By Casey Hall
SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s domestic platforms Taobao and Tmall will begin accepting payments from Tencent’s WeChat pay, Alibaba said in a statement on Wednesday.
Alibaba is affiliated with the Jack Ma-founded Ant Group’s Alipay, which is WeChat’s main rival for online payments in China.
Tencent has also been a major investor in other e-commerce platforms, including Alibaba rivals JD.com and PDD Holdings’. Both JD.com and Pinduoduo already offer WeChat Pay as an option.
According to Alibaba’s statement, Taobao and Tmall Group (TTG) have informed merchants about the draft plan to add WeChat Pay as a payment option.
It did not make clear how quickly the service was likely to be completely rolled out to users and Alibaba did not respond to queries about the timing.
In quarterly earnings results released last month, Alibaba said its domestic e-commerce market share had stabilised.
Revenue at the company’s domestic e-commerce arm fell by 1%, but the number of purchasers and their purchase frequency increased order growth by double digits.
China’s e-commerce landscape was originally set up so that users could only use Tencent’s payment system on Tencent-affiliated platforms and Alipay on Alibaba-affliated ones, but the “walled garden” system has gradually broken down.
Since 2021, WeChat users have been able to share links to products on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, but not complete transactions with WeChat Pay.
(Reporting by Casey Hall, Editing by Louise Heavens and Barbara Lewis)
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