Alipay vows to help digitize service merchants on its platform

Alipay, a leading third-party payment app, pledges to digitize service-sector merchants embedded on its platform, turning the mobile wallet into a comprehensive life services apparatus.

During a webinar-style partner conference on Tuesday, the company said that in tandem with 50,000 vendors, it aims to help 40 million merchants in the service sector digitize their offerings over three years.

Hu Xiaoming, CEO of Ant Financial, which owns Alipay, said the app's upgrade is essentially the new infrastructure China is on track to construct to seek high-quality growth. He noted that 80 percent of the service sector has not yet been digitalized.

Under the plan, Alipay, which claims to boast 900 million domestic users, will adjust its homepage and user interface, adding popular modules like online-to-offline services, grocery and supermarket shopping, as well as food and medicine delivery. It will also employ algorithms to tailor recommended services to users, based on their preferences.

Meicai, a veggie and grocery wholesaler, added 800,000 new individual customers in just one week after it launched a mini program service in the Alipay app in February. The novel coronavirus epidemic kept people indoors and pushed up demand for online grocery purchases.

"Our orders quickly expanded to 80 cities and daily active users jumped to 100,000," said founder and CEO Liu Chuanjun. "It's a huge boon for business-to-business services like us to reach out to new customers and seize the opportunity to digitalize our offerings."