'Influencer marketing is the biggest thing': What retailers need to know about WeChat

When it comes to financial technology, China has Silicon Valley beat. WeChat is a big part of that.

What started as a messaging app in 2011 is now a mobile payments giant. "People use it for everything. For utilities, for gaming, obviously to communicate with their family and friends, and to do business," said Yiren Lu, a software engineer (at Google) and a writer who covers WeChat and Chinese technology.

WeChat users can transfer money to their friends. But they can also pay for groceries, look through menus or place an order at a tea shop without standing in line or handling cash -- or a credit card.

"There are hundreds of millions of Chinese people who were unbanked, who did not have bank accounts. It was a very cash-heavy society," Lu said. WeChat and its main competitor, Alibaba's AliPay, "basically became banks," Lu added.

She chalks WeChat's success -- some 34% of China's data traffic goes through the Tencent-owned app -- to this quickly solved pain point, but also to the country's rejection of American tech companies.

In 2009, "China basically kicked out all of the U.S. tech companies," Lu said. China's "Great Firewall" blocked Facebook, Google, Twitter and Vimeo that year.

If China offers a rapidly growing middle class -- one with less "antipathy towards the idea of consumerism," as Lu put it -- it is Chinese companies that are getting to it first.