Set up Alipay and WeChat Pay — on your home wifi

China runs on two apps. Alipay and WeChat Pay sit under nearly every payment in the country: the metro gates, the fruit cart, the temple ticket, the dumpling place with no English menu. Foreign Visa and Mastercards link to both now, which is the biggest change of the last few years for anyone visiting.

The catch is timing. Setting them up is easy on your home wifi and genuinely unpleasant in an arrival hall at 9pm, on roaming data, while a shop assistant waits.

What to do, in order

• Install both apps. Not one. Alipay is the better visitor experience and works almost everywhere; WeChat Pay covers the places it doesn't, and WeChat itself is the messaging app half the country lives in. You will use both.
• Add your card in each. Alipay: Me → Bank Cards → Add. WeChat: Me → Services → Wallet. Card number, expiry, then a verification step — usually an SMS to your home number, sometimes a call from your bank.
• Passport verification. Both apps ask for it when you link a foreign card. Have the passport out; the camera step wants it flat and unglared.
• Test with a real payment. The step people skip and regret. A ¥1 transfer to a travelling friend, or a top-up inside one of the apps' own mini-programs, proves the card actually authorises — before the airport does the proving for you.

What it costs

Paying with a foreign card in Alipay is fee-free on small amounts. Cross a threshold around ¥200 on some transaction types and a service fee appears. Across two weeks the difference is real money, so copy the local habit: small payments go through the app all day, and the big ones — hotels, long train runs — often go on the card directly anyway.

Cash is still the backup. Small vendors, older terminals and the woman selling lychees off a cart don't care which super-app you have, which is why the ¥500–1,000 in small notes is its own item on the must-do list.

The two mistakes

First: installing one app and reckoning it covers everything. It doesn't — scan-to-pay stickers at some stalls name one platform or the other, and the mini-programs (metro codes, museum tickets, food delivery) live inside one app or the other specifically.

Second: verifying but never testing. An app that installed cleanly can still fail its first real transaction — a card that wants a second confirmation, a limit you didn't know about. Find out in your kitchen, not at the gate.