WeChat has evolved with the market and is no longer just for adorable stickers and risque GIFs. The app now provides much more than just basic communication. WeChat's mobile applications include features that allow users to top up their phone, buy plane and train tickets and more.

It used to be that you had to buy a physical top-up card from a street vendor or go to a China Mobile, Telecom or Unicom store to recharge your phone. Now you can do it on WeChat once you’ve setup online payments! First you need to connect your bank card to your WeChat account in order to make mobile payments.

Mobile Payment

Mobile payment is the foundation from which all of the other features are built on. To activate “WeChat Pay”, you must link your bank card to your WeChat account. Here’s how:

1) Tap “Me”

2) Tap “Wallet”

3) Tap the Menu button in the top right

 

4) Enter your name and card number, and follow the rest of the instructions, which are in English

Be sure to enter your name EXACTLY as it is registered with your bank card. Typically banks type all characters in capital letters, and you’ll need to as well. You’ll also need your passport number handy.

If you are unable to activate WeChat Pay, you may not have activated online banking with your bank. If you haven’t done that already, be sure to get that done. Have a Chinese friend go with you if you need help.

Once you’ve setup mobile payment, tapping “Wallet” on the main Wallet page. This will take you to your Wallet balances and active cards and you can start to take advantage of the other features WeChat's Wallet app has to offer.

Keep in mind that once you have one bank card setup, you will not be able to change your name – your WeChat Pay account will always be linked to the name you entered to setup your first bank account. Intuitively this doesn’t seem to be a problem – all of your bank accounts are in the same name, right?

Actually, this could be a problem. When you open a bank account in China, your name could be registered differently with different banks. The order your name is entered into their system matters: John Smith may have a bank account at Construction Bank of China as “Smith John” because the teller that opened this account put his surname first. A Bank of China teller however, may have entered his name as “John Smith” into the system, thinking that in western countries, the first name comes first.

For Chinese people this is not a problem because there is only one way to write Chinese names: 张三 will always be 张三. Nobody will ever register an account as 三张.

So at the end of the day, John Smith can ONLY link one of his bank cards to WeChat Pay, and any future cards he adds MUST have the same name order that his first card was linked to. If you try to add another card to your account that doesn’t have an identical name, you may encounter an error message.

If you continue to receive an error message when attempting to register, there’s nothing much you can do from WeChat. In order to rectify the issue, you need to get in touch with Tencent, who may not even be able to solve the issue in the end.

Topping Up Your Phone

For those of up on a top-up mobile plan, our Chinese cell phones seem to always run out of money at the most inopportune times. Then, we find ourselves rushing around the city desperately looking for a top-up card. Luckily, WeChat's top-up app makes adding money to your phone a whole lot easier! Here is how to do it:

1) Go to your Wallet

2) Tap the circled button

 

3) Enter your phone number, follow the instructions and voila, you’ve just topped up your mobile phone.

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Keywords: WeChat phone top up WeChat phone payment