For the first time, Chinese consumers can walk into department stores and buy items without bringing their wallets. All they need is their smartphones.
Intime Department Store, which has 37 stores in China, most of them located in the eastern province of Zhejiang, today signed an agreement with Alibaba Group’s e-payment affiliate Alipay that lets stores accept Alipay Wallet payments via mobile devices. Both parties also pledged to deepen strategic corporation and strengthen ties involving cashless transactions. Under the agreement, Alipay Wallet can already be used in 29 Intime department stores with full deployment in all its 37 stores taking place in the near future.
Alipay Wallet, launched in January, is a mobile app that allows users to pay for in-store purchases through their Alipay e-payment accounts. The app has all the functions of Alipay on the PC, such as the ability to pay bills, manage credit cards and e-coupons and complete e-commerce transactions.
The mobile wallet also allows users to electronically transfer funds via the Internet, through barcode recognition, QR code recognition, and a feature called “sound wave payment” that utilizes white noise generated by one smartphone to carry digital information to another Alipay device.
Intime Chief Executive Office Chen Shaodong said in a press release the increasing adoption of Alipay Wallet makes it a good option to offer customers. At Intime stores, customers can now pay at registers by opening Alipay Wallet and using either sound wave payment or barcode scanning.
Alipay Wallet now has nearly 100 million users. One-third of Alipay’s daily payments are currently being completed via mobile devices, an 800% increase in the last 12 months, according to Fan Zhiming, the head of Alipay Wallet.
In teaming up with Intime, Alipay hopes to expand the Alipay Wallet brand to a broader audience and better market the mobile app’s online-to-offline (O2O) features. In September, 11 vending machine distributors in China enabled their machines to accept cashless payments through the Alipay mobile app.
Mobile e-commerce in China reached RMB 37.5 billion in transactions in the second quarter of the year, up 181 percent over the previous year, according to iResearch.
The growth comes amid the ongoing proliferation of smartphones, which shows no sign of abating. China’s smartphone market is now the world’s largest; more than 450 million units are expected to be shipped next year, according to a September report by IDC.
