It just got a lot of easier for Chinese consumers to buy from overseas e-commerce site, including eBay.com in the United States.
China UnionPay, the country’s bankcard network, last week launched an online shopping portal where Chinese shoppers can find products that they can purchase from foreign e-retail sites. The site, Haigou.UnionPay.com, translates into Chinese product pages from non-Chinese e-commerce sites and sorts them into popular categories for cross-border purchasing, such as kids, cosmetics and electronics. Visitors can also choose products by country, including the U.S., Japan and Korea. Haigou means “shop the world” in Chinese.
When a UnionPay cardholder finds a product she likes, she can click a “direct buy” button on the page that takes her to the e-commerce site of the foreign retailer or brand where she can purchase with her UnionPay card. Established in 2002 as the debit card network for Chinese networks, UnionPay says it has issued more than 2.3 billion payment cards. It also has partnered with some 400 financial institutions around the world to promote merchant acceptance of UnionPay cards. They include American Express Inc. and PayPal, the online payment service owned by eBay Inc.
Through these relationships UnionPay says its cards are now accepted for online payment by 10 million overseas merchants in over 100 countries and regions, UnionPay says. Among them are Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 of Internet Retailer Top 500, eBay and Rakuten.com, No. 46. Some products from these e-commerce sites are listed on haigou.UnionPay.com. In some cases, however, items on those sites may not be eligible to be shipped to China because the merchant selling on a marketplace like eBay or Amazon is not authorized by the product manufacturer to sell into China.
The relationship with PayPal extends UnionPay’s acceptance among Western merchants. For example, when a Chinese shopper buys on eBay’s U.S. site and identifies her country as China PayPal offers her the option of paying with her UnionPay card.
UnionPay says the transaction amount in foreign currency, such as U.S. dollars, is converted into Chinese yuan and debited from the cardholder’s Chinese bank account, without any currency-conversion fee. UnionPay also provides promotions such as cash back or shipping discounts to its cardholders. UnionPay has not disclosed the fees it charges foreign e-retailers for directing traffic to their sites.
The Haigou web site also provides logistics services. For e-commerce sites that don’t offer shipping to China, China UnionPay offers a service that arranges fulfillment to the Chinese shopper.
Chinese consumers are accustomed to paying with UnionPay on Chinese retail web sites. UnionPay accounts for 11.4% of online purchases in China, putting it third behind Alibaba Group’s Alipay, which accounts for 48.8% of transactions, and Tencent Group’s Tenpay at 19.8%.
Tencent Group’s Yixun ranks No. 5 in the Internet Retailer China 500. Alibaba, soon to go public on the New York Stock Exchange in a highly publicized IPO, is not ranked because it does not own any merchandise itself and only provides a platform for other online retailers to sell.
UnionPay also announced today an extension of its agreement with American Express, which until now has mainly allowed American Express cards to be processed in China across the UnionPay network. With the new agreement, the two companies have agreed to pursue cooperation on new projects both inside and outside of China.
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