WeChat and Alipay ramp up ecommerce race with new features for online and offline merchants

Tencent today announced a suite of new features for businesses to better engage customers through their public WeChat accounts, according to TechNode. One day earlier, Alibaba’s mobile Alipay Wallet released over 60 new APIs for third party developers to build online storefronts, according to the company’s official English-language blog.

The Chinese web giants are battling to draw in merchants to their respective platforms. Alibaba has an edge in terms of the number of merchants already on board its Taobao marketplace, but WeChat has an advantage in its huge mobile userbase, which Alipay Wallet is far from achieving. A report earlier this week showed the average Chinese smartphone owner has over three Tencent apps installed, but just shy of one Alibaba app.

Essentially, the customers are all on WeChat, but the merchants are all on Taobao. Alibaba needs to drive mobile adoption of Alipay Wallet from its existing Alipay users, while WeChat needs to convert social users into ecommerce customers.

See: Wallet wars: A visual peek inside China’s PayPal

For WeChat, the new functions announced today are aimed at eight types of businesses:

• Restaurants – food ordering, payments, and calling staff to your table
• Hotels – booking rooms, payments, chatting with reception, digital keys, and shopping
• Transportation – ticketing, choosing seats, CRM
• Hospitals – appointment scheduling, queue tracking, digital prescriptions and reports
• Brick-and-mortar stores – digital membership cards, managing members, payments, CRM, and marketing
• Delivery – taking orders, payments, and tracking
• Tourism – ticketing, attraction notifications, CRM

Alipay Wallet’s new APIs open the app up to a wider range of independent merchants, and makes it faster and easier for them to set up their virtual storefronts. Some of Alipay Wallet’s existing features include:

• Payments at brick-and-mortar stores
• Transportation booking
• Appointment booking at hospitals
• Discounts, coupons, and membership programs

Alizila reports total mcommerce revenue in China was estimated to be US$3.7 billion last quarter, double what it was the same time last year. Alipay reports 300 million registered users, 100 million of them on mobile. WeChat boasts 438 million monthly active users.

(Sources: Alizila and TechNode)