Targeting the Chinese tax rebate market.

For travellers traveling abroad, long queues and cumbersome procedures must not be unfamiliar. The recently contacted “Wevat” hopes to help tax refund users change the experience.

Wevat was founded in London, England in 2016. It is a platform for tourists, students and other groups to provide UK tax refund services. The company was founded by Dmitry Ivanov and Zhou Qixian(Raphael Chow), both graduated from University College London and Oxford University, and worked for Deloitte.

Zhou Qixian said to 36 , that for tourists, tax refunds in the UK are often a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. For example, after shopping, consumers need to return a tax return to the merchant. The merchant checks the passport of the tourist. After filling out the tax refund form, the tourists queue up to hand over the tax refund form to the airport counter when they leave the country, and the tax refund can be completed if the conditions are met.

In this process, the main pain points for visitors are:

  • You need to manually fill out the tax refund form one by one. The tax refund form is often too much to be lost. The airport people need to queue for a long time. From the time point of view, the tax refund generally takes about 6-8 weeks. After the tourists hand over the tax refund to the airport customs, the customs needs to send the paper tax refund back to the tax refund company. Once the mailing process has problems, the tourists are very It is difficult to pursue the responsibility of either party, which also leads to a higher complaint rate in this section

  • There are many intermediate links, and visitors will eventually receive less tax rebates. The UK VAT rate is about 16.67% of the price of the goods. In the traditional tax rebate process, retailers often cooperate with commercial tax refund companies or foreign exchange trading companies, such as the global mainstream tax rebate company Global Blue, Planet; foreign exchange trading company Travelex. After deducting the intermediate fees, the amount that Chinese tourists can finally get is about 8% – 12% of the price of the goods.

At the front end, Wevat launched the tax refund app Wevat, which supports self-service tax rebates for most stores in the UK under 250 pounds. Visitors upload photos of all shopping receipts to the app without having to separately issue and manually fill out the tax refund form to the merchant. Wevat will collect information on the shopping receipts in the background. All the small tickets will be unified on a tax refund form. Visitors will print them down to the customs office to seal the time, save time in the customs office, and concentrate on a tax refund. Single, alsoIt can save the cost of customs fast track service by Zhang.

For the more than £250 ticket, Zhou Qixian said that since August 1 this year, users can continue to use the Wevat service if they can issue a commercial invoice with Wevat in the store. Or choose the traditional tax refund method. According to Zhou Qixian, this is because the British government has stipulated that a ticket of more than 250 pounds requires customers to issue a business invoice with a tax refund company. After that, Wevat will continue to work hard to expand the scope of services.

Wevat supports RMB, GBP and a number of major currency tax rebates, providing UK domestic transfers, WeChat, Alipay and UnionPay. Currency exchange is based on real-time exchange rates. Compared to the traditional tax refund method, Wevat can refund 15%-25% of the tax, and exempt from the currency exchange fee, and there is no traditional minimum tax refund threshold of about 30 pounds.

“The UK tax rebate rules are more complicated. Single tax refund and multiple small ticket combined tax rebates The corresponding tax rate and handling fee are different. We will choose the best tax refund method for users. Effectively save costs.” Zhou Qixian said.

Under the online, Wevat currently has staff at London Heathrow Airport to assist tax refund users to take the fast track to the counter to pay the tax return, while most users can get the tax refund within 10 days of departure. If a stamped tax refund is provided, Wevat can also arrange a refund for the tax as soon as possible. In addition, Wevat also provides full online Q&A for Chinese customer service.

Wevat has received approval from the UK’s Tax and Customs Administration (HMRC) and has served users in 63 countries around the world, with a total purchase of more than £4 million. In terms of market strategy , Wevat is targeting the Chinese market and has accumulated nearly 10,000 customers. 91% of its users are 20-35 years old, and 85% of users are from China.

In terms of industry, companies with overseas payment services, such as Alipay and WeChat, have already deployed tax rebate services. How does this affect Wevat? Zhou Qixian said that Wevat was founded in London and has been approved and approved by the UK Customs Administration (HMRC). For domestic payment service providers, tax rebates are a value-added service, and Wevat and they can complement each other.

For the company’s future development plan, Zhou QixianThe show will focus on improving the shopping experience of tourists. This year, we will continue to optimize products, enhance KYC links such as passport information identification, and launch front-ends such as small programs.

Wevat has completed three rounds of financing so far, the latest third round of financing, including Firstminute Capital, Sweet Capital, and Andy Phillips, former CEO of Priceline, the world’s largest online travel group. Firstminute Capital was founded by the founder of lastminute.com, a UK online travel and leisure retailer. Previously, Wevat also received two rounds of financing in January 2018 and January 2017 respectively. As of now, the cumulative amount of is 2.85 million pounds (about 24.4 million yuan).