The reason China is more advanced in terms of online payments is by and large due to the dismal US banking industry, which still relies on cheques, and does not yet seem to have gotten the idea of account transfers.
It does not help that every player in the industry, from stores to credit card companies to phone makers to OS makers are hindering each other in the great race to a sliver of that sweet cash.
QR codes are nice, but in that particular case, they offer no particular advantage over NFC. The miracle is rather that the store and the bank simply accepted the use of Alipay without throwing a fit and attempting to create their own incompatible and buggy system.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
