Alipay, originally created by Alibaba, is a payment platform. It is rapidly expanding it’s service in Asia, Europe and United States. With the dramatic increasing in the use of smartphones, e-commerce is more and more mobile. Euro Monitor estimates that mobile commerce will amount to $972 billion by the end of this year. By 2021, mobile payments are expected to reach $3 trillion.
Alipay’s first strategy is aimed at the oversea’s Chinese tourists. These tourists have used to use Alipay for their mobile payment while Alipay is wide spread in China. Last year, more than 120 million Chinese traveled abroad and spent nearly $200 billion. With this large purchasing power, last month alone, 11 international airports including Munich, Tokyo, San Francisco and Aukland signed up with this payment system.
In United States, there is no clear market leader is this area. Apply pay and Paypal’s position may be challenged by Alipay with more than 450 million users.
In my opinion, Alipay is not only for Chinese tourists. Once it has been widely accepted as a payment method in U.S., Alipay will challenge the position of Apply Pay and Paypal. As it already become popular in South Korea, Thailand, HongKong, Japan and other countries, it will continually expend to European countries and United States as well, especially Apply Pay and Paypal left the market leader space blank.
I think the major factor causing Alipay so popular and invasive around the world is that the usability of Alipay is much better than apple pay and PayPal. Instead of PayPal transferring money through the complicated process and apple pay scan through certain special sensors, Alipay can pay efficiently with a simple scan on the QR code that everyone can apply for one themselves. At the same time, due to the huge population and the widespread number of originated Chinese users, more and more countries are introducing Alipay to help make all the market adapting the Alipay trend. Alipay is a rapid offensive which was introduced into the American market in late 2016 and is already being used in a lot of stores in the US. (https://www.axios.com/alipay-is-bringing-cashlessness-to-the-us-1519237585-a9477a04-d444-488f-9bff-79de63e3f4cd.html) However, there is another payment method in China that is a fair competition for Alipay, which is Wechat pay. Although it is not as popular as Alipay around the world, Wechat pay is quite famous in China and the area around China. Because Wechat is the most popular social media people use in China, with the same convenient payment method, more people would prefer using Wechat pay instead of Alipay in China and use Alipay out of China. (https://medium.com/@wechatminiprogrammer/alipay-vs-wechat-pay-an-unbiased-comparison-52eafabc7ffe)
Alipay is already trying become the dominate company in the mobile pay market by partnering with Samsung Pay to allow people to use Alipay through the Samsung Pay app. Before it was a separate app that you had to download to access but now it is already on your Samsung phone. With this more people will be exposed to the app and more competitive compared to Apple pay and Paypal. This also gives Samsung an edge on the China market because now they have more access to them compared to Apple because they have another reason to purchase a Samsung phone.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/20/samsung-pay-partners-with-alibaba-alipay-on-payments.html