Shanghai residents spent an average of 31,018 yuan (US$5,085) last year through Alipay, a third-party payment service. Their expenditure accounted for 9.3 percent of the total spending in the country last year, according to Alipay, which was founded by China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba.
The total transaction volume by Chinese independent mobile payments services reached 1219.74 billion yuan (roughly $200 billion) in 2013, a 707 percent year-over-year increase, according to the latest report by online tracking and data analysis service iResearch. The independent services iResearch refers to are all payments services excluding those by conventional banks and China UnionPay, the bank card association. And payments include peer-to-peer money transfers. The major driver of the growth, however, isn’t mobile shopping anymore, but online money transfers, credit card payoffs, and other mobile payment applications.