If you run a shop, a department store or an outlet outside China, Chinese shoppers are back on your street. Not in the same numbers as 2019, and not with the same habits. They book differently, they pay differently, and they decide where to spend money before they board the plane. Most retailers still prepare for the version of the Chinese tourist they met eight years ago: a coach group, a UnionPay terminal, a printed leaflet in Chinese at the entrance. That version is gone.
This article is about the practical side. Payment, tax refund, staff, Xiaohongshu, guides, and what is left of the daigou trade. Not theory.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency. I have lived in Shanghai since 2012 and I spend part of my year with European and American retailers who want Chinese travellers to walk into their store, so this piece comes from till receipts and store visits, not from a press release.
Where Chinese outbound travel really stands in 2026
Start with the numbers, because the guesswork in this market is expensive.
China’s National Immigration Administration reported on 10 July 2026 that border checkpoints handled 369 million cross-border movements in the first half of the year, up 10.8% year on year and a record. Mainland residents accounted for 176 million of those movements, up 10.7%. Those figures count both exits and returns, so divide roughly by two to get trips.
For the full year, the 2026 outbound traveller survey published by Aurora Mobile’s research arm puts the outbound traveller pool above 220 million people for 2026, with mainland resident border crossings heading towards 450 million. The China Tourism Academy annual outbound report for 2025-2026 says volume is now close to the 2019 level. Volume, not behaviour.
Three details from that same 2026 survey matter more to a shopkeeper than the headline:
- Travellers under 25 are close to 40% of the outbound pool. They travel in pairs or alone, not in groups of forty.
- Clothing, footwear and bags remain the number one shopping category abroad.
- High-income travellers go abroad more than twice a year, which makes them repeat customers if you keep the contact.
One more figure worth reading twice. In the China Tourism Academy report, Chinese travellers’ satisfaction scores for overseas transport, dining, accommodation and attractions all fell, by 1.5%, 0.7%, 0.8% and 0.8%. They are travelling more and enjoying it slightly less. Service quality is the gap, and a store that gets service right stands out faster than it did in 2019.
Accept Alipay and WeChat Pay, and set them up properly
This is the first thing I check when I walk into a client’s store, and it is the thing most often half done.
Chinese travellers pay with the app they use at home. WeChat Pay’s cross-border service now covers 78 countries and regions and settles in 36 currencies, according to the figures Tencent released at its January 2026 developer conference. Payments made abroad by Chinese travellers on WeChat grew more than 60% over the year. Italy saw monthly transaction value grow over 300%, Malaysia over 90%. Alipay runs a similar outbound network across more than 70 countries and regions. The infrastructure is there. What is missing is usually on your side of the counter.
How it actually gets installed
You do not sign a contract with Alipay or Tencent directly. In practice:
- Your existing card acquirer very likely already resells both wallets. Ask your account manager for “Alipay and WeChat Pay acceptance”. In most of Europe, the UK, Australia, Japan and the US this is a form and a firmware update on the terminal, not a new machine.
- If your acquirer says no, go through a specialised cross-border processor. Setup takes two to four weeks. Fees usually sit in the same range as a card scheme, sometimes lower.
- Two flows exist. Merchant-presented QR: you print a code, the customer scans it and types the amount. Customer-presented QR: the customer opens their wallet, the cashier scans the code on their phone. Use the second one. It is faster, it removes typing errors, and it plugs into your POS so the sale lands in your accounting the normal way.
- Settlement arrives in your local currency, on your usual cycle. The FX conversion happens on the wallet side.
Then, and this is the part people skip, tell the customer. A small sign in Chinese at eye level near the till, saying 支持支付宝、微信支付, does more than any window display. If you are still figuring out the mechanics, our guide on how to set up a WeChat Pay account walks through the account structure.
Tax free, and above all instant refund
VAT refund is a real reason Chinese shoppers buy abroad rather than at home, and it is badly handled by most independent retailers.
Two things to fix. First, be an affiliated store with one of the refund operators so you can issue the form at the till. Second, offer the instant refund in store, where the customer gets the money immediately and you hold a card imprint until the customs stamp comes back. Chinese travellers hugely prefer this. It is cash back in their hand on the spot instead of a queue at the airport and a wire transfer weeks later.
Three practical points:
- Refund operators now push the refund straight to Alipay or WeChat wallets. Ask for it. A refund landing in the app they already use removes the last piece of friction.
- Train one person to explain the minimum spend, the passport requirement and the customs step in plain language. In China, tax refund abroad is discussed constantly on social apps, and bad information travels fast.
- Group the receipts. Many travellers buy across several visits in three days. If your system can consolidate to one form above the threshold, say so out loud.
Mandarin-speaking staff, and the personal WeChat of your salesperson
One Mandarin speaker on the floor changes the economics of the store. Not a translation app, a person. Chinese students in your city are the obvious hire: part time, weekends, they already know both cultures.
The part that surprises retailers is what happens next. That salesperson should have a WeChat account, and should add the customers who buy. Not a corporate account, a personal one, used properly. This is the private domain model that Chinese brands run at home, transplanted to your shop floor.
The mechanism is simple and it works because it removes every barrier at once:
- The customer flies home. Your store is 9,000 kilometres away. The contact in WeChat is not.
- When a friend asks where she got the bag, she forwards the salesperson’s contact card. That is the referral, and it costs you nothing.
- When new stock arrives, the salesperson posts three photos in Moments. Buyers reply, pay by WeChat, you ship. In several client stores this repeat business alone is worth 10 to 15% of Chinese revenue.
Set the rules early. Who owns the account, what happens if the person leaves, how prices and shipping are quoted. Do it in writing before the list is worth something.
Be findable on Xiaohongshu before the trip, not after
This is the change most retailers outside China have not registered. Xiaohongshu, or RED, is where the trip gets planned. According to a January 2026 analysis published by TravelDaily, the platform counts more than 230 million monthly active users with travel interests, over 80% of them use it to look up guides, and it logs more than 2.4 billion travel searches.
Read that as a behaviour, not a statistic. Three weeks before flying to Milan, a traveller in Chengdu opens RED and searches 米兰 购物 (Milan shopping), then the name of a district, then a brand. She saves a dozen notes to a folder. That folder becomes the itinerary. If your store is not in a single note, you are not in the itinerary, and no window display will fix that once she has landed.
What to do, in order of cost:
- Get the store into notes written by Chinese residents and students in your city. They are cheap to work with, they write natural Chinese, and their notes carry the geotag. Twenty to forty real notes beat one glossy campaign.
- Write the note title the way people search: city, district, category, price level. “Barcelona leather goods, under 300 euros” gets found. A brand slogan does not.
- Show the address in Chinese characters, the metro stop, opening hours, and the payment logos in the photo. Save is the metric that matters here, not likes.
- Open your own RED account only once you have third party notes. An empty brand account convinces no one.
The same logic applies to shopping-heavy periods. If you sell to travellers, look at where Chinese travellers go during Chinese New Year and prepare your stock and your notes six weeks before, not the week of.
Guides, tour leaders and receptive agencies
Group travel is smaller than it was, but it did not disappear, and it moved upmarket. Small groups of eight to fifteen, family trips, incentive trips from Chinese companies, and university tours.
These flows are controlled by receptive agencies in your country and by the tour leader who travels with the group. Contact the receptive agencies that handle Chinese groups in your city, not the outbound agencies in China. They are the ones who decide where the coach stops. Terms are usually a commission on the group’s spend, sometimes a fixed fee for a stop. Negotiate it openly, in writing, and check what your local law says about commission disclosure.
Two things get you selected: a toilet and a place to sit, and a person who speaks Mandarin. It is that basic. The luxury multi-brand stores that win Chinese groups in Paris and Milan almost always have both.
Daigou, as it exists today
Daigou, the personal shopper who buys abroad for Chinese clients, was declared dead several times. It has shrunk and it has become professional.
The amateur student buying six creams at the airport is mostly gone, squeezed by e-commerce law, customs enforcement and cross-border e-commerce platforms that undercut them. What remains is a smaller group of full-time operators with a client list on WeChat, sometimes a small team, who buy in volume and specialise: one category, a few brands, a stable margin.
If you run a store in a shopping capital, you already have them as customers. You just may not have noticed. Signs: same face every few weeks, large baskets, multiples of the same reference, video call at the shelf while shopping, payment by WeChat.
You have a choice to make, and you should make it consciously.
- Work with them. Give a stable purchase quantity, reliable stock, an invoice format that suits them, and treat them as a wholesale account. Volume is real and predictable.
- Limit them. Cap quantities per reference. Brands with distributors in China often require this, because a daigou selling at 30% below the mainland retail price damages the official channel.
The bad option is doing neither and letting your top ten references get cleared out on a Saturday morning while your actual customers find empty shelves. If you sell a brand that has, or wants, an official China presence, read our piece on how to launch a designer brand in China before you set your policy, because the two channels have to be priced together.
What no longer works
Three habits I still see in stores every year, and all three are wasted money.
The UnionPay sign on its own. It made sense in 2015. Today a card sticker in the window tells a traveller nothing, because they expect to pay with a phone. If UnionPay acceptance is the only Chinese payment signal in your store, you look ten years behind.
Paper brochures in Chinese. Printed, stacked at the entrance, translated once in 2018 and never checked. Nobody picks them up, and when they do the Chinese is frequently wrong, which quietly damages your credibility. Put that budget into a QR code that opens a WeChat contact or a RED note.
The undifferentiated tourist discount. “10% off for Chinese customers” reads as a category, not a welcome, and premium travellers dislike it. Discount was the reason to buy abroad when the price gap with China was 40%. It has narrowed a lot. Availability, authenticity, the exact model not sold in China, and the experience of buying it are stronger reasons today.
The in-store experience still decides the purchase
Everything above gets the customer through the door. What happens inside still decides the basket, and here the older rules hold.
Chinese consumers can find nearly any product online, at home, delivered the next day. Taobao and Tmall are cheap, fast and convenient, and life in Shanghai or Beijing is fast enough that shopping time is scarce. So the reason to walk into a physical store has to be something a delivery box cannot give: trying the product, the expertise of the salesperson, certainty about authenticity, and the plain pleasure of the visit. The store has to offer an experience, not just stock.
There is a second reason, less obvious. What people buy says something about who they are. Purchases are weighed, because the brand reflects back on the buyer. A product alone no longer decides the sale. It comes with the service, the salesperson, the place, the sign above the door and the other customers in the room. That is why three approaches to retail, experiential, emotional and sensory marketing, all point the same way: sell a good moment and a memory the customer could not have had ordering the same item online.
Three things worth working on:
- Staging. The space should tell a story about the brand, its origin, its craft. There has to be something to look at and something to do. A workshop table, a demonstration, a personalisation corner.
- Emotional attachment. Build it around dates that carry meaning: Chinese New Year, 520, Mother’s Day, Qixi. A small gesture on the right date is remembered and photographed.
- The senses, used carefully. Sight first, since it is the most stimulated, but sound, smell and touch all count. Music that fits the shop, a scent that suits the product, materials worth touching. The mistake is overdoing it. Music too loud, lighting too aggressive, a scent too strong, and the visit becomes unpleasant. Sensory marketing backfires when it is not restrained.
Chinese shoppers are also used to this kind of retail. In Shanghai and Beijing, entertainment is everywhere, from metro stations to malls. The bar is high, and copying a generic mall atmosphere impresses nobody.
The payoff is that when the visit is good, they post about it. Photos and an opinion in WeChat Moments or a note on RED, seen by people who trust them. That is visibility you did not buy. Country of origin helps here too, and it is worth knowing why French brands appeal to Chinese consumers or why US brands stay popular in China, because that story is what your salesperson should be telling.
A store in Barcelona, and what changed
A Spanish retailer, Andres, runs three leather goods stores near Passeig de Gràcia. Before 2020, Chinese shoppers were roughly 22% of his footfall and spent an average of 340 euros per ticket against 180 for local customers. By 2025 they were down to 6% of footfall, and the drop hit his margin harder than the raw percentage suggests, because the Chinese ticket was the profitable one.
He tried the obvious things first. Chinese leaflets left at four hotel receptions, and a “10% tourist discount” sign in the window. Eleven months later, measurable effect on Chinese traffic: about 2%. Not nothing, not a business.
What we changed, in this order. Alipay and WeChat Pay through his existing acquirer, live in three weeks, customer-presented QR at the till. Instant tax refund in store, with the option to send the refund to the customer’s wallet. One Mandarin-speaking weekend hire, a Chinese student in the city, with a WeChat account belonging to the store. And 38 Xiaohongshu notes over five months, written by Chinese residents in Barcelona, geotagged, titled around district and price range rather than the shop name.
The reason it worked is sequencing. The notes exist before the trip, so the store enters the itinerary at the planning stage. The payment and the refund remove hesitation at the till. The WeChat contact keeps the customer after departure.
Result after eleven months: Chinese customers went from 6% to 17% of revenue, the WeChat list reached just over 900 contacts, and 12% of those contacts placed a remote order after returning to China. Not a miracle, and it took a year.
FAQ
Do I need a Chinese company or a China bank account to accept Alipay and WeChat Pay?
No. Cross-border acceptance is designed for foreign merchants. You keep your local entity, your local bank account and your usual settlement currency. Your card acquirer or a cross-border payment processor handles the contract with the wallets. The customer pays in yuan from their app, you receive euros, pounds or dollars. Expect two to four weeks between the signed form and the first transaction, mostly compliance checks.
How much should I budget for Xiaohongshu before I see anything?
For a single store, a realistic starting budget is what twenty to forty notes cost from Chinese residents or small local accounts in your city, plus someone to write titles and captions in proper Chinese. Skip the big influencer quotes at this stage, they do not fit a single address. Give it four to six months. The signal you watch is saves and comments asking for the address, not view counts.
Should I sell to daigou buyers or turn them away?
Decide it once, then apply it. If you are an independent retailer with no distribution agreement in China, working with them is usually worth it: predictable volume, low acquisition cost, no marketing spend. If you carry brands that have official China distribution, cap quantities per reference, because a daigou undercutting mainland retail prices will get you a call from the brand. What you should never do is let it happen by accident and lose your best sellers.
Are group tours still worth chasing in 2026?
Worth chasing only if you are located where coaches can stop and you can handle fifteen people at once. Groups are smaller and more upmarket than in 2019, and they are now a minority of the flow: under-25s travelling independently are close to 40% of Chinese outbound travellers. For most city-centre stores, the independent traveller found through RED is a better use of effort than commission deals with agencies.
Working with us
Gentlemen Marketing Agency is based in Shanghai and works with retailers outside China who want Chinese shoppers walking into their stores. We build the Xiaohongshu presence that gets found before the trip and the WeChat setup that keeps the customer after it. We also audit existing stores: payment acceptance, tax refund flow, in-store signage in Chinese, and what a traveller actually sees when she searches your city on RED. Tell us where your store is and we will look at it. Contact our team here.
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