Alipay and US stores set out easy payment

Alibaba Group's payment affiliate Alipay has teamed up with leading US department stores to allow Chinese shoppers to pay with their Alipay accounts as it taps their growing demand on overseas websites.

Alipay said the shoppers can use its cash coupons and discounts for cross-border payments when shopping on the official websites of Macy's, Nieman Marcus, Bloomingdale and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Alipay will offer 60 million yuan (US$9.8 million) worth of shopping coupons to users in the week through December 1. The coupons can be used on Black Friday, which falls on November 28 this year — a peak season for discounts at bricks-and-mortar retailers and online vendors.

Alipay said it aims to make Black Friday a seamless shopping experience as on Taobao for domestic consumers, and to make it easy for shoppers to buy from overseas sites.

Chinese online shopping of imported goods will surge to 120 billion yuan in 2014, up 50 percent from a year earlier, according to Analysys.

Last year, China's cross-border e-commerce trade rose 31.3 percent from a year earlier to 3.1 trillion yuan, and may more than double to 6.5 trillion yuan by 2016, according to the Ministry of Commerce.