UPDATE – Apple has since told 9to5Mac that the comment by a local representative was not an official statement and was mistranslated by Caixan. Actually, the ability to add cards to Apple Pay was being made available on a rolling basis throughout the day.
Apple’s mobile payments service, Apple Pay, debuted in China on Thursday, and it appears the sheer numbers of users attempting to sign up during the first 24 hours overloaded the system.
“It kept telling me the phone ‘cannot connect to Apple Pay’ or the verification for the card is not available when I was linking a bankcard,” said one iPhone owner, who did eventually link the card after several attempts but then “could not even open the app” to register another.
Mashable reported 38 million credit and debit cards had been registered with Apple Pay by 5PM on launch day, 10M of them registered within the first hour. (Apple’s partnership with payment processor UnionPay potentially gives it access to a amazing five billion credit cards.)
Caixin Online quoted an Apple spokesperson who acknowledged there were issues, saying it was due to too many people trying to sign up and “would not last a second day,” which suggest Apple may have underestimated the demand for the payments service. A number of users on the Chinese microblogging site, Weibo, also reported issues when attempting to get their bank cards verified on Apple Pay.
China is Apple’s second largest revenue producer, and demand was expected to be heavy once the service began allowing users to link to their bank cards. Apple has deals with 19 of the biggest financial institutions in China, offering compatibility with 80% of the credit and debit cards issued in the country.
While the Apple Pay system may have been overwhelmed by signups on its first day of availability, the service has a ways to go before it can catch up with the mobile payments leader in the country Alipay. That service reportedly has 400M users. However, the first day signup numbers for the new service should help ease any concerns observers had about Apple’s ability to break into the Chinese payments market.
