The high walls of payment between Internet platforms are being "dismantled" with the re cooperation of the platforms.
Recently, there was another new trend in the platform "ice breaking" - at 20:59 on October 29, Alipay announced: "Just now, you can use Alipay to buy things on JD."
"Alipay payment has been launched in Jingdong Mall, and now users have successfully completed the payment." Alipay confirmed this news to the Times Finance reporter.
(Image source: Enterprise provided image)
According to sources from Time Finance, both parties will also promote the integration of JD Pay into Taobao and Tmall, allowing Taobao and Tmall users to use JD's payment tools.
Time Finance reporters found through actual testing that the Taobao platform has not yet connected to JD Pay. A person close to JD.com said that in terms of payment, JD.com hopes to continuously provide consumers with more payment options.
There are also traces of both breaking the ice. Public information shows that in July this year, Alipay and JD.com launched cooperation in medical insurance online drug purchase services in Beijing and other places. Previously, JD Express, Home, Made in Beijing and other businesses also opened official small programs to operate on Alipay.
It has been 13 years since the last payment cooperation between the two companies.
In August 2011, JD and Alipay announced the expiration of their cooperation. At that time, Liu Qiangdong, Chairman of the Board of Directors of JD, disclosed that the cessation of cooperation had nothing to do with the competition between JD and Taobao, but Alipay's rate was too high. "Every year, we have to pay 5 to 6 million yuan more because of Alipay's rate."
At that time, Liu Qiangdong stressed that about 80% of JD Logistics was paid on arrival, and a few online payments could be completed using UnionPay. Stopping cooperation with Alipay would not have an impact.
It is worth noting that up to now, the payment channels of the head e-commerce platforms of the whole network have all been connected to Alipay.
What caused these decision changes from cooperation, to building walls, and then to demolishing walls?
If we want to find a landmark event for building a wall, the 2008 ban on Baidu from crawling product and store information on Taobao may be the root cause of "each acting independently".
Over the next ten years, various platforms have demarcated boundaries: Taobao cut off the third-party WeChat interface in 2013, QQ and WeChat blocked the red envelope of Alipay and the payment function of Alipay in the WeChat store in 2015, and after Tiktok became popular, WeChat and QQ blocked Tiktok links in 2018.
For the Internet platform, for a long time, the traffic was linked to the profit and market value to a certain extent. Dividing territories and fixing users and attention on one's own platform may be the optimal solution for high-speed growth.
However, at the time when the industry is moving towards the emergence of giants, applications such as WeChat have become a kind of "infrastructure" in a certain sense.
In 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology required all major Internet platform enterprises to promote different types of problems such as instant messaging blocking website links, step by step and stage by stage, in accordance with the rectification requirements, so as to achieve interconnection between platforms.
At that time, platforms such as Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance actively responded to this, stating that they would implement measures for an open ecosystem in stages.
For platforms, this seems to be an inevitable trend at present. The scale growth brought about by the divide and conquer development seems to have reached its peak. At the time when the industry is moving towards the dominance of giants and stock games, the high wall may bring a negative impact.
According to the Semi annual Report on China Mobile Internet in 2024 disclosed by QuestMobile, in June 2024, the monthly activity scale of China's mobile Internet was 1.245 billion, an increase of only 1.8% year on year. The platform wants to seek new increments.
In 2021, WeChat announced that users will be able to access external Taobao links from the app. In 2023, Tencent will begin to open up WeChat advertising and marketing services to Alimama, and Taobao merchants will be able to directly access their stores and live streaming rooms through WeChat video accounts and advertising spaces on their Moments.
The most notable open interoperability event occurred in September this year, when Taobao and Tmall officially announced that they would fully integrate WeChat Pay by the end of that month.
According to media reports, a Morgan Stanley report suggests that this move is expected to help Taobao acquire hundreds of millions of new users. Goldman Sachs pointed out in its research report that the cooperation between WeChat Pay and Taobao/Tmall is beneficial for Taobao/Tmall to develop new users in lower tier cities.
Li Daokui, Dean of the Institute of Chinese Economic Thought and Practice at Tsinghua University, stated on Weibo that the integration of WeChat Pay with Taobao is a landmark event in building a unified national market. "The interconnection of major platforms benefits not only consumers, but also the Chinese economy.