Inexpensive mobile phones and e-retail growth are leading more Chinese consumers, especially those in the countryside, to buy online via smartphones, according to a report released today by Alipay, an online payment service affiliated with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

Alipay’s Annual Spending Report, released today on the 10^th anniversary of Alipay’s founding, says 54% of the transactions Alipay processed through the first 10 months of 2014 came from mobile devices, versus 22% in 2013. And consumers outside of the big cities were most likely to pay with their mobile devices: Alipay says, for example, that 62% of its transactions from shoppers in Tibet this year came from mobile devices, the highest percentage of all Chinese provinces, versus 32.7% last year.

Alipay payment has grown fastest over the past decade in such remote cities in western China as Lhoka and Shigaste in Tibet and Bortala in Xinjiang Province. Overall, the proportion of mobile payments from some of China’s less-populated region has doubled from 2012 to 2014, Alipay says.

Nonetheless, the major metropolitan areas of China account for most of Alipay spending, with 55% of transactions settled by Alipay coming from Shanghai and Beijing and Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. Hangzhou—a city of more than 2 million where Alibaba is based—produced the highest spending per individual. Alipay users in Hangzhou spent on average 44,197 yuan ($7,160) online so far in 2014.

Alipay says it has 300 million registered users in China whose identification has been verified. Besides using Alipay to pay online, Chinese consumers use it to pay their utility bills, recharge their mobile phones and to transfer money to other individuals. In fact, Alipay says consumers have used its service 6 billion times over the past 10 years to make such payments.

Alipay is the primary way consumers pay when shopping on Alibaba’s two big online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, which together account for about 80% of online shopping in China. Alibaba paid Alipay’s parent company $379 million in fees in its 2013 fiscal year and $119 million in the three months ended June 30, 2014, Alibaba reported in its filingwith the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in September ahead of its record-breaking $25 billion initial offering of stock on the New York Stock Exchange.

In that filing, Alibaba, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, also described how it divested itself of Alipay early in 2011 to comply with new Chinese regulations requiring non-bank financial service operators in China to be Chinese companies. Ownership of Alipay was transferred to a company called Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co. Ltd., in which Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma, other Alibaba executives and officers of the Alipay parent company own a 58% equity stake through an entity known as Hangzhou Junhan Equity Investment Partnership.