[Chaebixi]

> Why hasn't US achieved the level of digital payment smoothness that China has been able to?

Because it already achieved that "level of digital payment smoothness" with credit cards?

> I think we need to be careful about attributing all of the China's success and splurge of VC funding to IP theft, hostile domestic market for foreign players, etc. China is succeeding because it really wants to.

> It's important to recognize China's technological prowess. They have similarly taken a lead in bioengineering.

I attribute it to having an authoritarian government that's not afraid to direct the economy. The US, on the other hand, has more-or-less adopted an ideology that specifically rejects that kind of government economic direction.

[nostrademons]

The way credit cards work in the U.S. is incredibly behind how they work in every other developed nation.

I studied abroad in New Zealand in 2004. Even back then, everything was chip-and-pin, with computerized machines at every merchant to take orders. I never had to hand my NZ bank card to a merchant, just insert it into an EFTPOS reader and enter my PIN. My American credit card needed a swipe, signature, and handover to the cashier, because unlike in the U.S, they actually checked signatures in NZ.

Meanwhile, in the U.S, we just moved to chip cards 2 years ago, and just yesterday I had a POS reader reject it for "chip malfunction - swipe instead". The major merchants just stopped collecting signatures last month, though cashiers have been ignoring the signature for decades now.

I blame the innovator's dilemma and first-mover disadvantage, like sanxiyn's comment mentions. The U.S. has a "good enough" system that everyone's adopted; it's not worth it to force everyone to adapt to a system that's a little better. Same goes for many other broken systems in the U.S. - electricity, measurement, public education, public transportation, health insurance, etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

I haven't handed my card to a merchant in the states since I got back a year and a half ago. UnionPay card use was always annoying in China because in addition to your PIN, you would need to sign as well, it was like the worst of all worlds. I'm not really into QR either (tap via RF is the right solution), but it works better than what they had before.

[fspeech]

> Because it already achieved that "level of digital payment smoothness" with credit cards?

Whether the two are equivalent depends on the transaction costs of the two models.

According to the Economist: "Visa and MasterCard extract over 0.10 cents of net income for every dollar of payments. Ant takes a smaller cut, of less than 0.03 cents." https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726713-ant-financi...

Perhaps more importantly I've seen estimates that Chinese banks lose $20 billion yearly in credit card fees due to the mobile payments.

[Chaebixi]

> Whether the two are equivalent depends on the transaction costs of the two models.

I don't think we're not talking about exact, feature-for-feature, cost-for-cost equivalence.

Both these systems have the same or similar "level of digital payment smoothness" from the customer perspective. At least with credit cards, those fees are on the merchant side not part of the customer experience equation.

[fspeech]

If one tries to pay when merchants don't eat the fees, e.g., paying real estate tax online where the county tax collector charges a 2+% convenience fee for credit cards, one definitely would see the difference. In other cases where merchants eat the fees, they are just passed on to the buyers, though many cards do rebate their holders part of the fees as "rewards".