Bill to bill should enjoy high growth in the next couple of...

Bill to bill should enjoy high growth in the next couple of years.

Third-party payment secures online purchase
Last Updated(Beijing Time):2008-05-26 10:02

By Zhuang Guangping

The so-called third party payment means such a kind of trading in which a certain third party institution provided with ensured credit standing provide trusteeship services on funds for purpose of trading while sellers and purchasers conduct their settlements on a platform that the third party provides with. When a purchaser had confirmed an order, payment for goods should be first remitted onto the third party's platform, which will give a consignment notice to the seller upon having confirmed that the payment has been gathered. When the purchaser has accepted the goods and confirmed that the goods are satisfactory, the third party will remit the payment to the seller. So both sellers and purchasers will be under the supervision of the third party platform.

Having been cooperating with e-shopping for ten years, the third party electronic payment industry in China has been developing in a striding manner. At present, about 50 domestic enterprises have been engaged in the third party electronic payment and Alipay.com, tenpay.com, and Chinapay.com as the Top 3 in the industry have seized about 80 percent of all market shares. In 2007, the trading volume in the third party payment market broke through RMB100 billion yuan, more than doubled year on year and thus continuing to maintain a growth rate over 100 percent for five consecutive years.

The year 2003 is a water divide for the development of the domestic third party e-payment industry. "During the five years before 2003, the market was cultivated; during the five years after 2003, the industry has been expanding in terms of scale." said Cao Fei, a researcher of Analysts International on e-commerce.

E-payment and e-commerce are twin brothers. As the most important driving force for the third party payment, e-commerce had been developing in a toddling state during five years at the beginning as the consumption capacity of netizens was less substantially large, the concept of e-commerce was introduced from outside into China and there lacked localized innovations. A favorable turn from such a situation came in 2003. Driven by over 100 million netizens, the wave of e-commerce localization boost rapidly; and subsequently, the third party electronic payment platforms experienced a period of rapid development.

In 2003, third party payment services started in China and the trading volume only amounted to RMB7.4 billion yuan in 2004. Then, the annual growth rate was maintained above 100 percent in the subsequent years. At the very beginning, there were only two or three providers of such services; but such providers rapidly increased and amounted to about over 40 or 50. The successful pattern of e-payment was rapidly copied in the industry, and large-scale e-commerce websites began to set up their respective payment platforms in succession, which later become their subordinate enterprises and then extended out and developed�� Now, almost all large-scale e-commerce websites have been provided with a contracted third party payment platform. The third party platforms have helped to get the trading flow simplified and have also set up a stage of trust between trading parties.

"It is possible to find and buy fresh vegetables and fruits online, which will be delivered free of charge." Ms. Liu, whose home is in the Qingcheng Residential Area in Daxing District, Beijing, is a typical office worker who goes to work at 9:00 a.m. and comes off work at 5:00 p.m., and she usually does shopping online for major articles like household electric appliances and minor articles including vegetables, foodstuff, edible oil and salt. "6 out of 10 articles at my home were purchased online." Usually, Ms. Liu mainly browses www.taobao.com and www.paipai.com for purpose of shopping; therefore, she has especially registered two respective accounts of the third party payment: Alipay.com and tenpay.com. It seems that she is doing a familiar work with ease when using such accounts.

Due to the existence of third party payment platforms, it is not necessary for banks to directly face end users and thus, service costs will greatly decrease and their proceedings will be more rapid and more efficient. Payment platforms offer uniform application interfaces, making it unnecessary for businesses to get linked to respective banks in different independent systems and thus cutting down development and maintenance costs as well as risks of trading abolishment and credit frauds. As businesses have reduced their scale in terms of manpower, operating costs have been cut down and trading has become more efficient; thus, businesses tend to be more competitive. Also, the development of e-commerce as an industry has been thus accelerated as driven by efforts made by the third party payment platforms and specialized labor division.

Gradually, the concept of online payment has been accepted and recognized by consumers and businesses due to the security and convenience of online payment. As shown in the Statistical report on the development of Internet in China issued by the China Internet Network Information Center in January 2008, the utilization rate of the online payment function among netizens had amounted to 15.8 percent and subscribers making use of such a function amounted to 33.18 million. In addition, it is also shown through a survey conducted by relevant institutions on netizens' behaviors that 80.5 percent of netizens are making use of the function of online payment or like to accept the trading pattern of online payment.

As more netizens tend to accept online payment, trading in more businesses and more industries will conduct online trading and offer trading to consumers in the pattern of online payment. E-commerce in a lot of traditional service industries has obtained a striding development by virtue of e-payment. Nowadays, not only e-commerce websites but also offline clients including tourism agencies and airline companies have demands for e-payment for the trading of digital products including online games.

Since 2007, the third party payment industry has formally developed from a stage of scale expansion into a stage of service deepening. Online payment services are made even subcategorized and changes in the structure of payees have taken place. The proportion of genuine Internet businesses has decreased while the proportion of such businesses as aviation tickets and charge agency services are increasing.

Recently, Alipay.com and China Construction Bank have jointly put force credit services for Alipay.com sellers: sellers on www.taobao.com, who can meet the requirements on credit, will be able to obtain small personal credit of RMB100, 000 yuan at the most. Before that, alibaba.com had helped medium and small enterprises to obtain over RMB160 million yuan as low interest loans without mortgage from banks, in which the corporate credit standing provided by Alipay.com had played a very important role.

As third party payment platforms are ever-increasingly closely combined with banking businesses, people now even can repay loans with a credit card through a third party payment platform. 99Bill Corporation, another third party payment platform has put forth the business of repaying loans with a credit card: so long as the user get connected to any online bank through 99Bill.com, then it is possible for him or her to repay loans for credit cards issued by eight banks including Chine Construction Bank; thus, people can get relieved from such troubles as going to the bank and repaying the loan at the counter and queuing.

More and more enterprises cooperate with third party payment platforms so as to solve problems concerning online payment, and the third party payment is becoming one of the core applications to promote the development of e-commerce in China.