China third-party online payment market is becoming more and more rational. Online payment service providers pay more attention to product innovation and service quality improvement. According to iResearch, China third-party payment transaction reached 97.6 billion RMB and the growth rate will over 100% in 2008.
Fierce competition in user scale
As the transaction keeps fast growing, competition in user scale is also very fierce. According to Alipay, there user amount has reached 58 million in 2007, and tenpay¡¯s user amount exceeded 30 million. Since the policy is not clear now, all third-party service providers are doing all they can to expand user scale and lay strong foundation for market.
User stickiness needs more recognition
iResearch believes that in addition of user scale, user stickiness also needs to be improved. According to the latest data from iUserTracker, a continuous netizens behavior monitoring software, of all the financial services, financial news service was high in terms of unique visitors, monthly visits per user and viewing duration. The user stickiness is high. User stickiness of services like online payment and online assurance are low comparatively.
From comparing user stickiness of all online financial services, It is obvious to find that online payment service¡¯s user stickiness needs to be improved. The third-party payment market competition will become more rational in 2008. At the same time of product innovation and service quality improvement, expanding user scale and improving user stickiness have became the most important problems for domestic third-party payment service providers.
Winning factor changes from scale to service
According to iResearch, when user scale reaches a certain level, user loyalty, user activity and product reputation will play more important roles. As the growth of transaction volume and user amount, user management and custom service quality became important in long term. Judging from the recent market dynamics, Alipay has renamed its customer center to customer satisfaction center. The winning factor of third-party payment market is changing from scale to service.
