Everything You Need to Know About Cashier Services

We interact with payments every day. We use WeChat Pay to order food, buy groceries, and hail taxis. Payment is ubiquitous and constantly impacts our lives.

As payment becomes more than just a financial tool, becoming a service for everyday life, there's an urgent need for payment to reach end users more conveniently. This is crucial in the mobile internet era.

So how does payment reach users today?

Ruirong Tianxia has been deeply engaged in payment products for years, connecting finance with scenarios through code. We continuously focus on banking capabilities, deeply explore industry financial scenario needs, and help banks reach these scenarios. We have a strong reputation and influence within the industry.

Third-party payment institutions and commercial banks rely on their own cashier products. With the development of the internet, people can use mobile apps to conduct online and offline transactions anytime, anywhere, and cashiers are essential.

So, what is a cashier? As the name suggests, a cashier, also known as a payment counter, is where users transact and pay, the final step in the shopping process. For example, when you're topping up your bus or subway card, you click "Top Up," and the cashier pops up. You can choose from a variety of payment methods, including JD Pay, Alipay, WeChat, UnionPay QuickPass, Apple Pay, and corporate employee cards, as shown in the image below:

WeChat Pay is one of these cashiers. Although it's just one of many, it's used by almost everyone, demonstrating its enormous market share.

A complete cashier process is as follows:

Some may ask, if WeChat and Alipay are cashiers today, what were cashiers like in the past?

Looking at the historical development of cashiers, they've undergone four revolutions: cash registers, POS cashiers, web cashiers, and converged cashiers. Of course, each cashier was not isolated; they existed simultaneously. For example, when you're shopping at a supermarket, you can pay with cash or by scanning a WeChat QR code.

Let's first look at what cash registers look like, following a timeline.

Cash registers

A cash register is relatively easy to understand. It's the counter where you pay and receive goods when you buy something at a supermarket. During the cash register process, customers first withdraw cash, while the cashier calculates the bill, verifies the bill, makes change, and finally checks the bill against the order list.

This process invisibly lengthens the transaction time, making the entire payment process cumbersome and time-consuming. During busy periods, long lines often form at the register.

This is when POS (Point of Sale) (POS) registers became a thing of the past.

POS registers

POS registers are physical terminals equipped with product barcodes, OCR code readers, and a cash register module. They offer both cash and non-cash payment functions, primarily providing product identification, data services, and cash collection for transactions and settlement, as well as bill settlement. POS registers remain the primary payment method for large supermarket chains.

During the checkout process, the cashier module at the POS (China UnionPay, a commercial bank, or a third-party payment institution) reads the information on the bank card or payment QR code using a card reader. The cashier enters the total amount, and the cardholder enters their personal identification information. The cashier module then transmits this information to the card issuer's payment system via China UnionPay, completing the online fund transaction, indicating whether the payment was successful, and printing the corresponding payment receipt.

Web Cashier

With the advent of the PC era, web cashiers emerged. Web cashiers, also known as online banking, PC cashiers, or webpage payments, significantly altered the transaction scenario compared to cash and POS payments: transactions can be carried out in any location, from stores, malls, and shopping malls to individual homes.

Currently, almost all payment companies offer this type of payment product, and web cashiers remain popular. For example, Taobao's early web checkout platform used a payment gateway provided by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). This gateway serves as a web interface between commercial banks' financial network systems and the internet. After Taobao integrated this gateway, Taobao users who selected ICBC payment methods during shopping and checkout were directed to the ICBC checkout page, where subsequent account verification and payment operations were completed.

Converged Checkout

With the advent of the mobile internet era, users can choose from a variety of payment channels to purchase specific services or goods through their phones, tablets, and wearable devices, with funds arriving instantly upon transaction completion. This user-facing payment gateway, known as the converged checkout, makes purchasing and consuming services more convenient.

The most common payment methods include Alipay, WeChat, Tenpay, bank cards, credit cards, WAP payments, QR codes, vouchers, virtual currencies, top-up cards, and SMS collection (both upstream and downstream). These methods offer a richer and more comprehensive range of payment options than previous payment methods.

Let's focus on the following payment types:

Alipay: Alipay is a mobile payment solution that integrates Alipay with a wallet. In addition to general wallet functionality, it also includes built-in wealth management products like Yu'e Bao, Huabei, and Jiebei, as well as comprehensive services such as credit card repayments, transfers, phone top-ups, utility bill payments, electronic IDs, and Zhima Credit ratings.

WeChat Pay: WeChat Pay is Tencent's payment service, and its payment method is essentially the same as Alipay. Unlike Alipay, WeChat Pay is a payment function developed from mobile social networking software and a payment product built on the social connections between people. Currently, it supports QR codes, WAP, PC web pages, red envelopes, in-person payments, game payment SDKs, and WeChat mini-programs, covering multiple payment scenarios, including online official accounts, offline consumption, shopping, travel, entertainment, and virtual top-ups.

WAP Payment: WAP payment, also known as mobile payment, is an early mobile payment prototype following bank card payment and web page payment. It uses technology similar to web payment, but the difference is that the WAP payment experience is closer to the mobile phone experience, while the web payment user experience is closer to the browser experience.

Prepaid card payment: Prepaid cards, also known as user stored-value cards, are a wireless payment method that emerged in the PC era. Users can top up their virtual accounts by calling the prepaid card issuing center or visiting the prepaid card service website. They enter their prepaid card information (usually the card number and password) via the phone or website.

Vouchers: As the name suggests, they are used as a cash substitute. They are typically offered by merchants as a promotional offer for certain commercial activities, and can be used to offset a corresponding percentage of cash used in payments. The issuance and use of vouchers can increase repeat purchases and drive user growth.

This concludes our introduction to cashier services. We hope this has helped you gain a better understanding of cashier services. If you have any questions, please leave a message in the backend. We welcome your feedback.