Galleria Supermarket Accepts WeChat Pay & Alipay in GTA

With the rapid growth of Chinese international students and tourists to Canada in recent years, Galleria Supermarket is collaborating with OPAY Inc., a company with extensive experience in banking and Telco system deployment industry, to launch the WeChat Pay and Alipay for all five of its branches located in the Greater Toronto Area starting February 1st, 2018.

Galleria is the only grocer among two in the GTA that will have WeChat Pay.

Alipay is one of the leading third-party mobile payment platforms in China with 520 million global users, and is the mobile payment processing service that emerged from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Meanwhile, WeChat Pay is another popular mobile wallet in China, with 963 million users.

To support the launch, Galleria Supermarket will provide attractive WeChat Pay promotions to benefit Chinese customers. It is estimated over 600,000 Chinese tourists visited Canada in 2016.

This marks is a significant milestone for Galleria, and will help to shape marketing strategies through the data collected via these apps on their Chinese customers.

WeChat and AliPay offer a glimpse of what the future may eventually hold for mobile payments in North America.

Both WeChat Pay and Alipay launched in Canada a couple of years ago and have been expanding their Canadian presence. Some 700 Canadian merchants already accept Alipay.

Alipay’s North American president Souheil Badran has said it wants to “continue offering Chinese consumers visiting Canada the ability to pay as they would in China.” Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma has urged Canadian small businesses to think big,”If you are not globalized, you will never be able to survive,” he said in a CBC report. “Think globally.”