Shopify recently announced a partnership with Alipay.

While this may sound like great news to US #merchants, this is barely worth mentioning in #China.

That’s because nobody shops in independent stores in China. Sure, private traffic is a buzzword. But over 70% of all ecommerce happens on just Tmall & JD alone. It’s rare for people to shop on independent sites.

Having an #Alipay payment option is nice to attract a few Chinese customers. But what would make a real impact is an option to gain access to the traffic on #Tmall & JD. Chinese consumers have a hard time trusting independent stores & Tmall solves that problem as an effective mediator.

It would be great if #Shopify merchants could just plug into Tmall and run everything using Shopify’s existing system & processes.

But there is no passive way to participate in Tmall. Maintenance #costs & set up fees are high compared to the US. Promotional events play a major role in every store and require active involvement of a Tmall marketing & operations team.

Despite that, a direct Tmall-Shopify #partnership could open the floodgates to Tmall Global.

Do you think #Alibaba will ever open up to allow such an #integration?