Chinese internet firm Sina has partnered with Alibaba for their latest Weibo payment feature.
We reported yesterday Sina has updated their immensely popular Weibo application to support a new payment feature. Now the smoke has cleared and we are able to better understand what the feature will offer. Sina has partnered with Chinese Ecommerce firm Alibaba to begin offering Alipay integration within the Weibo app.
The microblogging service in cooperation with Alibaba has devised Weibo Payment. Weibo Payment offers in-app Payments for Taobao and Tmall listings, with more merchants and marketplaces to be added on in the future. The new payment service can function as a full replacement for Alibaba’s Alipay mobile wallet and can be used wherever Alipay is supported. Weibo-Payment will support all the features of the Alipay Wallet app including QR scanning and will require a user to login with their Alipay credentials.
While this is a big step for Sina into Ecommerce and mobile payments, it is also another step for Alipay to instill itself in the local Mcommerce market. Alipay has recently been aggressively pushing the use of their mobile application. Alipay went as far as adding fees to desktop users, while waiving them for mobile transactions.
The sudden entrance into mobile payments comes as a result of Tencent’s mobile messaging application, WeChat, gaining popularity in China. WeChat has become a threat to both Sina and Alibaba by driving users away Weibo in favor of social messaging and offering a payment feature similar to Alipay.
Recently we have seen Alibaba go head-to-head with WeChat by offering its own messaging app called Laiwang.
