Alipay will charge users a fee when they make transfers from their accounts to their debit cards, following a similar move by rival Tencent's WeChat Pay earlier this year. The online payment affiliate of Alibaba said the new fee will take effect on October 12. Each Alipay user will have a one-time free allowance of 20,000 yuan ($2,985) before a 0.1 percent charge is levied on the total transfer amount.
The minimum charge is 0.1 yuan for each transfer. Alipay said in an e-mail statement that the fee is to offset rising operation costs. But it said most users are unlikely to have to pay the fee because of the high allowance. The new rule only affects individual users and does not apply to Taobao vendors or offline merchants that use Alipay to collect payment from buyers.
Alipay also said that users can continue to transfer funds free of charge between their Alipay accounts and Yu'E Bao, a popular cash management product offered by Alibaba in conjunction with Tianhong Fund. Users can also earn Alipay reward points by making online or offline payments and use these points to offset the transfer fee. Each point is equivalent to 1 yuan of transfer amount not subject to the transfer fee.
