How low are the fee costs for payment channels?
According to WeChat Pay’s official statement, the cost rate for their “strength channel” is 0.1%. However, Minsheng Bank claims that the WeChat Pay channel is 0% rate. In other words, since WeChat Pay currently charges merchants a 0.6% rate, WeChat’s minimum profit is 0.5%. The 0.1% rate for individual withdrawals should basically just cover costs. All things considered, it’s still relatively advisable to use UnionPay Cloud QuickPass (YunShanFu): merchants enjoy discounted rates, and users basically pay nothing. If you use certain bank channels, some banks have effectively offered unlimited 0% rate promotions. For example, the once very popular ICBC payment code was widely used for credit card cash advances precisely because it was 0% rate for a long time. Currently, many WeChat Pay service providers are expanding to merchants at a cost rate of 0.2%, with the remainder being the provider’s profit. Based on this, some WeChat Pay service providers actually went public. Now that the unified rate is 0.6%, it’s probably purely because WeChat wants to make more money.