China UnionPayHow China UnionPay Cards Work Online & What Merchants Should Expect When Accepting Them

China UnionPay Explained for Merchants: Cards, Online Payments & Fees

For a generation, the list of card brands that most online retailers operating in North America or Europe might encounter at checkout has changed very little.

Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are common. Sometimes, you might see Discover or JCB. So, when a new brand mark turns up in the payment data, in red, blue, and green, the usual assumption is that a regional card has wandered a long way from home.

The more interesting fact is that the wanderer belongs to the network with the largest cardholder base in the world: UnionPay.

In this post, I’ll walk you through what UnionPay is, how its cards work online, what accepting them involves, and how it compares with Visa and Mastercard, the brands more familiar to Western audiences.

What is UnionPay?

UnionPay

[noun]/yo͞on • yən • pā/

China’s bank card network, also known as China UnionPay or CUP. It carries card payments between banks in mainland China and, through UnionPay International, connects those cards to merchants and ATMs abroad.

UnionPay, formally China UnionPay, is the primary bank card network of mainland China. It was established in Shanghai in March 2002 by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the State Council. 85 Chinese banks were among UnionPay’s founding shareholders.

UnionPay carries card payments between banks in much the way Visa and Mastercard do elsewhere. And, like those two brands, UnionPay is neither a bank nor a card issuer. Member banks issue the cards and hold the accounts, while UnionPay supplies the rails that carry payments between them (a distinction explained in our guide to card networks).

The domestic scale is hard to overstate. According to the PBOC’s Payment System Report, the number of bank cards opened nationwide stood at 10 billion at the end of March 2025, and UnionPay’s interbank system processed 84.4 billion transactions worth 67.36 trillion yuan in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Abroad, the business runs through a subsidiary, UnionPay International, which works with more than 2,600 institutions, has enabled acceptance in 183 countries and regions, and supports card issuance in 84 of them.

Instead of thinking about UnionPay as a domestic scheme with foreign outposts, I’d prefer to describe it as a network built for acceptance everywhere around one very large home market. That is the more useful way to read it.

What is a UnionPay Card?

A UnionPay card (often called a China UnionPay card) is a credit, debit, or prepaid card issued by a bank on the UnionPay network, whether inside mainland China or outside it. You can identify the card by its number: UnionPay card numbers typically begin with either 62 or 81, and can be between 16 and 19 digits.

Banks can issue both credit and debit cards with the UnionPay brand. But, the vast majority of existing cards are debit; the customer behind a UnionPay number is therefore far more likely to be spending from a bank balance, rather than from a credit line.

But, what distinguishes a UnionPay card from other brands that are more familiar to Western merchants?

For one, recurring billing is not always an option. UnionPay International’s own product pages list recurring transactions and pre-authorization among the functions of their credit cards and signature-based debit cards, but not among those of their PIN-based debit cards. That’s a detail worth paying attention to for subscription merchants.

The card number may carry complications, too. A checkout form that assumes 16 digits will reject a valid 19-digit card before any network sees it. Some processors are aware of this and have made accommodations; Braintree notes in their UnionPay guide some of these cards have no card verification value (CVV), and ZIP codes are rarely collected, which is why it bypassed its CVV and address checks for certain UnionPay transactions. This makes it possible to accept these cards… but also means that merchants have fewer of the familiar signals they would normally examine when scanning for potential fraud.

Where is UnionPay Accepted & How Do Merchants Accept It?

UnionPay International reports acceptance in 183 countries and regions. A merchant does not sign with UnionPay directly: acceptance comes through an acquirer or payment provider that supports the network, or one of the networks with which UnionPay has a partnership. As mentioned above, UnionPay International card numbers are routed over the Discover Network in the United States, for example.

For many merchants, the capability is already switched on. Stripe lists China UnionPay among the brands they accept without additional configuration for businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of the European Economic Area. Braintree has retired its separate UnionPay integration because the cards can now be processed like other cards through Discover.

The demand side is not in doubt. China’s commerce minister, Wang Wentao, said in July 2025 that the country’s consumer market remains the second largest in the world. UnionPay International further elaborated in April 2021 that close to 22 million online merchants outside mainland China accepted their cards. UnionPay now says more than 100 million merchants outside mainland China accept its cards.

The bottom line: any business building a cross-border eCommerce operation will meet shoppers who expect to pay with UnionPay sooner or later. Therefore, it pays to ensure that your processor is already capable of accepting these cards before it becomes an issue.

Whether a processor supports UnionPay at all is usually the easy part. The two more pressing questions I would put to a provider are which route they use for UnionPay cards, and where the fraud liability sits on that route.

Is UnionPay Safe for Merchants?

UnionPay is at least as safe as any other payment network.

UnionPay began migrating to EMV chip-enabled cards several years before the US. A chip does nothing for an order placed online, however, which is where 3-D Secure authentication becomes essential.

If the cardholder completes a 3D Secure check while using a UnionPay-branded card, the merchant avoids liability for fraud chargebacks. If the payment is routed without authentication, though, the fraud risk stays with the merchant. None of this is peculiar to UnionPay; it’s the same as with a Visa or Mastercard transaction.

Every card network has its own extensive body of rules governing how transactions may be conducted. Payment protocols, authorization time limits, procedures for suspected fraud… and timeframes, fees, and reason codes for disputes.

Disputes run on UnionPay’s own rules, with their own deadlines and reason codes, or at least with those of the relevant regional partner. As I mentioned earlier, UnionPay is partnered with Discover in the US. So, Discover time limits and fees apply in cases in which a buyer filed a UnionPay chargeback in the US.

Each UnionPay dispute carries a reason code that explains why it was filed; when the transaction runs through Discover’s network, Discover’s reason codes are used. You can view the full list of UnionPay reason codes used in the US here.

Staying Competitive in a Global Marketplace

The Chinese consumer pool will continue to grow larger and more affluent. Meanwhile, UnionPay is likely to retain dominance over the nation’s card market.

Merchants who hope to remain competitive in the global marketplace are likely to see more and more transactions involving UnionPay.

However, drawing the attention of one of the largest consumer markets in the world is only half the battle. Merchants need a proactive risk mitigation plan to ensure a sudden spike in sales isn’t actually a massive influx of chargebacks in the making. You need to think globally, the way Chargebacks911® does: we provide on-demand, region-specific solutions and expertise to a wide range of clients around the world.