According to a new release from yStats.com, a leading secondary market research company based in Hamburg, Germany, mobile payments prosper across the Asian markets. The report, titled “Asia-Pacific Online Payment Methods: First Half 2017” also sheds light on the preferences of consumers in this region when it comes to payment options in E-Commerce and their concerns regarding the security of online and mobile payments.
China, India and Indonesia rank the highest in the world in share of Internet users interested in mobile payments as of early 2017, according to a global survey cited in this report by yStats.com. China’s mobile payment value is already a thirteen-digit figure in Euros, and is projected to rise higher still at a strong growth rate in 2017. Third-party mobile payment providers, such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, not only benefit from the mobile payment boom in their domestic market, but also expand their reach abroad to serve Chinese consumers travelling around Asia and Europe. Likewise, in advanced economies, such as South Korea and Australia, mobile payments are on the rise, driven by factors such as speed and convenience.
Regarding online payments, consumers in Asia-Pacific show some variance in terms of their preferred methods. In Japan and South Korea, credit card is the strong leader among the payment methods used when shopping online, and in Australia, card payments accounted for nearly one-half of all online payments in 2016, according to market data cited in yStats.com’s report. At the same time, online shoppers in China prefer to pay with E-Wallets rather than with cards, and among Southeast Asian nations cash on delivery and bank transfer are the top payment methods in E-Commerce, although surveys also show that online shopping is seen in these countries as the main purpose of having a credit card.
Despite the recent innovations in authentication methods, shoppers from Asia-Pacific find safety of payment transactions to be of utmost priority when buying via computers or mobile devices. More than 50% of digital payment users in South Korea protect their transactions with a password, while only a single-digit share choose biometrics such as fingerprint scans. On the global level, around one-third of surveyed consumers stated that payment security matters most to them when deciding to use mobile payments.
