On May 13th, Walmart China announced their collaboration with Alibaba which will allow its users to make purchases through the Alipay mobile wallet in 25 of Walmart's stores in southern China. Visitors can pay by using Alibaba wallet, which is the mobile version of Alibaba's online payment unit Alipay. Retail stores have scanners to read barcodes in the app, with payment then taken in seconds. Currently more than 40,000 retail stores operating in China, including Carrefour and Family Mart accept payments through the app.
Alipay also has ambitions of going global by expanding their payment service to cater to the Chinese travelers’ overseas shopping needs. Last year April, Alipay had established offline payment partnerships with Lotte DFS, apparel and convenience stores in South Korea to facilitate Chinese tourists’ shopping experience in South Korea. Low transaction fees, quick transfer speed and large user bases are what attract Korean merchats to establish partnerships. For the time being, this offline payment service is only open to Chinese tourists who are in Korea not to the Korean citizens themselves. However, Korea experts believe that Alipay could grab domestic market share in the future as there is little innovation in payments or Fintech currently in Korea.
Aside from offline payment expansion in South Korea, Alipay also provides tax refund and international remittance service to global Chinese users. We have the reason to believe that Alipay is on the start of its global payment market expansion. And they may never stop.
