Alipay Wallet’s massive sales win older people

It is never easy to introduce technology to seniors, but Alipay successfully included them into its demography by launching 50% off sales across the country.

On December 12, Alibaba’s another shopping festival called Double Twelve, consumers could get a 50% discount when they purchase with Alipay Wallet at one of the 20,000 brick-and-mortar stores ranging from bakeries, restaurants, supermarkets to convenient stores.

According to the statistics from Taobao, 45.8% of the sales on the Double Twelve were completed on the mobile app, up from 42.6% on the Double Eleven last month.

Contrary to the Double Eleven Festival on November 11, the Double Twelve focused on offline businesses, which are more close to daily living needs.

This move greatly enthused housewives and retired people, who are usually considered inactive to new technology but sensitive to discounts. On that day, people were surprised to see many older people queuing at supermarkets with their smartphones. Some even offered paid services of installing Alipay Wallet on the handset on the street.

Alipay Wallet is an application on mobile phones that allows users to pay with their Alipay account by scanning their handset, similar to Google Wallet or PayPal’s app.

In Shanghai, users could enjoy up to 50 yuan off at Pizza Hut.

On the briefing before this year’s Double Twelve, Taobao sent out a signal that it is not just an online commerce platform and it is marching towards a marketplace of all kinds of products and services, whether online or offline.

During the 2014 Chinese New Year, Tencent's WeChat launched a game of sending out red pocket money on its app to promote its mobile payment service. It was thought that WeChat gained a huge amount of new users with this little game and threatened the status of Alipay.

Alipay has remained low-key on the success of this year’s Double Twelve, for fear that Union Pay, the biggest bank card organisation in the country, would get suspicious and feel threatened.

Either WeChat’s red pocket money game or Alipay’s Double Twelve sales aims to cultivate a habit of mobile payment among Chinese people. It remains to be seen whether users' enthusiasm could persist after the promotion events.