more than 48 million in July last year.

The handling fee is not much, and the service providers have gone to provide value-added services to the store.

When you open WeChat, you may occasionally find that some accounts that you are not actively following have been added to the WeChat list. They may come from a restaurant, a tea shop, or a service provider of WeChat and Alipay.

"What Qian Fang finally did was actually O2O, but what we want to do more as a business drainage than O2O is to help them retain repeat customers by providing these corporate services to stores." Li Yinghao, CEO of Qian Fang, explained the current idea of providing value-added services to stores.

In order to attract customers to pay, now they focus on helping stores bring customers and increase their income.

Help shops stick to consumers, and they have done membership services.

For example, in Qian Fang's service, the store obtains the exclusive code, and the user automatically becomes a member of the store when scanning the code to pay. In this way, the channel connecting consumers is directly sold to merchants.

Qian Fang also launched a special reward card. Like the credit card issued by the tea shop, you can exchange ten chapters for a cup of milk tea. You can get a certain discount if you complete a certain amount of consumption.

Qian Fang is close to the main page and scorecard page of the business application.

In addition, Qian Fang, Doraemon and other service providers also provide stored-value card services. Shops can choose whether to issue such stored-value cards according to their own needs. This kind of stored value card is most common in some barbershops, pedicure shops and beauty salons.

It can accumulate deposit funds for these shops. The salesman of Doraemon will also recommend this service when selling. He will directly recommend that you spend 200 yuan a month to try out the membership stored-value card service, and repeatedly emphasize that this service can bring deposit funds to the store and increase income.

Dora Bao's Business App Member Management Page

These services are essentially a connection between service providers and consumers through QR codes, and resell service providers to merchants.

Provide convenient internal management tools for stores.

In addition to meeting the convenience of payment, service providers are also emphasizing their easy-to-manage reconciliation system. Let customers solve the reconciliation problem in an App. Employees in the store can see the running water in the store as long as they download the App of the corresponding service provider, log in to the account, and receive payment information when collecting money.

In this way, store users don't have to check the income back and forth between different payment tools, and all the income and the frequency of consumers' visits to the store can be directly viewed on the App.

This is what we learned from small shops, and they think it is the most practical service function.

Let the store put in marketing advertisements.

This service is a function that Dora Bao likes to talk about. It provides advertising recommendation service for stores based on Doraemon's existing consumer data.

These ads will appear as patch ads at the bottom of the payment page. These data mainly come from the data generated by consumers after scanning Doraemon's code payment, including the number of consumption, the most frequented shops, the most frequently consumed places and so on.

This kind of service is actually that the service provider wants to exchange consumer behavior data for the income of the merchant.

After scanning the QR code provided by Doraemon, a patch advertisement will pop up on the payment page.

They also want to provide financial services for small and micro shops.

However, at present, this service is not dominated by service providers. Both Dora Bao and Kelaile are talking about consumer finance, but what they are talking about now is actually to cooperate with some financial institutions to recommend financial products to shopping customers on the platform.

Only a few companies, such as Lacarra, have relevant licenses to sell wealth management products or issue loans to earn interest. Other companies can only promote wealth management products made by others.

It is not easy to ask small businesses to pay for services.

The original price of this service is 2499 yuan per year, but the boss said that he saw a discount of 1 at the end of last year, so he bought this service when he was not in 250 yuan.

But it's hard to say whether he will renew his contract after the service fee expires.

In the business circle 10 shops we interviewed, most shops rarely use value-added services except the QR code provided by service providers. When talking about this QR code, the manager of a fried chicken shop downstairs in Jianwai SOHO told us with great interest how convenient this payment method is for them, but when asked if he would use its membership service, he took out his mobile phone and looked at it, saying, "With this function, you can see who comes more often, but we don't need it because we have our own membership system."

In the matter of value-added services, service providers want to do more and more things, which also means that the input cost is increasing.

When interviewing the duo Lai Bao and Clarer, the interview list placed at the front desk of their company shows the interview list in recent days, most of which are technical positions. According to the "20 16 China Programmers' Professional Salary Report" released by Geek Park last year, the average monthly salary of Beijing programmers reached 1.2 million yuan.

It is more difficult for service providers to make some money in this market.

Now Meituan and UnionPay will also come in to grab business.

Soon, in addition to WeChat and Alipay, new payment services will appear in the store.

Wang Wei, CEO of Kelaile, told Curiosity Daily that Meituan is also preparing to push this QR code payment on a large scale. He is worried that the arrival of the American delegation will directly affect his catering business. Because most of these businesses are users of Meituan.

Meituan Dianping is an important food and beverage entrance, and the daily activities of Meituan Dianping add up to 35 million users. In 20 15, public comment also made flash payment for mobile payment products, but this business was not done.

Last September, Meituan also acquired Qianbaobao. It is a partner of China UnionPay, and has obtained licenses such as Internet payment, telephone payment and bank card receipt. Compared with these service providers, it is fully qualified and faces less policy risks.

Moreover, the promotion of QR code payment by Meituan is not just about earning fees.

The projects it is investing in now are actually in direct competition with the value-added services that service providers have to do.

Meituan Cloud, the basic Internet service provided by Meituan 20 13, now mainly promotes services such as catering cloud and hotel cloud, all of which are solutions for these enterprises. At present, most of Meituan's investments are invested in startups that provide services for businesses, such as catering cashier system, food bank health and so on.

Meituan has obtained a small loan license and can collect interest from small businesses.

These are all things that service providers want to do, but Meituan can do better than them in everything.

Another once slow-moving but influential competitor, UnionPay, will also join the ranks of making QR codes.

In the past, UnionPay used to push credit cards. In order to get back the mobile payment market, Alipay and WeChat have been pushing NFC contactless payment tools such as China UnionPay Express, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, but they all need the support of specific mobile phone hardware and are not popular.

Now UnionPay is going to make a QR code. Banks have cooperated with UnionPay. China Merchants Bank and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, two banks with active credit card business, respectively launched their own digital payment services.

According to the usual experience, UnionPay's scan code payment will at least appear in various places where credit cards can be swiped. Since banks themselves are involved, there is no need to share interest with credit card issuers like WeChat and Alipay. They will get more handling fees.

However, regardless of the outcome of the competition, it is certain that mobile payment will stay.