Maverick China Research

A few months ago we interviewed 20 Chinese online merchants and thought I'd share some of my findings with you here.

The 20 companies I interviewed were chosen at random from a list I compiled a few weeks ago. Although the 20 interviews do not give the data analyzed a solid statistical reliability, we have, however, found that the answers we were given are highly indicative of China's payment industry as a whole.

The participating online merchants in this survey included the sellers of clothing and accessories, electronic tickets and game cards, online education services, software sellers, online bookstores, and others.

Accepted Payment Methods

Out of the 17 online merchants who answered this question 100% accept payment through a third-party payment provider (such as an Alipay stored-value account), 71% accept credit or debit cards (mostly debit cards), and most importantly almost half of all merchants interviewd still use cash on delivery; only 35% accept direct wire transfers.

I have been recently quoted in Anita Davis' article titled Baidu faces massive lawsuit, where Anita describes Baidu's latest challenge:

More than 50 companies are reportedly gearing up to launch a mass-litigation suit against Chinese search engine Baidu for violating anti-trust, fraud and infringement laws. 

According to MIIT’s latest statistics, fixed-line subscribers dropped by 0.92 million in September. China Telecom’s fixed-line subscribers dropped by 1.1 million and China Unicom’s Netcom’s fixed-line subscribers dropped by 0.8 million.

According to MIIT's latest statistics mobile subscribers this month increased by 8 million to reach 624 million. China Mobile's subscribers increased by 7 million to reach 436 million and China Unicom's subscribers increased by 0.7 million to reach 172.5 according data release by China Mobile and China Unicom, respectively.

Approximately 522 billion SMS messages were sent this month.

According to MIIT's latest statistics Personal Handset subscribers this month dropped 0.8 million to 75.2 million.