Unlike in North America, where adoption of these transactions has been slow, Alibaba has seen massive Chinese success.
Alibaba, the tremendous e- and m-commerce company in China has been watching the success of its affiliated mobile payments service, Alipay, simply taking off throughout the length of 2014.
In the first 10 months of this year, the use of Alipay made up 54 percent of all of Alibaba’s transactions.
This represented a growth in the use of the mobile payments service of 22 percent when compared to the figures from all of 2013. This makes it easy to believe the claim from Alipay that it is the largest platform of its kind, and that its volume of smartphone and tablet based transactions is greater than all of those seen by PayPal and Square, combined. There have been a number of different factors that have contributed to the tremendous success and considerable growth being experienced by this service.
Among those drivers has been the consumers located in small cities and rural areas who are adopting mobile payments.
Those consumers in China have been – on an increasing basis – using m-commerce and smartphone based payments as their primary method of shopping and paying online. This, according to a report that Alibaba released at the start of the week. That same report said that the rapidly decreasing cost of smartphones has propelled mobile to the top spot among residents of China for accessing the internet. It cited China Internet Network Information Center research group data from July in order to support its claim.
Approximately 83 percent of those who took part in the cited research survey had said that they used the internet with their smartphones. Just slightly less, 81 percent, said that they used their personal computers to use the web. At the end of 2013, 42 percent of the respondents to the survey were already using their smartphones for m-commerce shopping.
The largest proportion of mobile payments users came from the more remote regions of China to the west – an area in which broadband telecommunications infrastructure is lacking – where there was an average usage of about 60 percent.