Back in February, it was reported Taobao had been trialling the interconnectivity with WeChat Pay and some lucky users were already able to use WeChat Pay on the marketplace platform from Alibaba. It was, as Dao reported, history in the making. On 4 September, history took a further step as Alibaba announced that it was on track to accept WeChat Pay, this time from everyone.
The announcement came in the form of a public consultation. It was reported that Taobao and WeChat teams started working together 6 months ago on all fronts from tech, security, legal, industry and customer service to ensure a seamless experience. On 5 September, Taobao also announced that it would be gradually making WeChat Pay available to all merchants on Taobao Tmall Group platforms from 12 September. In fact, the discount platform Taote has already been interconnected with WeChat Pay since around the end of last month.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, the topic “Taobao to completely support WeChat Pay” shot to number 1 on the Hot Search list and remained on the list for nearly 5 hours. The hashtag currently has 95.02 million views with major state-owned media reporting the news. Pundits argue that the announcement is timely, with the transition due to be completed before Double 11 this year.
The shopping festival this year will mark the first of the key sales events after the major e-commerce platforms gave up on low-price strategies, which were prevalent last year. The latest financial report also shows that for Q2 2024, the Taobao Tmall Group’s revenue was 113.34 billion RMB (15.98 billion USD), down 1% year-on-year (YoY). Adjusted EBITA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Amortization) also dropped 1% to 48.81 billion RMB (6.88 billion USD). With fierce competition from not just conventional rivals like JD.com and PDD, but also social commerce platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu (RED), Taobao could really use the 1 billion WeChat Pay users.
