Rakuten’s shopping service started accepting Alipay as one of its payment options, enabling Chinese consumers to use the Japanese company’s cross-border marketplace.
Both Alibaba and Rakuten operate marketplaces where merchants sell their products to consumers. In China, consumers now use Alipay to pay for different kinds of transactions, from utility bills and restaurant meals to taxi rides.
Rakuten’s Japanese marketplace has a total of 42,000 sellers, and about 10,000 of them also use Rakuten Global Market to sell their products to overseas customers. For now, only 250 sellers on Rakuten Global Market accept Alipay as part of the tie-up, but eventually all Rakuten sellers that can ship their products to China will accept Alipay, according to Alibaba.
Alipay’s tie-up with Rakuten comes as Alibaba is preparing for an initial public offering in the US. Bankers and analysts predict that Alibaba’s IPO could raise more than USD 15 billion.
Alipay was originally developed in late 2004 as a system to handle transactions on Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace, a shopping website that has hundreds of millions of users in China.
In recent news, Alipay has revealed plans to set up a fund to promote security and safeguard user information.
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