Innovative payment service and processing provider Stripe has partnered with Chines online payment method AliPay to support the highly used payment option in China.
A post on Stripe’s blog announced the news recently, and gave insights on the strategic partnership with Chinese tech giant Alibaba and its payment platform.
It’s no secret that in order to successfully enter a new market, especially one of the BRIC nations, supporting popular local payment methods is a must. While stripe supports a number of Chinese supported credit and debit cards, AliPay is used on over 50% of online transaction is the region.
AliPay is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers, and its support ranges from online and mobile purchases, to cab fare, point of sale transactions, and vending machines.
“Traditionally, paying with Alipay meant being bounced to a different site. With Stripe, Alipay users will simply enter their email address and a six-digit SMS code in Checkout. It works great on desktop and mobile,” stated the blog post on Stripes website.
Stripe supporting merchants will not have to integrate AliPay into their checkout page. A simple activation from Stripe’s back-end dashboard will add the payment option to the checkout page, giving customers the ability to choose AliPay upon checkout.
Interestingly enough, both firms have been compared to eBay's immensely popular PayPal payment paltform, offering simple and secure Payments on a wide range of devices and industries. Stripe’s services are already used by online businesses in over 14 countries and offers support in over 130 currencies.
The addition of AliPay puts Stripe in a strategic position by being able to offer support for the most popular payment methods in the world’s second largest economy.
