By end of December 2010, the payment volume using Alipay per day has exceeded rmb2.5 billion. The number of daily transactions on Alipay reached 8.5 million and 500k transactions were completed on mobile per day. Alipay’s mobile app becomes one of must-have ones for Chinese and has been installed on over 10millions handsets.There is no reason why Alipay should not go mobile.
eBay just acquired mobile payments provider Zong for $240 million in cash, which basically again proves one thing, as the CEO of Zong said,
Most of e-commerce will shortly become m-commerce.
As the counterpart of eBay in China, Alipay is catching up with this trend. Early this month, it reveal its own mobile payment solution called Barcode Pay. Alipay has around 550 millions registered users (by end of 2010) and people are get used to pay online using Alipay which is indeed convenient. But how to get consumer to pay when they are on mobile, which is what Barcode Pay mobile payment solution is trying to solve. Once you logon alipay on the mobile app, you can see a unique barcode. Just present it to the merchant and get it scanned, you will see a pop-up message on your phone asking you to confirm the payment. The money will be charged directly from your Alipay account. See the following illustrations.
Alipay wants to sell this Barcode Pay solution to cafe, bar, gas station, super market and restaurant etc. Alipay’s official blog also said the company is working on other mobile solution for non-smartphone, web-cam and NFC devices.
Clever but not good enough. This still expose the buyer’s id for tracking. The better way doing is :
the shop generate a one time transaction id on alipay, then print the code on receipt, or show it on screen (2d barcode or just a few digit number)
Payer use phone to login alipay, then scan or enter the transaction id, pay it. The user do not need to expose the id to finish the transaction.
Thanks for your suggestion. The 2d barcode for shop will coming soon.
I think we can not ensure that every handset has a camera for scanning.
And enter the transaction id manually is madding.