Paypal Pulls Its Service From Alibaba’s B2B Platform

Well, that didn’t last long. Just a year after Paypal announced a deal with Abibaba’s B2B sales platform AliExpress.com, the online payment company has pulled out from the agreement. Originally Paypal described AliExpress as a “fantastic new merchant” partner with which it could drive “amazing synergies across borders.” Clearly things have changed a lot over the past year.

But Paypal remained relatively tight-lipped on exactly why the partnership broke down. Over on The Paypal Blog director of communications for Paypal Asia Pacific Dickson Seow explained:

Following a routine annual business review, we have decided that PayPal will no longer be a payment option on AliExpress after August 3rd … We have valued the opportunity to work with AliExpress over the past year and wish them well.

AliExpress.com

Paypal doesn’t specify any reason why the AliExpress deal is not living up to its original expectations. But according to The Wall Street Journal the company was concerned that AliExpress “was serving more individual customers — a departure from the wholesale model that had been agreed upon by the two companies.”

So that’s one less payment option available to users of AliExpress. And while Alibaba has its own online payment system, Alipay, that service has been subject to a recent dispute with Yahoo (see CEO Jack Ma talk more on this below).

While Reuters reported that the two companies had reached an agreement this past week, the deal would require the approval of Softbank who is said to be “uncooperative.”