According to several sources including China Tech News, Alibaba may have initiated conversations with Paypal to support this payment method in their international trading platform AliExpress. AliExpress currently supports payments with credit card and Alibaba’s subsidiary Alipay.
Although Alipay is the leading online payment tool in China domestic market, it could be slowing the expansion of AliExpress because of its low international awareness. One Alibaba insider confirmed that their overseas merchants are much more interested in using Paypal.
There are two interesting angles to the story:
1) eBay and Alibaba have been years competing for China domestic ecommerce market share. eBay spent millions of dollars in setting up eBay China and acquiring Eachnet, but always remained far behind Alibaba’s Taobao. Finally, they get the opportunity to gain growth in China by partnering with their previous archrival. Not unusual since Paypal is also supported by competitors of eBay worldwide.
2) Although Alipay domestic leadership is still unchallenged, Paypal has just partnered with China UnionPay, to provide their customers the ability to make Internet purchases from Web sites overseas.
A very interesting case of corporative love & hate.
