
Bots and WeChat of the West - supster
https://sapan.svbtle.com/the-reality-of-bots
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marme
wechat first gather a lot of users by building a great chat app. Starting by
copying whatsapp then extending it to be much more while seamlessly linking to
other tencent social media accounts which includes qq one the largest instant
messaging community in the world by virtue of the fact that everyone in china
already used qq so switching over to wechat was easy because you could reuse
your username and login.

People started moving to wechat payments because they were offering it for
free and started giving out free money and gift for depositing money into your
wechat wallet. They spent a lot of money to get users to add their bank
account to their wechat, there is no way they have recouped those costs yet.
They are also charging little to no fees for sending and receiving money, way
less than what banks charge so they cant be making much if any money off it
yet, they are waiting until adoption of wechat payments becomes ubiquitous and
then will jack up the fees. The hold near monopoly within china and are
protected from outside competitors by china strict financial regulations that
dont allow foreign companies to run banking and payment services in china.
Paypal currently runs their service in china through a chinese based partner
that process the actual transactions and paypal just provides the front end
app and api

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paradite
To me it seems like Wechat is more like a natural successor of QQ (to get rid
of the huge burden of the ecosystem) rather than a Whatsapp clone.

In terms of functionality, QQ has most of Whatsapp covered. What makes you
think that Wechat copied Whatsapp?

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mathattack
I think that "Logged in Users with Saved Payment Information" is very big. It
takes a lot of the friction out of WeChat commerce.

