By Wang Xin | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2025-09-04
With Chinese cross-border e-commerce contentiously expanding globally, local payments are seen as of greater significance to seize opportunities and boost business growth worldwide, especially in emerging markets, said senior business executives in Shanghai on Tuesday.
The global e-commerce market has been growing rapidly in recent years and is forecast to reach $20 trillion this year. Moreover, as technology continues to develop in mature markets and become more accessible in emerging markets, the market is expected to grow 50 percent over the next three years to $30.96 trillion by 2028, according to Tristan Chiappini, senior vice-president at PPRO APAC, a leading provider of digital payments infrastructure.
“This global market presents a massive opportunity for Chinese businesses. But in many markets, local payment methods dominate with local preferences,” said Chiappini, adding that offering local payment methods and catering to local payment preferences is a “must” to create trust with local consumers.
Chiappini pointed out that they estimate that there are around 450 major payment methods around the world, bringing complexity of management as well as regulatory challenges and friction in different markets.
Founded in 2006 and active in China since 2015, PPRO has been dedicated to building globalized payment platforms for businesses to expand worldwide, allowing them to offer more choices at checkout and boost cross-border sales. Seeing great opportunities in China, the company is seeking to expand partnerships with more Chinese businesses for global growth.
“The Chinese market and e-commerce businesses represent a very exciting opportunity internationally. We see great and unique growth of Chinese businesses doing cross-border payments, and they are now dominant within European and Latin American markets in terms of e-commerce,” said Eelco Dettingmeijer, chief commercial officer at PPRO.
Taking Latin America as an example, the company shared that about 56 percent of cross-border online purchases made by shoppers in Brazil were from Chinese merchants, and about 43 percent of online purchases made by shoppers in Mexico were from Chinese websites.
“We find it very exciting to work with Chinese merchants. We see huge spikes in sales volume during our cooperation with Alibaba Group since 2016, and a lot of large Chinese e-commerce businesses are very sophisticated in the way of optimizing payments. They’re very fast to adopt new trends in payment methods,” said Chiappini.