Alibaba's Koubei to Spend RMB 5 Bln on Offline Merchants in 2015
I.wshang.com, 9/08/15
Fan Chi, CEO of Alibaba Group's (NYSE: BABA) Hangzhou-based subsidiary Koukou Xiangchuan Network Technology, has announced that Koukou Xiangchuan's online and mobile local life service platform Koubei will invest RMB 5 bln to help transform the local life services industry, including restaurants, supermarkets, and entertainment venues.
Koubei will offer a number of different services to offline merchants, such as payment services, store traffic support, precision marketing services, and an online management platform.
Koubei will collaborate with Chinese third-party payment processor Alipay to offer payment solutions for merchants of different sizes, who can choose to have customers pay by scanning the barcode or QR code within the merchant version of Alipay's app, or scanning the merchant's offline QR code.
Koubei has already begun to offer offline merchant payment, marketing, data analysis, and customer service interfaces. Merchants can handle their own sales promotions and operations, and can use Koubei's data analysis functions to analyze business data.
Taobao's mobile app, Alipay, Alibaba's digital map subsidiary Autonavi, Chinese Internet company Sina's (Nasdaq: SINA) microblogging platform subsidiary Weibo (Nasdaq: WB), and UCWeb's third-party mobile browser UC Browser will help drive traffic to Koubei. Currently, more than 100,000 merchants have already joined the Koubei platform.
Keywords: Fan Chi third-party payment Internet Alipay Koubei Alibaba Group local life BABA Koukou Xiangchuan