There will be another payment option for Chinese travelers shopping at U.S. Walgreens locations. As the following Retail Dive article reports, Walgreens will begin accepting the mobile pay app in major U.S. markets this week.
- Starting this week, 3,000 U.S. Walgreens stores, including locations in New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas, now accept Alipay, the mobile payment platform owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, according to a post on Alibaba’s Alizila news blog.
- That number will increase to 7,000 by April, according to an email from Alibaba to Retail Dive. Each year, some 4 million Alipay users are in the U.S., and save on foreign-exchange fees when they’re able to use it, the company said.
- Alipay is increasingly an option for Chinese travelers to the U.S. Last September, for example, cross-border mobile payment company Citcon and omnichannel platform GK Software partnered to bring Alipay and rival WeChat Pay for use by North American retail customers, according to an email from those companies to Retail Dive
This news is validating Alipay’s strategy of making its hugely popular mobile pay app available to Chinese users at highly-visited locations such as the coastal cities and destinations like Las Vegas. Expect to see Alipay at many other merchants as major chains like Walgreens and others roll it out on a nationwide basis.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Director, Merchant Services at Mercator Advisory Group
